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2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
“dreams of the good and the killers of the dream” a review by Christina G. Bucher Anna Jean Mayhew. The Dry Grass of August. New York: Kensington, 2011.
Christina G. Bucher is an associate professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College in Rome, GA. She has published articles on Kate Chopin’s “Fedora” in Mississippi Quarterly, the poetry of Pauli Murray in NCLR 2004, Gloria Naylor and Charles W. Chesnutt’s approaches to the conjure tradition in Studies in the Literary Imagination, and several book reviews for NCLR. She recently presented a conference paper on Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, focusing on its wild popularity, the wide range of reader responses to the novel, and the potential reasons for both.
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Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, 1949 (New York: Norton, 1994) 25.
In Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith’s landmark 1949 memoir of the tangled relationships of race, gender, class, and sex and the damage they wreaked on the South, the author begins with the sentence, “Even its children knew that the South was in trouble.”1 Jubie Watts, the thirteen-year-old white protagonist of Anna Jean Mayhew’s debut novel, The Dry Grass of August, spends the summer of 1954 learning hard lessons of just how much trouble the South is in because of such issues. Poignant, at times lyrical, brutal, perhaps rushed at the end, gingerly – and partly successfully – walking the line of presenting a story about black/white relationships in the South, particularly the interplay between domestic workers and the families who employ them, the novel is a strong first work that will please many readers. Mayhew, a native of Charlotte, NC, worked for eighteen years on the novel, and while she had published a story when she was in her forties, this book marks her first major entrance into the literary world at the age of seventyone, a fact she quips about in the acknowledgements, thanking her editors for taking a chance on her at that ripe age and suggesting it makes for a wonderful marketing angle (282). Certainly, her perseverance and the quality of the prose should inspire those embarking on their literary careers at any age. The novel opens in August of 1954 as the Watts family is preparing for a family vacation, during which they will drive from Charlotte to Pawleys Island, SC, by way of Pensacola to visit a relative. Paula, the sad, ineffectual, sometimes good-hearted mother; Stell (short for Estelle), the serious sixteen-year-old daughter,
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who has recently been saved and has thrown herself full force into all things religious; Puddin’, the younger sister; Davie, the youngest at two years old; and Jubie are setting out sans their volatile, sometimes violent father, Bill, a successful businessman, who plans to join them at Pawleys Island after they make their detour to Pensacola. Another traveler, crucial to the novel’s plot and themes, is Mary Luther, the family’s African American maid, who is going along to tend to the children and help with cooking so Paula can have a “real” vacation. In chapters that alternate between present and past narration up until chapter eighteen (at which point narration shifts entirely to the present for the remaining fifteen chapters), Mayhew guides readers through the Watts family history as well as through Jubie’s growing awareness of the evils of the Jim Crow South. As the family makes a stop in Claxton, GA, to buy fruitcakes, an automobile accident forces them to remain in the town for several days, and Stell’s desire to attend an advertised tent revival at a local African Methodist Episcopal church leads to events that mark Jubie’s full introduction to the “trouble” of the South and that propel her toward adulthood as her family crumbles around her. While certainly the novel is a traditional coming of age story that centers on a young woman gaining knowledge of the secrets that are eating away at the core of her family, the changes her body is going through and her budding sexuality (including her attraction to Leesum, a young relative of Mary’s), and the degree to which she will assert her independence as a young adult, the author’s specific focus seems to be on