|
|
|
|
  n
1962, a year before she entered Duke as a freshman, Josephine Humphreys
’67 boarded a train in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina,
bound to visit a boyfriend in Providence, Rhode Island. At seventeen,
she had recently made her social debut and was completing her studies
at Ashley Hall, an exclusive and then all-white prep school for girls,
where, says the school’s current website, “stretching your
mind includes learning to shine.”
The train headed up the coastal plain of South
Carolina, crossing the blackwater swamps of the Pee Dee River basin
into North Carolina, stopping briefly in Lumberton, the seat of Robeson
County, which by some accounts was then, and is now, the most racially
diverse rural county in the nation. There a young bride in a sundress
and the groom in his sailor’s uniform boarded the car Jo Humphreys
was riding.
To Humphreys’ surprise, the bride sat in
the open seat next to her, leaving her new husband to find a place
elsewhere on the train. The bride, says Humphreys, “was breathtakingly
beautiful. She looked like Liz Taylor—the Elizabeth Taylor of
National Velvet, not Cleopatra.” The young woman explained that
she and her husband were on their way to visit his parents for the
first time, and they had been quarreling. She was certain the in-laws
would not approve of her.
“Why not?” Humphreys asked.
“Because I’m not white. I’m Lumbee.”
Humphreys had no idea what the young woman meant, but
would soon find out. She spent the rest of the trip hearing about
the Lumbees—the largest Indian tribe east of the Mississippi—and
their legendary folk hero, Henry Berry Lowrie and his wife, Rhoda.
“I thought it was the most fascinating story I’d ever heard,”
says Humphreys.
Fast-forward thirty-eight years to October 2000.
Humphreys is in the Rare Book Room of Perkins Library to read from
her new novel, Nowhere Else on Earth, released last August by Viking.
She’s returned to campus many times to participate
in panels and readings since the publication of her first novel, Dreams
of Sleep, the story of a well-heeled Charleston couple’s troubled
marriage; it won the 1985 PEN/Hemingway Award for a first work of
fiction. Her second novel, Rich In Love, an unconventional coming-of-age
story also set in Charleston, followed two years later and was made
into a movie starring Albert Finney and Jill Clayburgh.
STAYING IN CHARACTER?
Clyde Edgerton is one of North Carolina’s
most popular contemporary authors. Not long ago, he submitted
for publication an excerpt from a novel that was written from
the point of view of a black woman. It was rejected by a major
national magazine, at least in part, he was told, because his
racial background is different from his main character’s.
 Similarly,
Michael Parker, whose novel Hello Down There was named a 1993
Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, was recently
told by an agent that she would not attempt to market a short
story he had written from the point of view of an elderly black
man. Parker, an assistant professor of English at the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro, is white. “This agent
said that no editor of a New York publication would touch the
story because it was too risky,” he says.
Other stories of similar rejections have some fiction
writers concerned. “I’ve never had any trouble with
journals and magazines in this regard,” says novelist Tony
Earley, who teaches at Vanderbilt University and is a frequent
contributor to The New Yorker, “but then again, I haven’t
wandered that far afield. It seems to me that fascism is fascism
and thought police are thought police, no matter what part of
the spectrum they’re coming from. The only thing that concerns
me about writers writing about other genders and races is whether
or not they pulled it off. That’s the only yardstick I
care to be measured by, and/or whipped with. If I thought I
was only allowed to write about blue-eyed, white, Southern males,
simply because that happens to be the circumstances of my birth,
I’d just as soon quit.”
Edgerton, who has actually written from many points
of view—
including that of a dog and a wisteria vine—agrees. With
these restrictions, he says, “we are treating art as if
it were a highway, saying, ‘Don’t ride on the wrong
side of the road!’ How can we say that lesbians can only
write from the point of view of lesbians or that we want to
limit black people to writing only about black people? I have
a suspicion—speaking from the horrible class of white,
middle-class men—that we, as a group, probably botch other
points of view more often because of being so insulated and
having an arrogance of position in this society. But whether
someone writes poorly from a point of view other than their
own is a different issue from having the right to do it.”
“If you can find some emotional connection
to a character, that’s the juice, that’s the payoff,
for the writer and the reader,” says Parker, who is from
the coastal plain of North Carolina and has also explored the
history of the Lumbees in his fiction. “Obviously, you
should be as careful and authentic and honest as possible, but
we’re talking about emotional, not political honesty.”
C. Michael Curtis is a senior editor at The Atlantic
Monthly, which, along with The New Yorker, is one of the most
prestigious venues for the publication of short fiction in the
country today. “The race question is a tricky one,”
Curtis says, “and some readers may take vigorous exception
to certain stories.” He believes that this sensitivity
in literary circles began when William Styron ’47 was attacked
so bitterly for writing from the point of view of Nat Turner,
the African American who led a slave revolt in 1831 in Virginia.
Like Humphreys, Styron had the idea for his 1967
novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, many years before completing
it. When the novel finally came out, it was in the middle of
the civil-rights movement. The book earned the 1968 Pulitzer
Prize for fiction, but its author was widely denounced. Speaking
at the Library of Congress in 1998, Styron said of his book:
“I was especially lacerated and hurt that it was labeled
racist. That was hard to take for a writer who attempted to
expose the horrors and evils of slavery.” But, he added,
“basically, it is a very politically incorrect book written
by a white man trying to seize his own interpretation and put
it into the soul and heart of a black man.”
At the same gathering, Styron was also questioned
about the flak he received for writing so intimately in the
1979 novel Sophie’s Choice about a female Polish concentration-camp
victim. “There will always be a complaint from people who
see writing as a province where one should remain rooted in
one’s own experience,” he told the group. “My
view is that one of the glories of artistic creation is to transcend
the barriers of race and gender and exploit talent to its fullest,
and to hell with barriers of race, gender, et cetera.”
For his part, Curtis says that while The Atlantic
Monthly has no strict policy about stories written from the
point of view of a character whose race or gender is different
from the author’s, the magazine is cautious. “We will,
for example, resist stories written by white authors in which
black characters are portrayed as stupid or craven,” he
says, or when the narrative point of view “might be construed
as damaging or needlessly negative.”
The New Yorker, Curtis says, is probably stricter
in disallowing stories in which the author crosses a racial
line. “We published a story not too long ago written from
a Hawaiian point of view by a non-Hawaiian and received a letter
saying the author’s work was unpersuasive,” he says.
“At the same time, we recently published a short story
written by a white woman but told from the point of view of
a black boy in Kingston, Jamaica, and we’ve had no complaints.”
Curtis, who is married to a novelist—Elizabeth
Cox, an associate professor in Duke’s English department—agrees
with the writers: “It is finally a matter of how well the
piece is written, not the background of the author.”
—Georgann Eubanks
“My view is that one of the glories of artistic creation
is to transcend the barriers of race and gender and exploit
talent to its fullest,” says William Styron, “and
to hell with barriers of race, gender, et cetera.” |
In 1991, Humphreys’ third novel, Fireman’s Fair, covered
the midlife crisis of a Charleston divorce lawyer who is upended by
Hurricane Hugo.
In the ensuing decade, Humphreys has been silent,
except for her role as midwife to the remarkable memoir of a young
African-American woman from Hungry Neck, South Carolina, near Charleston,
who sought Humphreys’ assistance in telling the story of her
childhood abuse, drug use, and eventual recovery. Humphreys taped
and then transcribed the story as it was told to her. As she writes
in the introduction to Gal: A True Life by Ruthie Bolton, “I
was only a witness and secretary, while Ruthie was in it, seeing it,
making it happen again.”
Without mentioning that experience and how it
might have shaped her new book, Humphreys explains to her Duke audience
that Nowhere Else on Earth involved bearing witness and serving, at
times, as a kind of recording secretary to another life quite removed
from her elite Charleston upbringing, a life lived on the margins
of mainstream, white America well over a century ago. And, she tells
us, this fourth novel is, in fact, the book that she became a writer
in order to write. It is the 1860s love story of the Lumbee Indian
couple, Rhoda Strong and Henry Berry Lowrie.
While the tale she first heard on that train has
tugged at her all these years, it took tremendous courage, skill,
and decades of research to complete the novel. Humphreys says it is
a book that she could not have written any sooner. And already some
reviewers have questioned her success with the material.
Writing for The New York Times, Michael Upchurch,
an occasional novelist whose own works have lapsed into obscurity,
fired the first volley: “Humphreys has ventured in such an unexpected
direction and struck such an unlikely note of homespun earnestness
that Fireman’s Fair fanatics may find themselves reeling in confusion,
wondering what’s going on.”
What’s going on is that Humphreys has not
only taken on a legendary love story that has been much embroidered
by Native-American oral tradition, but she has also ventured into
an area of North Carolina history fraught with controversy. She knew
her work would be scrutinized from all quarters —literary, historical,
and cultural. “I know I got some things wrong, and I will be
corrected,” she says with characteristic humility.
Since the early 1800s, U.S. government officials
have questioned the authenticity of the Lumbees’ claim to tribal
status because of the absence of a distinctive Native-American language
or definitive tribal customs among them. Some anthropologists and
the Lumbees themselves have speculated that they are actually the
racially-mixed descendants of the Lost Colony—the 122 English
settlers sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh who disappeared from North
Carolina’s Roanoke Island in 1590.
Although the Lumbee established the nation’s
first state-supported institution of higher education for Native Americans
in Pembroke, North Carolina, in 1887, it was as late as 1934 when
the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent a pair of anthropologists to Robeson
County to determine the authenticity of the tribe. According to Lumbee
scholar and filmmaker Melinda Maynor, they performed blood tests and
a humiliating exercise known as the pencil test.
“A pencil was slipped into a subject’s
hair,” Maynor writes. “If the pencil stayed after mild to
vigorous shaking of the head, the subject’s hair was deemed too
tight or ‘non-Indian.’ If the pencil fell, it was understood
to have fallen out of real Indian hair.” From the 200-some Lumbee
individuals tested in 1934, only twenty-two were categorized as Indians.
Finally, in 1956, the U.S. Congress passed a bill recognizing the
Lumbees as Native Americans, but they continue to be denied federally
recognized tribal status.
Add to this long and bitter dispute the fact that
Humphreys has chosen to write from the point of view of a Lumbee woman.
A number of white writers have recently been discouraged from attempting
to market fiction written from the primary perspective of a character
of a race or ethnicity different from the author. Some New York agents
and editors have shied away from representing or publishing such works.
“It’s an important question whether
it’s proper or allowable for a white writer to take on the story
of a nonwhite person,” Humphreys tells her Duke audience. “My
first answer was, ‘No, I can’t write this. It’s not
right.’ ” She shakes her head. To work up the nerve necessary
to the task, Humphreys told herself she would go ahead and write the
book but wouldn’t publish it.
During her research in the mid-Eighties, Humphreys
went to visit the distinguished Lumbee educator and historian Adolph
L. Dial, then chair of Native-American studies at Pembroke State University
(now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.) “I was nervous
when I told him what I wanted to do,” she says. “After a
long moment, he finally said, ‘I think you should write this
book,’ and then he paused again. I thought he was going to say,
‘because it needs to be written,’ but instead he smiled
and said, ‘because you will learn a lot by doing it.’”
Humphreys learned more than she anticipated.
“I knew I didn’t know enough about the Reconstruction,”
she says, “but then to understand that, I had to go back to the
Civil War, and that led me to the Antebellum period, then the Revolution,
and then the Colonial period. My husband and children thought I was
never going to finish.” The family was so engaged in her project
that one of her sons, now grown, actually wrote a school paper about
Henry Berry Lowrie before his mother finished her own manuscript.
continues on page two |
|
