A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa
Read A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa Online
Authors: Elaine Neil Orr
A
DIFFERENT
SUN
A Novel of Africa
ELAINE NEIL ORR
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2013 by Elaine Neil Orr.
“Readers Guide” copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
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®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62206-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orr, Elaine Neil.
A different sun : a novel of Africa / Elaine Neil Orr.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
“An original publication”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-425-26130-9
1. Young women—Georgia—Fiction. 2. Plantation life—Georgia—Fiction. 3. Missionaries’ spouses—Fiction. 4. Missionaries—Nigeria—Fiction. 5. Americans—Nigeria—Fiction. 6. Self-realization—Fiction. 7. Nigeria—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.R58843D54 2013
813'.6—dc22
2012030108
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / April 2013
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For the dearest—
My husband, Anderson Orr
Our children, Joel and Dominique
My mother, Anne Thomas Neil
Becky Neil Albritton, sister
And to the memory of my peerless father, Lloyd Houston Neil
It is more difficult to love than to die.
—BEN OKRI
You just can’t fly on off and leave a body.
—TONI MORRISON
My heart is up to something that is alarming the rest of my body, in fact. I must go pray.
—MARILYNNE ROBINSON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The world has its stories and will yield them to a seeker.
Thank you to anyone who ever told me to pick up a pencil and write.
Thank you to Lloyd and Anne Neil, my dear father and mother, for their unceasing love.
Thank you to Andy Orr, who listened as this story unfolded, who talked me through rough periods in the writing, and who gave me scenes out of his own imagination.
Thank you to Joel Orr for his love and support.
If ever a novel was the product of a multitude of teachers and friends, this is it. Of course, any errors of history or geography are mine. I plead artistic license for making the Oba River larger than it ever was and for placing blue pools on Ogbomoso hills. Maybe they are there to the beholding eye.
I owe a world of thanks to Sena Jeter Naslund and Angela Davis-Gardner: To Sena, who first recognized that I might be a writer and who believed in Emma’s story from my first groping sentences. To Angela, who invited me into her writing group and responded with grace and encouragement to this novel’s rough beginnings. Thanks to all of the writers in that group, including the matchless Lou Rosser, for reading early chapters, listening to broad swaths as I read aloud, and encouraging me always. Thanks also to Angela for introducing me to my amazing agent, Joelle Delbourgo, who waited six years for this book and then sold it in three weeks. And to my extraordinary editor, Natalee Rosenstein, who knew she wanted this story and found the title, who told me with the skill of a surgeon the three areas that still needed work and sent me back into the woods to do the work! I am also deeply grateful to Leslie Gelbman, publisher and president of Berkley Books, for an enthusiasm that ran as deep as Natalee’s and the energy that powered our course.
A large
e se
, or thank you, to Yomi Durotoyo, who planted the seed for the plot and served as my Yoruba guru throughout the writing of this book.
Thank you to Joel McRay, Greene County (Georgia) historian, for pointing me in the direction of the houses and places and people who mattered for this story. Thanks to Carolyn Reynolds Parker for inviting me into her house and showing me a particular writing box. Thanks to Mamie L. Hillman of Greensboro, Georgia, for the loan of important books without which I could not have written this one.
Thank you to Burster Iyere for assisting me on research trips to Nigeria, for seeing to my accommodations, for making important connections, and for offering his friendship. Thank you to His Royal Highness, the Soun of Ogbomoso, for inviting me to attend a Friday meeting with his chiefs, and to his fourth wife, Ronke Oyewumi, for dancing with me and inviting me into the palace receiving rooms where I viewed a number of crowns and some elephant tusks. Thanks to Lawrence Alawonde and James Oladayo Ojeniran for driving me about in Nigeria, for picking me up in Lagos and returning me there all in one piece. Thank you to Elizabeth Adetutu, librarian at the Nigerian Baptist Seminary, Ogbomoso, for help in retrieving historical papers. Thanks to John Olasunmibo for catering for me in Ogbomoso. Thank you to Pastor Adedokun for his friendship and prayers. Thanks to Amos Adeniji for restoring me to old friends. Thanks to David and Esther Adeniran for hospitality and friendship.
I am extremely grateful for fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a number of residencies without which this novel never would have been written. I started there. Thanks to Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences for residencies at the beginning and the end. And thanks to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow for five important summer weeks. Thanks to the Wake County Arts Council for a fellowship at an important moment.
A huge thanks to Peggy Payne, Marjorie Braman, and Susan Ketchin for brilliant guidance at just the right time.
My deep gratitude goes to Tony Harrison, my department chair, for supporting my work. Thanks to my college dean, Jeffrey Braden, for rewarding my research efforts and to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, North Carolina State University, for several summer research grants. Thank you to my students at NC State. No one ever gave a person better reason to keep growing and learning and feeling hopeful than a class full of good students.
For reading the entire novel at one point or another and offering valuable insight, thanks to Sena Naslund, Angela Davis-Gardner, Nell Joslin, Wayne Caldwell, Phil Deaver, Linda Holley, and Jill McCorkle.
Thank you to the community of writers in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University for practicing the generous notion that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Thank you to Wilton Barnhardt for an early conversation that helped me understand the structure of the novel and to Julie Brickman for early instruction on point of view that saved me months of floundering and for offering her theory of the historical novel as a mediation between past and present. Thanks to Nick Halpern, who suggested early on that I had it in me to write a novel about a person of faith.
Thanks to the cheering section: Richard Goodman, Becky Neil Albritton, Jon Low, Jon Thompson, Nancy Olson, Kim Church, Jeanette Stokes, Robert Doty, and Nina Sichel.
Thanks to Louis Urrea and Margo Rabb, Bread Loaf gurus, and to all the writers in our Bread Loaf group.
I am grateful for a number of private and improvisational residencies. Thanks to Gita Larsen, who first invited me to join her at John Foster’s cabin in Black Mountain, North Carolina; and thanks to John, who invited me back five more times so that I could write. Thanks again to Gita for accompanying me on a trip to Greensboro, Georgia. Thanks to Preston Browning and Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts; to Jeanette Stokes and Pelican House retreats on Emerald Isle; and to Susan Watson and her family and Abba’s House. Many thanks to Carrie Knowles for wonderful writing space at Free Range Studio.
I am indebted to Edie Jeter, archivist at the International Mission Board, Richmond, Virginia; to the Mission Board for access to files; and to Vicky Black and Barbara Koontz, for aid in accessing photographs. Thanks to Edgar Burkes for early conversation via e-mail when I was just beginning. Thanks to Anne Charles-Craft for her hospitality in Richmond.
Many thanks to Charlie Farrington, Mary Kohn, and Jason McLarty for assistance in researching Antebellum African-American English of the American South.
Thanks to Jim Crisp for conversation about Texas in the period significant to my novel and to Don and Patsy Meier for reading a chapter that dealt in medical matters. Thanks to Peter Gilliland for sharing his maps of nineteenth-century Yorubaland and old Ijaye, and for conversations about history and geography. Thank you to Toyin Falola for sending me to J.D.Y. Peel’s
Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba,
a source that profoundly influenced my thinking. Thanks to Robin Morris for tutoring me on the mechanics of the percussion cap rifle.
For last minute proofreading assitance I am forever indebted to Ryland Swain and Tasha Pippin.
Thank you to everyone at Berkley Books for producing and shepherding the beautiful material artifact of this book, and especially to Robin Barletta, for day-to-day interactions.
I sing praise to my muses, among them: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Tillie Olsen, Nadine Gordimer, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Charles Frazier.