The Mothers of Invention

A peek inside the private lives of writers

By D.G. Martin

How much impact do mothers of great authors have on their children’s writings?

Ask Daniel Wallace, creative writing professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and author of the humorous and poignant Big Fish.

In a new book, Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, edited by North Carolina writers Lee Smith and Samia Serageldin, Wallace writes about his mother.

“My mother was twelve years old the first time she got married; her husband seventeen. This is how she told it, anyway, over and over again how she was married when she was twelve, and her husband’s name was John Stephens, and they ran off together to Columbiana, Alabama, where they found a judge who would marry them.”

As Wallace explains, his mother, Joan, and John were at a community swimming pool, and “with the crazy logic of two kids who were in love and in the grip of some uncontrollable hormones — trying to find any way to be together, to have sex with each other and make it right, make it okay somehow — they decided to get married, And they decided to get married that very day. Still in their bathing suits . . . ”

Joan set out, writes Wallace, “not to live as man and wife with John, because that wasn’t going to happen, but to have sex as a newly married couple might: with a feral eagerness. But ‘legally,’ and with the unintentional blessing of her mother. Where they had sex is unclear to me — my mother just said ‘everywhere they could’ — and they continued thusly until somehow my grandparents found out about it and had the marriage annulled. ‘It was a summer marriage,’ she said.”

Wallace’s mom told this story to everyone. “It was the perfect story,” Wallace writes, “because it cut to the chase of the kind of woman my mother was and who she always had been: defiant, sexual, shocking.”

Wallace says he got his “oversharing” storytelling gifts from her.

“She was a great storyteller, and much more creative than I ever gave her credit for. Because what I came to learn after a little bit of sleuthing, is that it wasn’t really true, this story she told. It didn’t happen like this at all.”

You will have to read Wallace’s entire essay to get something closer to the real truth. But even before we get to that point we can ask, why did Wallace’s mom lie about this story? Wallace tries to answer, “We learn more about people through the lies they tell than we do from the truths they share. I think this is why I became a fiction writer in the first place. It’s how I was raised.”

Thank goodness. Otherwise, we would have missed Big Fish, Extraordinary Adventures, and Wallace’s four other imagination-filled novels.

Wallace’s essay is just one of 28 about authors’ mothers collected by Smith and Serageldin in Mothers and Strangers. The contributors, all respected authors, include Wallace, Belle Boggs, Marshall Chapman, Hal Crowther, Clyde Edgerton, Marianne Gingher, Jaki Shelton Green, Sally Greene, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Eldridge “Redge” Hanes, Lynden Harris, Randall Kenan, Phillip Lopate, Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Jill McCorkle, Melody Moezzi, Elaine Neil Orr, Steven Petrow, Margaret Rich, Omid Safi, James Seay, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Sharon K. Swanson and, of course, the two editors.

In comments about the book, Smith emphasizes that the relationships and experiences between mothers and children are varied. Each is unique. She explains, “America’s traditional Hallmark conception of Motherhood (note the caps) takes a real beating in these essays. The whole idea of motherhood is hampered by the stereotypes and preconceptions associated with it — mothers are selfless, right? Automatically loving and giving and happy with their biological and limited role, making biscuits from scratch and sewing all our clothes, yadayada. Almost nobody had a mother like that.”

Then she confesses, “Except me, I guess. Actually, my own sweet mother really did all these things, though she suffered terribly from depression when she quit teaching, which she had loved, to ‘stay home and take care of you.’”

In the book’s foreword Smith explains, “She sent me down to visit my lovely Aunt Gay-Gay in Birmingham, Alabama, every summer for two weeks of honest-to-God Lady Lessons. Here I’d learn to wear white gloves, sit up straight, and walk in little Cuban heels. I’d learn proper table manners, which would then be tested by fancy lunches at ‘The Club’ on top of Shades Mountain. I’d learn the rules: ‘A lady does not point. A lady eats before the party. A lady never lets a silence fall. A lady does not sit like that!’”

Smith’s description of her feelings for her loving parents and traditional upbringing will not surprise her fans, who have come to admire the loving respect with which Smith treats the main characters of her novels and short stories.

Jill McCorkle’s mother had a full-time job as a secretary while other mothers “were staying home and doing the June Cleaver thing.” McCorkle never felt slighted. She marvels at how her mother and her postal worker dad “owned a home and sent two children to college and faithfully tithed to the church.”

“Of course,” she continues, “the answer to that question is that they did without a lot for themselves.”

Her latest book, Life After Life, is set in a nursing-retirement home, where some residents are struggling with dementia. In her essay, she describes her mother’s current dementia. Most often she does not recognize her daughter. McCorkle writes, “If there is a sliver of grace to be pulled from the gnarled up tangle of dementia, it is that little bit of time given to loved ones to fully appreciate the scope of a whole life while the individual is still there and breathing and every now and then, for the briefest second, visible.”

Other writers describe different experiences with their mothers. Serageldin grew up in a prominent Egyptian family that was put into a stressful situation after the 1952 revolution. Threatened confiscation and arrests were part of the picture, but “she colluded with her mother’s pretense of normality, sensing that the illusion was more for the adult’s sake.”

Clyde Edgerton’s mother, Truma, was born to sharecropper parents who worked land in what is now the Umstead State Park near the Raleigh-Durham airport. When her father died, the family moved to Durham, taking a cow with them. When she was 12 years old, she went to work in a hosiery mill. Edgerton writes, “To my knowledge she never considered her upbringing to be in any way adverse.”

Edgerton lists some of her habits: “She’d never waste water. If she turned on a faucet for warm water, she’d collect the water that was getting warm and use it to water plants.

“She loved to listen to and tell and laugh about family stories — often the same ones over and over. Those stories were among my most special inheritances.”

Clyde says that Truma and her two sisters raised him.

He includes sections from his second novel, Walking Across Egypt, that are based on his mother. Then he writes, “That’s my mother. I wish you could have known her in person as I did. I think of her almost every day. I know I find solace in natural things, simple things — like trees, flowers, and birds — because of her inspired example of embracing and finding pleasure in the simple free gifts the earth provides . . . She never guessed that the son she hoped would be a concert pianist or a missionary would end up writing ‘talk’ for a living.”

These essays and all of the others are readers’ treasures. Short, written crisply by some of the region’s best authors, each one gives an inside look at the writer’s private life and how the mother faced and dealt with different sets of challenges, ones that have, for better or worse, helped make the writings of each author what they are today.  OH

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 11 a.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV. The program also airs on the North Carolina Channel Tuesday at 8 p.m. To view prior programs go to: http://video.unctv.org/show/nc-bookwatch/episodes/.

Triumphant Return

Frazier is back with a new historical novel that reads like poetry

By D.G. Martin

Charles Frazier’s blockbuster first novel, Cold Mountain, marked its 20th anniversary last year. It won the National Book Award in 1997 and became a popular and Academy Award-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renée Zellweger. From Cold Mountain and the books that followed, Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods, Frazier gained recognition as North Carolina’s most admired writer of literary fiction since Thomas Wolfe.

Frazier’s many fans celebrated the April release of his latest novel, Varina, based on the life of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ wife. But, because his most recent previous novel, Nightwoods, had come out in 2011, they wondered why he had made them wait so long. The simple answer: Frazier refuses to work fast. Every word of every chapter of every one of his four books was reviewed, rewritten, replaced and restored by him to make the final product just right. It’s that process that makes Varina a book so full of rich and lovely prose it could pass for poetry. And well worth the wait.

Because Varina is historical fiction, Frazier faced a challenge similar to the one Wiley Cash encountered in his recent book, The Last Ballad. Writing about a real person — textile union activist Ella May Wiggins in Cash’s case or Varina Davis in Frazier’s book — limits an author’s freedom to create and imagine without limits. The facts of history set firm and solid boundaries.

On the other hand, those real historical facts provide the framework within which Cash and Frazier, both, have succeeded in developing interesting and believable characters. Varina takes us back to the 1800s and the Civil War, a period it shares with Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. The central character of the new book is Varina Howell Davis, until now an obscure Civil War footnote. Frazier refers to her as “V.”

He builds V’s story around an unusual fact. While living in Richmond as first lady of the Confederacy, she took in a young mixed race boy she called Jimmie. She raised him alongside her own children. At the end of the Civil War, Union troops took 6-year-old Jimmie away from V, and she never learned what happened to him.

Frazier begins his story 40 years later at a resort-spa-hotel-hospital in Saratoga Springs, New York, where V is residing. James Blake, a light-skinned, middle-aged African-American, has read about Jimmie. His memories are very dim, but he begins to think he might be that same Jimmie and sets out to visit V at Saratoga Springs.

When Blake calls on V at the hotel, she is suspicious, having been the victim of various con artists who attempted to exploit her fame. But something clicks. “She works at remembrance, looks harder at Blake’s broad forehead, brown skin, curling hair graying at the temples. She tries to cast back four decades to the war.”

Blake visits V for several Sundays, and Frazier builds his story on the growing friendship and the memories they share. During the course of Blake’s visits, V remembers her teenage years in Natchez, Mississippi; her courtship and marriage to Davis; life on his plantation while Davis is often away in military service or politics; living in Washington as wife of a U.S. senator and Cabinet official; being the first lady of the Confederacy; and her post-Civil War life when she becomes friends with the widow of Ulysses Grant and writes a column for a New York newspaper.

These are important subplots, but the book’s most compelling action develops in V’s flight from Richmond when it falls to Union troops at the end of the Civil War. In the book’s second chapter, V and Blake begin to recall their journey southward. As V prepares to leave Richmond on the train, Davis tells her she would be coming back soon because “General Lee would find a way.” But Lee does not find a way this time.

V’s family, including Jimmie, servants and Confederate officials, travel to Charlotte, where an angry mob confronts them at the rail station. Evading the mob there, they “traveled southwest down springtime Carolina roads, red mud and pale leaves on poplar trees only big as the tip of your little finger, a green haze at the tree line. They fled like a band of Gypsies — a ragged little caravan of saddle horses and wagons with hay and horse feed and a sort of kitchen wagon and another for baggage. Two leftover battlefield ambulances for those not a-saddle. The band comprised a white woman, a black woman, five children, and a dwindling supply of white men — which V called Noah’s animals, because as soon as they realized the war was truly lost, they began departing two by two.”

Their goal is escape to Florida and then Havana.

Supplies have shrunk and their money has become worthless. Rumors circulate that their caravan has a hoard of gold from the Confederate treasury and that there will be a big reward for their capture.

Frazier writes, “In delusion, bounty hunters surely rode hard behind faces, dark in the shadows of deep hat brims, daylight striking nothing but jawbones and chin grizzle, dirty necks, and once-white shirt collars banded with extrusions of their own amber grease.”

Like Inman’s trek toward home in Cold Mountain, V and her companions confront adventure and terror at almost every stop.

In Georgia, low on food and soaking wet, the group finds refuge in a seemingly deserted plantation house. As they settle in, two or three families of formerly enslaved people appear, accompanied by the son of their former owner, Elgin, a “white boy, who grew less beard than the fuzz on a mullein leaf.”

Elgin sasses and threatens two former Confederate naval cadets, Bristol and Ryland, who are accompanying V’s group. He blames them for losing the war.

Ryland responds in kind, “You’ve not ever worn a uniform or killed anybody, and you’re not going to start now. Have you even had your first drink of liquor?”

Ryland and Bristol laugh when the boy reaches into his pants and pulls out a Derringer pistol and points it at Ryland.

“And then Elgin twitched a finger, almost a nervous impulse, and an awful instant of time later, Ryland was gone for good.”

Frazier writes that Ryland had been transformed in a matter of seconds “to being a dead pile of meat and bones and gristle without a spark. Three or four swings of the pendulum and he was all gone.”

Instantly Bristol guns down Elgin. Before moving on, V’s group and the former slaves bury Elgin and Ryland, two more unnecessary casualties in a war that simply would not end.

With V’s group back on the road, we know their attempt to escape is doomed to failure. But Frazier’s dazzling descriptions give us hope, hope that is quickly dashed when Federal troops capture V and take Jimmie away from her.

Readers who loved Frazier’s luscious language and compelling characters in his earlier books will agree that Varina was worth the long wait.

But what are they to make of V, her husband, and the Confederate heroes who are bit players in the new book?

Perhaps Frazier leaves a clue with the final words, as James Blake remembers what V says to him on one of their visits at Saratoga Springs.

“When the time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.”  OH

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at 11 a.m. and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.