“Bay Boy” is gentle, full of nostalgia for a time which was in fact not very long ago, but seems lost forever. Nobody drowns it isn’t that kind of book. Foolishly, they leap into the water, swim to their bobbing boat, and make it home. A storm comes up, the waves grow to six feet.
One night, ill-advisedly, Watt and two younger brothers decide to sleep at the middle bay lighthouse with their boat anchored nearby. That night he gets into bed with the necklace still on, and his father mercifully takes it off and puts it “someplace safe.”
On the way home he wears it proudly at Wal-Mart and Delchamps, with lots of people staring. His father and his friends make a necklace of deer testicles and put it around his neck. In the autumn, in season, there is deer hunting and Key tells of killing his first buck, at 12 years old, after which he is ceremoniously “blooded” and then hoodwinked. Key and his brothers build a tree house, go shrimping, and fish in the bay, sometimes for trout. It was a different Point Clear, that is clearer, simpler, more natural, almost Edenic.Ĭhildren stay overnight in the woods but are not kidnapped. It would, as they say, make a good gift for your maiden aunt. Readers should know this is a very quiet book, no violence, and sex and drugs had not yet been invented. The Keys spent summers in their little house on the bay, with no air conditioning, the children often sleeping on the wharf, to catch the breezes. The Grand Hotel was long-established but the whole area had not become so very posh. This book, “Bay Boy,” is another collection of nonfiction pieces, but Key takes us further back in time to when he was a boy, growing up, especially in summers, in Point Clear, Alabama. Watt Key established himself as a writer of young adult fiction with three successful novels, “Alabama Moon” (2006), “Dirt Road Home” (2010) and “Fourmile” (2012), then published a collection of nonfiction stories set in the Mobile-Tensaw River delta, “Among the Swamp People.” In that book we explore this geographically near but hard-to-access piece of nature and some of the odd folks who make it their home or their hide-out. “Bay Boy: Stories of a Childhood in Point Clear, Alabama”
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