22
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W Photographs by Kevin Mann
there to register it. I felt the longer I wasn’t there, the more of myself I would lose” (34; italics in original). Loss permeates Helen’s life; so does guilt. By the age of ten, Helen has suffered the loss of her mother and her grandmother. Lisbeth died of pneumonia, contracted in the hospital after a miscarriage. “‘They’d been trying to get you a little brother or sister,’” Nonie tells Helen (4). Nonie died of heart failure while shopping for an Easter hat. Helen plays over and over in her mind how the result would have been different had she simply been there to give her grandmother the pills she carried in her purse. But Flora’s
death is the one for which Helen believes she is the most culpable. Flora – at twenty-two, too young and temperamentally too immature (or so it seemed to Helen as a child) to be a true mother figure – was nonetheless the third female caregiver that Helen lost to death, and the grief combined with remorse for the part that she played in Flora’s death created the writer that Helen became, one driven to resurrect textually what she knows she cannot resurrect bodily and (to use one of her favorite words) to “register” her own accountability, her awareness of the role she played in Flora’s death. “[W]hat is anybody’s memory but another narrative form?” (72), Helen asks at one point. She remembers stories involving ten imaginary students, which she created to help Flora prepare, through role playing, to become a teacher that fall that Flora did not live to see. Still, the older Helen finds
number 23
some hope amidst the remorse that she is “still growing into”: those classroom hours “were filled with hope and promise and mutual development and even closeness. We were making up a game that needed both of us. . . . But right here, right in here somewhere, in what we were making together, is located the redemption, if there is to be any” (140–41). In Flora, Gail Godwin has created a novel that is itself “something of service to life,” a testament to the power of memory and narrative to shape who we are and what we become – and what we hope to achieve. n
above and right Gail Godwin reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC, 19 May 2013
Courtesy of the University of North Carolina press
above An illustration from Cecelski’s book: African
American volunteers for the Union army in New Bern, circa 1863, from Frank Leslie’s Illusstrirte Zeitung, 5 Mar. 1864
ragan OLD NORTH STATE award for civil war–era biography The winner of the Ragan Old North State Award for nonfiction is historian David S. Cecelski for his book, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway & the Slaves’ Civil War (U of North Carolina P, 2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013). Presenting the award for the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, Robert Anthony, Curator for the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, noted of Galloway, “It turns out he’s one of the most important African Americans in the Civil War South.” A native of Craven County, Cecelski is the author of several books, including Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (1994), A Historian’s Coast: Adventures into the Tidewater Past (2000), and The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001). Read essays by Cecelski in NCLR 2007 and 2011. His essay “The Voice of the Shipyard: Arthur Miller in Wilmington, North Carolina, 1941” will be published in NCLR’s 2014 print issue. n