98
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
GROWING UP WITH TOBACCO TRUTHS a review by Stephanie Whetstone Adele Myers. The Tobacco Wives: A Novel. William Morrow and Company, 2022.
STEPHANIE WHETSTONE, a Kentucky native, earned a BA in comparative area studies from Duke University and an MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro and was an English instructor at Durham Technical Community College. She lives in New Jersey and is the assistant director of Princeton Writes at Princeton University. ADELE MYERS is from Asheville, NC. She earned a degree in Journalism from UNC Chapel Hill and works in advertising in Brooklyn, NY. The Tobacco Wives is her debut novel.
Winter 2025
If you have ever driven through is left to create a whole new self Eastern North Carolina in deep and a whole new life. summer, you know the beauty Aunt Etta is a skilled seamof a ripe tobacco field, full of stress who sews ballgowns for lush plants with leaves wide the wives of the executives enough to cover a squatting at the tobacco company, the tobacco picker’s back. You see “tobacco wives,” as she calls its tall, spindly “sucker” flowers them. These ladies of wealth ready to be nipped away – or and leisure keep Etta busy all “topped” – to let the precious summer sewing their gowns for leaves continue to grow. And the annual gala. Etta also sews you smell the sweet scent of uniforms for the women who golden Bright Leaf tobacco have started working at the when curing begins in the fall. tobacco warehouses during the These experiences are rarer now war, who may or may not get than they used to be. There is to keep those jobs once all the less tobacco grown, fewer peomen return. ple’s lives connected to it. Maddie is thrown by her Now, we know that smokmother’s abandonment but ing kills. Now, we know that caught up in the glamour of cigarettes are especially harmassisting Etta in sewing for the ful to pregnant mothers and tobacco wives. She enjoys cretheir developing fetuses, but we ating beauty and developing didn’t always. There was once her independence. She says, “I only glory for tobacco in North loved falling asleep among the Carolina: beauty, wealth, even fabric and the notions, dreamsupposed health benefits. The ing of the endless possibilities in transition is the North Caroa bolt of cloth” (28). Maddy fanlina period that Adele Myers tasizes about taking care of herexplores in The Tobacco Wives, self, building her own business, as tobacco and tobacco barons and she thrives when she is free begin to fall from grace, and to make her own creations. communities like Bright Leaf Myers connects Maddie to sevSTEPHANIE WHETSTONE, a Kentucky grapple with their identities and eral women in town – her aunt’s native, earnedtheir a BA in comparative try to imagine future. Theyarea friend (and hinted at lover), studies from Duke University and an MFA are in led in this novel by Maddie Frances; the working women creative writing from UNC Greensboro Sykes, courageous fifteenand awas an English instructor at Durham at the warehouses; and most Technical Community with College. She significantly, Mitzy, the wife of year-old girl grappling lives in New Jersey and is the assistant what it means to be a woman. the top executive of the tobacco director of Princeton Writes at Princeton It University. is 1946, and Maddie’s life company. When Etta falls ill with is in chaos. Her father recently measles, Mitzy takes Maddie in, from Asheville, diedADELE in theMYERS war. isHer mother isNC. She and Maddie finds herself deep in earned a degree in Journalism from UNC struggling to cope with this loss the belly of the nascent tobacco Chapel Hill and works in advertising in and Brooklyn, make ends meet. She Wives sees is her health scandals that will come. NY. The Tobacco debut novel. as her ticket a new husband Mitzy’s husband, Mr. Winston, out and a teenage daughter as has enlisted the town doctor an impediment to finding one, and the tobacco wives to market so she packs Maddie up before MOMints, a menthol cigarette dawn one morning and takes specifically for women. MOMints her to live with her aunt Etta in are supposed to be good for Bright Leaf for the summer. She morning sickness and for slimdoesn’t call or write, so Maddie ming down after pregnancy, but