On Agate Hill (55 page)

Though my own Mariah Snow is entirely a fictional character, I got the idea for her by reading the estimable Mrs. Anna Burwell’s diary, which is to be found at the Burwell School Historic Site in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where I was ably aided in my research by Katherine Malone-France and Lauren A. Mikruk. Here and there, I have used Mrs. Burwell’s own words: for example, her dictum, “Have communion with
few
, Be intimate with
one
, Deal justly by
all
, Speak evil of
none.”
My Gatewood Academy is a fictional combination of Peace Institute in Raleigh, the Nash-Pollack School in Hillsborough, and the Burwell School itself. Especially helpful were Kathleen Johnson, ed., “Nineteenth Century Reflections on Life, Love, and Loss in the Diary of Clay Dillard,”
North Carolina Historical Review
(April 2004); and Ann Strudwick Nash,
Ladies in the Making
(Durham, NC: Seeman Printing, 1964).

Later sections of this novel are informed by the following books: Zeta Barker Hamby,
Memoirs of Grassy Creek: Growing Up in the Mountains on the Virginia–North Carolina Line
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998); Karen Cecil Smith,
Orlean Puckett: The Life of a Mountain Midwife, 1844–1939
(Boone, NC: Parkway, 2003); John Houck, Clarice Weaver, and Carol Williams,
Images of Ashe County Revisited
(Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004); Martin Crawford,
Ashe County’s Civil War
(Chalottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Cecelia Conway,
African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions
(Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Sean Wilenz and Greil Marcus, eds.,
The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); William A. Link,
A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virgnia, 1870–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Andrew Gulliford,
America’s Country Schools
(Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1991); William R. Trotter,
Bushwhackers
(Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1991); and Londa L. Woody,
All in a Day’s Work: Historic General Stores of Macon and Surrounding North Carolina Counties
(Boone, NC: Parkway, 2000).

Thanks to the late Frank Colvard for his suggestions in Ashe County; to Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper for the books
The Pond Mountain Chronicle: Self-Portrait of a Southern Appalachian Community
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), and
The People of the New River: Oral Histories from the Ashe, Alleghany, and Watauga Counties of North Carolina
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001); and very special gratitude to Clarice Weaver, longtime children’s librarian and educator whose remarkable oral history project may be found in its entirety at the Ashe County Public Library in West Jefferson, NC.

Thanks to attorney Cyrus D. Hogue III for his legal knowledge and to Sally Cook and Bruce Cormier of Castine, Maine, for their expertise in Portuguese, Confederados, and life in Brazil. I found Eugene C. Harter’s
Lost Colony of the Confederacy
(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000) to be especially insightful on this fascinating topic: some details of Simon Black’s voyage to Brazil are taken from Julia Keyes’s diary as quoted in these pages.

Other helpful books include:

Mary Elizabeth Massey,
Refugee Life in the Confederacy
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964); Judith McGuire,
Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War (1867)
(New York: Arno Press, 1974); U. R. Brooks,
Butler and His Cavalry
(Germantown, TN: Guilded Bindery Press, repr. 1994); Drew Gilpin Faust,
Mothers of Invention: Women in the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Jane H. Pease and William Henry Pease,
A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Walter Sullivan,
The War the Women Lived: Female Voices from the Confederate South
(Nashville, TN: J. S. Sanders, 1995); Michael J. Varhola,
Everyday Life during the Civil War
(Cincinnati, OH: Writers Digest Books, 1999); Manly Wade Wellman,
Giant in Gray
(Dayton, OH: Press of Morningside Bookshop, 1980); Clint Johnson,
Touring the Carolinas’ Civil War Sites
(Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1996); John Gilchrist Barrett,
North Carolina as a Civil War Battleground, 1861–1865
(Raleigh:
Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1987); Richard L. Zuber,
North Carolina during Reconstruction
(Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1969); Mark L. Bradley,
This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

On Agate Hill

   
A Short Note from the Author      371

   
A Reading and Discussion Guide   375

    
A Conversation with the Author     379

A SHORT NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Originally published in the
Atlanta Jourt-Constitution
,
September 17, 2006

I
HAD DONE A LOT
of historical research but had barely begun my novel
On Agate Hill
when my beloved son Josh died in his sleep on October 26, 2003. The cause of death was “acute myocardiopathy,” the collapse of an enlarged heart brought about in part, I believe, by all the weight he had gained while taking an antipsychotic drug.

He was thirty-three; he had been sick for half his life, doing daily battle with the brain disorder that first struck during the summer between his junior and senior years in high school.

In many ways, our old Josh died then—that wild funny boy of seventeen, that brilliant musician, poet, break-dancer, skateboarder, and camper.

The hospitalizations began, alternating with intermittent, heartbreaking tries at returning to normalcy, then to group homes and day programs. Finally the new drug clozapine gave him back his life, or some of it, in 1992. He moved out of the hospital into a group home, then into an apartment. He completed a vocational rehabilitation program. He got a job.

And we got to know Josh all over again, now a huge whimsical man of immense kindness, with a special sort of gravity and eccentric insight. In this later stage of schizophrenia, he was like the bodhisattva, a person who has achieved the final apotheosis, beyond desire and self. It was comforting to be with him. As a friend said, he was a man like a mountain.

But then we lost him for good.

This time, my grief—and rage—were indescribable: “oceanic,” to use a doctor’s terminology. He told me that there are basically two physiological reactions to grief. Some people sleep a lot, gain weight, become depressed and
lethargic. I had the other reaction—I felt like I was standing with my finger stuck into an electrical outlet, all the time.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t remember anything, anything at all. I forgot how to drive to the grocery store. I couldn’t find the school where I had taught for twenty years. I left a trail of glasses, jackets, pocketbooks everywhere I went. In group situations, I was apt to blurt out wildly inappropriate remarks, like a person with social Tourette’s syndrome. I cried all the time. I lost thirty pounds.

Weeks passed, then months. I was wearing out my husband and my friends. But I couldn’t calm down. It was almost as if I had become addicted to these days on fire, to this intensity. I felt that if I lost it, I’d lose him even more.

Finally, I went to a psychiatrist, a kind, rumpled man who formed his hands into a little tent and listened to me scream and cry and rave for several weeks.

Then came the day when he held up his hand and said, “Enough.”

“What?” I stared at him.

“I am going to give you a new prescription,” my psychiatrist said, taking out his pad and pen. He began to write.

“Oh good,” I said, wanting more drugs, anything.

He ripped the prescription out and handed it to me.

“Write fiction every day,” it said in his crabbed little hand.

I just looked at him.

“I have been listening to you for some time,” he said, “and it has occurred to me that you are an extremely lucky person, since you are a writer, because it is possible for you to enter into a narrative not your own, for extended periods of time. To live in someone else’s story, as it were. I want you to do this every day for two hours. I believe that it will be good for you.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I haven’t written a word since Josh died.”

“Do it,” he said.

“I can’t think straight, I can’t concentrate,” I said.

“Then just sit in the chair,” he said. “Show up for work.”

Vocational rehabilitation, I thought. Like Josh. So I did it. For three days. On the fourth day, I started to write.

And my novel, which I’d planned as the diary of a young girl orphaned by the Civil War, just took off and wrote itself.

“I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” Molly Petree begins on May 20, 1874. “I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl . . . but evil or good I intend to write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.”

Molly’s spitfire grit strengthened me as she proceeded to “give all her heart,” no matter what, during a passionate life journey which included love, betrayal, motherhood, and grief (of course, grief). But by the time we were done with it—Molly and I, two years later—she had finally found a real home, and I could find my way to the grocery store. I could laugh.

And yes, through the mysterious alchemy of fiction, my sweet Josh had managed to find his own way into the final pages of the novel after all, as a mystical bluesman and healer living wild and free at last in the deep piney woods he used to play in as a child.

When Joan Didion published
The Year of Magical Thinking
, with its close observation of her life in the painful year immediately following her husband’s death, a friend wondered, “How can she do that—write at such a time?”

“The right question is, how could she
not
do that?” I answered. Writing is what Joan Didion does, what she has always done. It’s how she has lived her life.

In a different way, I realized, this is how I have lived my life, too. Of course, writing is an escape: as Anne Tyler once said, “I write because I want to have more than one life.”

I do, too.

But writing is also a source of nourishment and strength. It cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night.

My psychiatrist’s prescription may benefit us all. Whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction, journaling or writing for publication, writing itself is an inherently therapeutic activity. Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the sadness and chaos of our lives.

A READING AND DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. Early on, Molly writes in her diary, “I want to be a real girl and live as hard as I can in this world, I dont want to lie in the bed like Mama or be sick like Mary White. Or be a lady. I would rather work my fingers to the bone and die like Fannie. I want to live so hard and love so much I will use myself all the way up like a candle, it seems to me like this is the point of it all, not Heaven” (page 78). This says so much about Molly’s character. How do you think Molly came to reach this conclusion about her aspirations, and how do you think it shapes what happens later on in her life?

2. How do Nicky Eck’s crimes against Molly affect the rest of her life?

3.
On Agate Hill
is a story within a story, told from many different perspectives. The novel opens with a letter from Tuscany Miller, a university student from the present day who is looking into her own past and the pasts of those who lived at her father’s (Ava’s) new home. What parallels can you draw from both stories, and why do you suppose the author chose to set it up this way? How would the book be different if the author left out the Tuscany Miller thread altogether?

4. Why does Mariah Snow take an immediate dislike to Molly? Is this a clue to what happened in Mariah’s past? Do you believe people like or dislike other people because they possess similar qualities (either positive or negative)?

5. At the beginning of the chapter titled “Paradise Lost,” Agnes Rutherford describes Agate Hill in a letter to her sister, Mariah Snow. She says that it is “surrounded by an air of loneliness” and “Defeat. Failure. Loss. Decay” (page 132). She goes on to say that “the interior of the house was so unkept as to appear ransacked” (page 135). This is far different from what we are
led to believe from reading Molly’s journal. How do you think your reading experience would’ve been affected by knowing the true state of the plantation right from the very beginning?