byChrisWhite – 2025

It was a dry Chattanooga morning when I found him again. Sut, I mean. Or maybe he found me, wedged in the back of a musty little bookshop, “All Books,” on Broad Street, the kind of place you’d expect a little yellow bell above the door and no sense of time inside. The dust I blew from its cover was older than some of the college students outside. Conspicuous threadbare Confederate memorabilia hung behind the register, far too faded to offend. I walked past a shelf of antique books and reached for a brown cloth volume, brittle with foxing and fragile at the spine. The title, embossed, but missing its gold leaf, had mostly flaked away. But I knew that durn’d fool the moment I held him in my hands.

The book smelled like old pipe smoke, vanilla swirling with mildew, and maybe a little sweat. Some previous owner had scribbled a name inside, Clyde something, a surname lost to the mold. I flipped to the first page and there he was: Sut Lovingood, slouching off the page like a hungover prophet. It’d been years since I last read of him, back in high school when I thought studying literature might save me from it. But here he was again, coarse as cracked leather, grinning out from the crooked hills of Knoxville, Tennessee with a whiskey jug in one hand and the devil in the other.

Sut’s not just any old Southern literary character, and he damn sure ain’t a hero. He’s more like a swamp fire, unreliable light in the dark, flickering between salvation and savagery. George Washington Harris, his creator, called him a “nat’ral born durn’d fool,” but fools make the best mirrors don’t they? Like Falstaff in a hog-wallow or Huck Finn with a mean streak and worse liquor breath, Sut Lovingood speaks from that place in the American psyche we’d rather not visit sober. But Sut doesn’t care what you prefer. He’s already halfway through his yarn, one boot off, belly out, daring you to laugh and wince in the same breath.

Faulkner liked him. That should tell you plenty. Called him one of his favorite characters, listed him next to Sarah Gamp, Mercutio, and Huck. Said he admired Sut’s honesty. Said he respected a man who could be a coward and know it. That sounds simple, but it’s the whole cracked gospel of Sut: he knows he’s ruined and doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t lie to himself the way we do.

“…every critter what hes ever seed me, ef they hes sence enuff to hid frum a cummin kalamity, ur run frum a muskit, jis’ knows five great facks in my case es well es they knows the road tu thar moufs. Fustly, that I haint got nar a soul, nuffin but a whiskey proof gizzard, sorter like the wust half ove a ole par ove saddlil bags. Seconly, that I’se too durn’d a fool tu cum even onder millertary lor. Thudly, that I hes the longes par ove laigs ever hung tu eny cackus, ‘sceptin only ove a grandaddy spider, an’ kin beat him a usen ove em jis’ es bad es a skeer’d dorg kin beat a crippled mud turkil. Foufly, that I kin chamber more cork-screw, kill-devil whiskey, an’ las’ly, kin git intu more durn’d misfortnit skeery scrapes, than enybody, an’ then run outen them faster, by golly, nor enybody.”

The American literary canon is flush with rogues and reprobates, but few are as spiritually ugly as Sut. He’s a mischief-maker in the old sense, like Pan with a hangover or Loki in long-johns. A backwoods Bacchus. And like all the great sacred clowns, his trickery reveals what decency conceals. When he pants after married women, when he pukes in the pulpit or rigs a funeral with firecrackers, it’s not just foolishness, it’s farce aimed at a world already rotten and ready for it. He desecrates what deserves no reverence.

Some critics flinch. Edmund Wilson found Sut offensive. Called him repellent. Claimed the stories were too crude, too sadistic to merit laughter. But Wilson, for all his brilliance, mistook discomfort for disapproval. He heard the laughter but didn’t listen to what it cost. Franklin J. Meine, by contrast, heard it right: he called the Sut stories Rabelaisian. Vulgar, yes—but also vital, necessary, alive. Laughter from the gut, not the throat.

And what of Harris, the man who summoned this wild thing from the dirt? He was no genteel scribbler. Copper mine foreman, riverboat captain, occasional drunk. He knew his way around sin and survival. He wrote the way East Tennesseans talked after too much whiskey and not enough salvation. His gift wasn’t polish, it was pulse. He gave Sut the rhythms of the hills, the stink of the outhouse, and the slow-burn rage of the poor.

What separates Sut from mere caricature is that moral core, not righteous, but honest. He knows he’s a bastard, and he’s got no truck with those who pretend otherwise. He loathes hypocrites. Loves women. Feeds dogs. Hates sheriffs. Respects ghosts. And runs like hell from his own conscience.

There’s myth under the mud here. Sut isn’t just some yokel with a long jaw and longer legs. He’s part Paul Bunyan, part Job, part Odysseus in homespun. He tells tales the way drunks testify, slurring into revelation. And when he lies, he lies like scripture, half true and fully believed.

But to understand Sut, really understand him, you have to walk back through the crooked corridor of comic history and trace the bloodline to 1867. Falstaff (Shakespeare) comes first, bloated with wine and wisdom, too large for any one play to contain. He taught us that laughter is often the most honest reaction to ruin. Then later, Huck Finn (1884), barefoot and half-feral, running from civility in favor of a raft and a friend. Huck lies too, but for love. Sut, sandwiched in between, lies for revenge, for rage, for the sheer hell of it.

If Huck represents the moral imagination of a child and Falstaff the shambling brilliance of failed nobility, then Sut is something else entirely. He is the gospel of the grotesque. A rural Jeremiah with tobacco-stained teeth and no hope of redemption. A man who sees the world clearly and sets it on fire out of spite.

He lives in a world of mule sweat and corn whiskey, where churches double as theaters of the absurd and education is a punchline. And yet, for all his filth, Sut never lies about what he sees. He knows the smell of hypocrisy better than a bloodhound knows the scent of fear. And he calls it out, in his own wild vernacular, again and again. Like some mad hillbilly chorus, he won’t let us forget.

We like to believe we’re better than him. Cleaner, wiser, more restrained. But we laugh when he talks. Hard. Maybe too hard. Because Sut says the things we’re not allowed to say anymore, about women, about religion, about politics, about ourselves. He vomits up the things we choke down. And then he grins, dares us to look away, dares us to say we’re better.

So I keep reading—the manager preoccupied and unaware Not because I admire him. Not because I agree. But because somewhere under all that stink and spite, there’s a strange sort of freedom. He is what he is. No apologies. No corrections. Just Sut, slouching through the pages like an Appalachian Cain with no Abel to kill but the world itself.

Sut has no education and recognizes his deficiency. “Ef I wer jus’ es smart es I am mean, an’ onrary,” he says, “I’d be President ove a Wild Cat Bank in less nor a week.” He is frustrated at being unable to express himself, through lack of training. “Now why the devil can’t I ‘splain myself like yu?”, he askes George. “I ladles out my words at randum, like a calf kickin at yaller-jackids…” He failes to realize, then, how brilliantly colorful and original his language is in metaphors, similes, and “kinetic” action. His lack of an awareness of his own abilities as a storyteller, in fact, add to the quality of his humor. William Faulkner pointed this out, in an interview, which he said that “something funny is sometimes much more amusing than when it’s told by a professional wit who is hunting around for laughs.” 

When Sut is set aside or against other characters in his world, more of his personality becomes evident. Though Sut himself has a great affinity for elaborating upon the facts of his actual adventures, until they become supreme examples of traditional tall tales, he cannot abide anyone else stretching the truth. In reference to a woman who testified at a camp meeting that she saw the Devil catch someone and “eat him plum up,” Sut says, “She tole a durn’d lie, I speck.” 

He is always ready to interrupt anyone else’s conversation to take the floor, as he does in a yarn called “Eaves-Dropping a Lodge of Free-Masons.” Harris begins to relate a tale in his own person, only to have Sut interrupt his poetic reminiscing with: 

“Oh, komplicated durnashun! that haint hit…Yu’s drunk, ur yure sham’d tu tell hit, an’ so yu tries tu put us all asleep wif a mess ove durn’t nonsince, ‘bout echo’s, an’ grapes, an’ warnit trees; oh, yu be durn’d! Boy’s, jis’gin me a hoult ove that ar willer baskit, wif a cob in hits mouf, an’ that ar tin cup, an’ arter I’se sponged my froat, I’ll talk hit all off in English, an’ yu jis’ watch an’ see ef I say ‘echo,’ ur ‘grapes,’ ur ‘graveyard’ onst.”

Geoffrey Chaucer used a similar literary device in The Canterbury Tales to cast a false but humorous reflection on his own abilities as a poet and storyteller. As Chaucer was in the midst of his “rym doggerel,” about Sir Thopas, Harry Bailey, the host, shouted out: 

“No more of this, for goddes dignitee,”

Quod oure hoste, “For thou makest me

So wery of thy verray lewednesse

That, also wisly god my soule blesse, 

Myne res aken of they drasty speche…”

Though Sut may interrupt to take the floor at any time, it is not wise to interrupt him. One night Sut is describing a marriage to his listeners, in this fashion: “—an’ that very nite he tuck Mary, fur better, fur wus, tu hev an’ tu hole tu him tu his heirs, an’—,” when suddenly an uninvited guest in the vicinity interjects, “Allow me to interrupt you; you do not quote the marriage ceremony correctly.” Sut’s reaction is immediate and to the point:

“Yu go tu hell, mistofer; yu bothers me.” This side of Sut’s nature is also pointed up when a “rat-faced youth” questions a discrepancy in one of his yarns. Sut replies, “See a yere, soney, yu tell yur mam tu hev yu sot back jus’ bout two years, fur et the rate yu’se a climbin yu stan’s a pow’ful chance tu die wif yer shoes on, an’ git laid hoss way, yu dus.” These persons take Sut quite seriously, as does a book agent, a victim of Sut’s insults, called by Sut “Onsightly Peter” (derived from “encyblopedia”), who fearfully

“Folded his tent like the Arab, 

And as silently stole away.” 

And so I keep going back, opening the book for another short taste. Turn past the preface, past the warning. Sut doesn’t warm you up. He doesn’t even ask for the dance. He drags you out of the pew by your collar and into the hog pen of his humor. First tale: a preacher humiliated at his own revival. A woman scandalized not by sin, but by its resemblance. A town gathered not to be saved, but to be entertained.

There is no sacred cow Sut won’t tip. Especially not if it moos piously.

Here is the South, postbellum and raw, where language was thick with twang and sermons and whiskey, sometimes in the same sentence. Sut knows these people because he is these people. And he has no reverence left. For anything. Not church. Not law. Not blood. Not even himself. If there is a sin Sut won’t commit, it isn’t because he knows better. It’s because he hasn’t thought of it yet.

And yet—here’s the twist—you can trust him.

That might be the strangest thing about this foul-mouthed mountain oracle. You can trust Sut Lovingood. Not to tell the truth, exactly. But to reveal it. Because in a land where the preachers are perverts and the lawmakers are thieves and the good women are worse than the bad ones, maybe the only honest man is the fool too broken to fake a thing.

So I sit with Sut. One elbow on the bar of history, one foot in the grave. And I ask him, sometimes aloud, what the hell he’s doing here.

And he answers, in that crooked drawl, “I’se wuts left b’hind wen yu scrapes off the varnish.”

And maybe that’s the heart of it. Not that Sut is admirable, or wise, or even necessary. But that he’s what remains when all the polish is gone. The American South, hell, the American self, is a layered thing: manners lacquered over blood, scripture laid across the bones of cruelty, and somewhere underneath it all, a voice like Sut’s—foul, funny, unkillable.

He ain’t asking you to like him. He don’t even care if you laugh. But if you read him, truly read him, you may find a voice that sings truer than all the polite chorales and polished prose ever printed. You may find, to your unease, that you recognize him. And worse, that he recognizes you.

We trace his bloodline through American letters, through Huck and Yossarian and the bastard sons of Southern lit. We talk about his literary merits and moral rot, about what makes him grotesque and why we laugh when we shouldn’t. But for now, I just want to sit with him in this shop a little longer, thumb the pages, and let the stink of old truths rise off the paper like steam from a mountain whiskey still. What the Huck…I’ll just buy the dang thing. 

He was a fool, yes. But maybe the last honest one. And that’s enough. 

Book: “Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool” (New York 1867)