blackbird online journal spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

FEATURES

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A READING BY LEE SMITH

Thank you and  I am really, really happy to be here, and happy to look out and see so many familiar faces in this audience.  I’ve lived here at several different times.  We have here some good friends that I went to St. Catherine’s with, and then I was back again working on the Richmond News Leader for awhile, and then I was back again teaching at VCU and living in the fan district.  It’s always a real pleasure to be here. 

I’m going to read to you tonight from my new novel, which is named On Agate Hill.  This is my first foray into real historical fiction.  You know, I come from the mountains of Southwest Virginia, from Buchanan county, where we really did not pay very much attention to the Civil War.  Nobody gave a damn about the Civil War as far as I could tell; I mean I never heard a word about it.  I don’t think we did it. 

We like to fight, but I think some people who did join the conflict fought for the South, others fought for the North; most people, I don’t think, did very much about it.  I mean, we didn’t have anything to lose maybe, like the rest of the country, certainly no flat land aristocracy—no aristocracy or flat land either one. 

The only columns in the county were on the Presbyterian church, so it was a very different South.  I had a hard time trying to explain this to my new mother-in-law, because I took her up to Grundy, and she kept saying things like, “Where are the mansions? Where are the cotton fields? Where is this and where is that?”  But the mountain South, of course, is a completely different South, and different still from the Piedmont, from Piedmont, North Carolina, which is where my husband and I live now, in a little town named Hillsborough, which is just north of Chapel Hill.  I mention this because this is entirely why I became addicted, finally, to the Civil War.  It may be an illness that strikes all Southern writers at a particular time; I don’t know. 

But in our case, Hal and I moved into a very old house, a very, very old house.  Our yard adjoins the Civil War cemetery with CSA on all those little mossy stones and these distressingly short dates. so I took to walking in the cemetery, and it began to make an impression.  And then, a very old man in town came and knocked on our door before we were even completely unpacked.  And I opened the door and he said, “Honey, let me in!”  So I let him in and he said, “I’ve come to tell you a story about your house.” 

Well, this is what every novelist wants to hear.  So of course I said “Come in; sit down,” and he told me his story, which is one of obsessive love, which I cannot resist telling just briefly.  Apparently there were two lawyers in Hillsborough, North Carolina, who fell in love with the same beautiful girl from Tarboro, and her name was Annie Grey, and they courted her.  But she chose, of course, the young good looking one named Sam Nash, who had been a hero in the war.

And so she chose him. She did not choose the older, dark, saturnine Allen Ruffin who was very old, at least in his forties, when he was trying to court her.  So she married Sam Nash and moved into his family home, called “Pilgrims’ Rest,” on Queen Street, in Hillsborough.  Well, Alan Ruffin proceeded to buy up all the land surrounding this house, and convert a smaller house right across from Pilgrims’ Rest into his own home, which is our house.  So he was just as close as possible to his beloved as she began her new married life. 

Soon enough, she had her own baby, a little girl, whom she named Annie Gray.  And at that point, according to town legend, old Allen Ruffin walked across the street, knocked on the door, and when Annie Gray opened the door with her baby Annie Gray, he said, “If I could not have you my darling, then I shall have your daughter.”

Is this not so creepy?  This gives me chills.  Well, then when the baby Annie Gray was 16, Alan Ruffin again walked across the street and married her.  Married her, and brought her back, and she had a baby in my TV room.  So this is really interesting to me, and when you read this book you will see how this kind of a story finds its way, that is, a man who was in so much love with a woman that he becomes obsessed with her daughter as well.  So this kind of finds its way. 

Then, I go down to the corner of the block where our old house is, and there’s the Orange County Historical Museum, the wonderful young scholar who is also a re-enactor.  And his name was Dr. Ernest Dollar.  And not only was he a re-enactor, but so was his wife and so was his baby. 

They just got me really interested, and he kept spoon-feeding me things to read.  And one thing he gave me was the diary of a young girl who had been in a boarding school during the 1870s in North Carolina.  And I loved that. I guess because I loved Jane Eyre; it’s one of my favorite books.  In fact, I think one of the reasons I ever started writing in the beginning was because I could not stand for my favorite books to end.  And I would write more and more onto the end of them.  Like, more and more onto Heidi, more and more onto Johnny Tremain.  More and more onto The Secret Garden, chapters and chapters.  And I think, in a way, that’s what I’ve done here is just written more and more onto Jane Eyre.  You might call this Jane Eyre with sex. 

So I get interested in this boarding school business, and then up on the other corner is the Burwell School, which was a girls’ boarding school.  So I go up there and the nice young historian says, “Well, would you like to see the diary kept by Anna Burwell?”  Well naturally, yes I would love to see this. 

Well, she was a real case.  She stood 6 feet tall. When the pork was delivered, like when the hogs were delivered, she would go out and chop them up with an ax, herself, for the kitchen.  And then she would go in, and clean up, and teach Greek and Latin all day long.  She knew Paradise Lost by heart.  She had 12 children. And she was always writing in her journal, though, that her husband, who had a little stone house outside the main house where he would sit and write his sermons . . . and she would always say, “He is so cold.  God give me the grace to bear this aright.” But, I mean, how cold could he be with 12 children?  I don’t know. 

Anyway, I just got fascinated.  So a lot of things were coming together, and I just began to read and read and read.  And we, of course, we have the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, and there’s no end of wonderful letters and diaries and things to read.  And people express themselves so beautifully.  I mean when I contrast this with the emails I send to people or get, I mean it’s a whole different . . . we’re losing a lot. I mean we are really losing something.

But anyway, I just got addicted to this period.  The aspect of it that interested me the most was something I had never understood, I guess, in college, in history courses, which is that the amazing displacement caused in the South by the Civil War, which runs counter to our somewhat hackneyed notion, I think, of the South as a place where no one ever went anywhere and everyone just sat on their front porch for six generations or whatever. That’s not true. 

During the Civil War, one of the major changes was this incredible displacement--not only the great armies, everyone leaving home to serve in these great armies which were crisscrossing the land, especially Virginia--but also people for instance , from the deep South, from Georgia fleeing Sherman, coming up to Piedmont, North Carolina, other people leaving the little farms they couldn’t run any longer with the men gone, African Americans fleeing, going North, just leaving, everybody leaving where they were from.  It was this huge displacement—refugee movement.  This really struck me and I was particularly interested in a number of these refugee lives.  And then while I was writing the book, Katrina happened, and so. you know you seeall of these refugees in that kind of a plight.  That kind of displacement becomes even more real. 

So anyway, let me just read you a little bit from On Agate Hill, where my main character is Molly Petrie.  And her mother has fled a plantation in South Carolina and ended up in Piedmont, North Carolina, in a tumbled-down plantation house outside of Hillsborough, North Carolina, and the name of it is Agate Hill.  And the reason I named it that, frankly, was that one of my best friend’s wrote a ballad named “Agate Hill,” then I wrote the liner notes to the CD. 

And somehow, it’s a song about loss. the loss of her mother.  But somehow it just kind of was playing in my mind the whole time that I was writing this, so anyway, I named my plantation Agate Hill. And now we’re making a CD, I am so excited to say, which is Alices [Gerrard] singing and all I get to do is talk, but it’s going to be music from Agate Hill. But anyway, okay,  it starts as a diary kept by Molly Petrie and I’ll just read you a little bit of this. 

(From On Agate Hill, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006)      

And then I’ll read you a little bit from the very end of that section.  Molly has found a little cubby hole. Up under the eaves of this tumble-down house is a little space which she has found behind some hanging dresses in an attic closet.  She's found a space and she goes back in there and she has taken a little chair, she’s got an ammunition box as her table, and it's here that she goes to write in her diary and peep out and record everything that she can see which is going on in the rest of the plantation.  This is her cubby hole and her hideaway. 

She calls herself a ghost girl, because I think it’s instructive that nobody misses her when she's up there all this long length of time, because the plantation at this point, since her aunt Fanny died and her uncle Junius is sick, the plantation is just kind of going to hell in a handbasket, as my mother used to say.  There is an evil housekeeper named Selena who is worming her way into Uncle Junius’s affections.  And, I think I’ve really, as I've said, written a 19th century novel here, so we have to have an evil housekeeper. 

Okay, this is the very end of this section. Nora Gwinn and her husband are trying to find Molly to tell her goodbye, but she’s up in her cubbyhole, not coming down.  And she looks out at the end of this very first section. 

(From On Agate Hill, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006)           

So this is obviously a rapidly deteriorating situation from which Molly will, at length, be rescued by the mysterious stranger—another somebody we have to have in the Victorian novel is the mysterious stranger, who will arrive in the nick of—not quite in the nick of time—take her and put her into a boarding school to keep her safe.  This is Simon Black, who actually you will not be surprised to hear, used to be in love with Molly's mother.  Although this is a whole story that we learn as we go on. 

So I want to read you one tiny little section because I had so much fun. The next section is from the headmistress’s journal.  Okay. And I named her Mariah Rutherford Snow, and her husband, who is so cold, is named Dr. Cincinnatus Snow, and her journal is named For No One's Eyes—July 20th—and she takes an immediate hatred, immediate dislike and jealousy of Molly. 

(From On Agate Hill, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006)      

This situation will obviously become somewhat dangerous for Molly as well, and so a lovely young teacher there in the school takes her and they flee to the mountains where they accept a teaching post in a one-room school.  People are always fleeing in this book.  She gets up there and the son of the owner of the blanket factory takes a fancy to her, and it finally looks as if things are going to work out for Molly; she’s going to be taken care of; she will have something in this world.  Until, unfortunately, she goes to a dance, a house party, you know where people take all the furniture out of the house and a band comes over and all this would be in the 1870s and she meets a banjo player named Jacky Jarvis. 

So I’ll just read you just one little scene.  Okay. This is where she meets him.  This is her, this is Molly writing again, later—just right after this—she’s writing a letter at this point.

(From On Agate Hill, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006)      

And then she tells this one little conversation and then I’ll quit, and any questions will be fine.   So they’re all dancing, and Molly starts dancing too, even though she doesn’t really quite know how to square dance and what they’re doing. 

So Molly is obviously going to get in a lot of trouble, you know, she maybe makes some bad decisions, but none of us have ever made any, right?  Anyway, I think in a way, this book is sort of a dialectic between the Molly we see at the beginning who is hidden away and says, “I will never fall in love, I will never have babies, I will never give all my heart,” and then the very passionate person she becomes who is really the stuff of a ballad. You know, it’s a sort of a dialectic between those two opposing ways of life.   So I’ll close by reading a ballad.  A lot of stuff is going to happen here:  there’s going to be a fire, and a murder, and a court case, and all kinds of things, and this is only one version of it. 

Jacky Jarvis’s family runs a store and that’s going to burn up and a lot of stuff happens. I’m just going to read you this ballad.

I was just talking to my friend Greg; we always go to the Merle Watson festival.  I am such a fan of music and if I could sing I would never have written any of these books, frankly.  However, this is—and Alice [Gerrard] is recording this too—this is a traditional ballad from Ash County, North Carolina written by me, of course, not really traditional.  It’s named “Molly and the Traveling Man.” 

(From On Agate Hill, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006)      

Thank you.  Thanks. Thank you. Thanks a lot.    end of text


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