Tag: The Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Heavy Mettle

Three mothers of tenacity appear in a debut novel

By Anne Blythe

Mother’s Day has come and gone this year, but Sara Johnson Allen’s Down Here We Come Up offers a unique and complicated tribute to the grit of motherhood, not the roses and candy of a Hallmark holiday. This debut novel from a writer with Raleigh roots shows the depths to which three mothers will go for their children despite the blunders and foibles that accompany the rough-and-tumble lives that bring them all together under one roof in a “creaking, rotting bungalow” outside Wilmington.

In rich, vivid, sparkling prose, Allen’s page-turner explores tough topics: socioeconomic divides; the realities of immigration often skirted in today’s hot-button debate; the shadow economies of the illegal drug trade, and human and weapons trafficking.

Kate Jessup is the protagonist. She’s in her mid-20s, “movie-star beautiful,” and the wistful mother of a daughter whose soft skin she could still smell even after spending only 48 hours with her before handing the newborn over to a Boston couple in a “closed adoption.”

Kate’s a twin who is almost as street smart as her brother, Luke, is book smart. They’re the children of a sassy single mother, Jackie Jessup, who showed her twins how to live by hook or crook as they grew up near Wilmington. They learned early in life that “there was a thing’s market value, the perceived value, the true value, the if-the-buyer-was-drunk value.”

Jackie, readers find out pretty quickly, “could con people into anything because she saw ahead of everyone else by several moves,” Allen writes. “In a different set of circumstances, Jackie might have been a great chess player, someone who could beat the fast strategies of the men playing outside the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square where Kate later followed her twin brother Luke when he received enough merit and need-based scholarships plus loan money that it didn’t matter he had no actual money.”

Settled near Harvard Square with her professor-boyfriend in a multi-million-dollar Victorian home he’d purchased from his father for a dollar, Kate gets a call from Jackie that shakes her out of the aristocratic world she had joined.

“Mama, I’m at work. What do you want?” Kate asked while ducking down between the rows of plants she loved to tend in the greenhouse where she worked.

“ . . . Look, I need something,” Jackie said between drags on a Kool 100.

Jackie wanted Kate to “get someone’s children,” and to entice her daughter, she added: “I have something you want.” Kate had been emotionally hollow when she left the South and her mother to be near her brother in New England. Most of all, she wanted to know where the daughter she’d given up for adoption was. Though she tried to tamp down those questions, they were never far from the surface.

Against her brother’s advice, she had even gone to the home where she thought the adoptive parents lived, just to get a glimpse of the life she had brought into the world. But there was no sign of the couple or a little girl who would, by then, be close to 8 years old.

Jackie’s phone call, and the chance that her mother might truly know where her daughter was, leads Kate back to the house where she grew up. She leaves Boston, taking her boyfriend’s Audi without his permission or even telling him she was going. Memories of a life she thought she had left behind flooded back.

“She knew driving south would be like letting poison seep into the well,” Allen writes. “She could taste it, bitter and sharp on the sides of her tongue, the menthol smoke, the chemical air freshener, a variety of aftershaves of strangers in their house, all of it.”

Once home, Kate found her mother deathly ill, “a skeletal, yellow-grey version of herself.” The bungalow was filled with people she didn’t know, travelers from south of the U.S. border who were there because of Maribel Reyes, a former teacher and mother of three who fled Mexico to build a better life for her family.

Maribel had moved into the Jessup home, taking on a daughter-like caregiver role for Jackie. More than that, she had created a safe house for migrant workers who made stops in southeastern North Carolina as they carved new paths in a foreign and sometimes unwelcoming land.

Maribel, Kate and Jessie may have converged in this place from different circumstances for an array of reasons but they shared a powerful bond. They were mothers who knew too well the pangs of being separated from their children. Each was willing to go to great lengths to narrow that distance, often bending the rules to achieve that greater purpose.

As the women plot the trip to get Maribel’s children out of Mexico and across the Bridge of the Americas from Cuidad Juarez into El Paso, Texas, Allen shows her deftness at describing places. You can almost feel the hot weather of the inner coastal communities. “Kate knew heat,” Allen writes. “She knew it up and down like the motion of a paper fan in a closed-window church. Blot-a-cloth-against-your-sweaty-forehead heat. Waving-up-from-the-asphalt-like-a-mirage heat. Wet heat.”

You can visualize what the coastal community looked like before the new housing developments cropped up on old farmland and forever altered the landscape. The sounds and smells of the changes hang heavily in the air — new languages among the rural Southern accents, the chilaquiles and memelas served in kitchens where biscuits once were the main fare.

Amid all the calculating, heartbreaking and serpentine storylines of survival are moments of triumph, jubilation and humor. Allen has her readers cheering for her characters, rallying for them to forgive themselves and others and longing for new beginnings.

“Follow anything back to the beginning, and you will find a mother,” Jackie says at one point.

From start to finish, Allen will make her readers think about motherhood, how to define it, and the joys, messiness and sacrifices that come with the job.

Author Alena Dillon describes Allen’s first novel as “a literary mic drop.” Let’s hope it’s not the end of a performance, but the first of more stories to come. She’s off to a great start. PS

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

The Omnivorous Reader

The Great Escape

Silver Alert is a bewitching joyride

By Anne Blythe

Lee Smith, a treasure of the North Carolina literary world, takes you on an unusual journey in her newest novel, Silver Alert. She’s predictably funny in her typically marvelous, unpredictable way. Her characters are beguilingly quirky. Yet amid all the humor and occasional madness in this tale about an octogenarian’s “one last joyride,” Smith plunges her readers into the depths of tough topics such as aging, sex trafficking, emotional abuse, poverty and wealth.

There are two protagonists. One is Herb Atlas, a curmudgeonly but ever so lovable retiree on his third marriage who we meet in his lovely — and very pink — Key West home. In his golden years now, Herb is perpetually mining for the gold he really didn’t know he had in his youth as he does his best to care for his once lively, artistic, adventurous and beautiful wife, Susan. He longs for the fancy and fast cars of his earlier years, alluring courtships and an escape from the dementia that has relegated Susan to a rattan chair by the bay window, where she remains lost in her own world.

The other central character, Dee Dee, or Renee, or whatever name the victimized but optimistic woman from Appalachia decides to use, is a young pedicurist fleeing hard-knock days. She is whip-smart, resourceful and endearing. Her parents died when she was a child. She bounced from household-to-household, man-to-man, lives in a bread-shaped trailer with a pink roof and fends for herself in a world in which those she encountered rarely had her best interest at heart.

Dee Dee is running from her past with hopes of a brighter future. Herb wants little to do with his future and yearns for the past. Their paths converge in Key West, a place with celebrated sunsets and a seize-the-day vibe.

Key West is a character in the novel, too. Smith takes her readers down Duval Street and its offshoots, into shops, cafes, Laundromats, and the nooks and crannies where people come to remake themselves, start anew or sometimes disappear.

Herb is in his home at 108 Washington Street, “a primo address,” as Smith describes it, wearing red-and-black plaid pajama pants, lime green crocs and a Hawaiian shirt covering his considerable gut, when he opens the door, and his life, to Dee Dee.

Using Renee, instead of her real name, Dee Dee has come to give Susan a pedicure. “She looks like a kid, with those wide brown eyes beneath the blond bangs, her high, shiny ponytail swinging as she steps forward in her white, white tennis shoes,” Herb thinks to himself. He gives her an earful as he walks her back to his wife’s quarters. Susan’s daughter, Maribeth, “the hippy one,” as Herb calls her, and her partner Pat DeVine, “the bossy one,” who arranged the appointment, have come down to help care for his wife.

Herb is unenthusiastic. “I never asked them, you understand. I don’t need them, this is a classy operation. But this Pat, you can’t tell her no, you can’t tell her nothing.”

Dee Dee, dressed in jeans, a pink tunic and carrying a big bag of nail polishes, clippers and salon tools, is not just a pedicurist, it turns out. She has a knack for dealing with Susan. The “crazy whisperer,” as Herb dubs her, can make his Susan laugh, smile and even seem happy with colorful markers, a tablet and easel from the Walmart children’s section. For hours at a time, Susan sits in the garden in front of her easel, using only one color on each sheet of paper, drawing “crazy art.”

The makeshift art corner delights Herb as he tries to ignore the signs of aging thrust at him — the living wills, the health care power of attorney, confounding medical forms and that humiliating clock he had to draw for the nurse, showing the hands set at 7:15, to assess his mental acuity. Then there’s his constant urge to pee — “Old age is all about urine, who knew?” Smith writes.

Smith takes on some of the difficult topics of aging as she introduces her readers to the cast of adult children in Susan and Herb’s world. She shows the push and pull, and the sometimes painful juxtaposition, as children take on the difficult roles of being parents for their parents.

Smith craftily explores the wealth dichotomy so prominent in Key West as readers follow Dee Dee, whose hardscrabble beginnings have left her with few nickels to scrape together. Her travels take her from the trailer park where drug trafficking sometimes pays the rent to the affluence of the Atlas house and the “tree house,” where she has a romance with a well-to-do graduate student taking a break from his scripted life to live like a Bohemian and write poetry.

Herb and Dee Dee go about their business for much of the first half of the book at a pace that — like a child chomping at the bit to grow up — is not always as swift as desired.

Then Herb and Susan’s family stages an intervention and they can see their dreams unraveling. As the adult children talk about moving Herb into an assisted living facility in Del Ray with Susan, he fishes keys to his Porsche from his secret hiding place in a shoe and sets off with Dee Dee on a madcap adventure.

Herb’s last joyride is a joy for readers, as well. Even though there are cringing moments as the pair starts out along the streets of Key West, then on the highways north, eventually headed to Disney World, it’s difficult not to cheer them on.

Silver Alert will make you squirm over the wistfulness of aging, but it will leave you with a big smile from getting to know characters who worm their way into your heart. OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades. She has covered city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

2023 Department The Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Of Race and Justice

Two books with common cause

By Anne Blythe

Sometimes two books can sit far apart on the bookshelf and seem to have little in common. Then you read them and discover the themes they share.

Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial is novelist and lawyer Corban Addison’s first work of nonfiction, a fast-paced legal thriller that reads like a novel about — wait for it — hog feces.

Addison tells the saga of Elsie Herring and hundreds of other residents in eastern North Carolina so disgusted by the stench and waste disposal practices of the industrial-style hog farms among their rural, mostly Black communities that they waged a legal battle against a pork industry giant. Through deft description of courtroom drama and artful portraits of the characters in this classic good-versus-evil narrative, Addison exposes the longstanding injustices of institutional environmental racism.

In Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt, Phoebe Zerwick, head of the Wake Forest University journalism program who used to work at the Winston-Salem Journal, delivers a thorough journalistic exploration of the life, wrongful conviction, exoneration and death by the suicide of Darryl Hunt. Zerwick shines a harsh light on a fundamentally flawed justice system and the institutional racism embedded in it.

Addison opens his book inside the federal courtroom in Raleigh where U.S. District Judge W. Earl Britt has just been alerted that a jury has reached a verdict in one of a series of nuisance cases that hog farm neighbors brought against Smithfield Foods Inc., the world’s largest pork producer.

The decision came quickly.

“The word spread like sparks from a brushfire,” Addison writes. “Smartphones emerge from pockets and handbags, thumbs fly across screens, and messages are cast across the digital wind, lighting up other phones with chimes and beeps miles away.”

Britt, Addison writes, is “a charming octogenarian with the oracular eyes of a barn owl,” who waits for the assembly of the necessary attorneys, paralegals, plaintiffs and others to take their places in the courtroom. Peering over his glasses at the lawyers, he motions to the bailiff to bring in the jury.

A quiet settles over the courtroom. The foreman, holding an envelope with the verdict sealed inside, tells the judge that he and his fellow jurors have come to a unanimous decision. “As the envelope makes its short trip to the bench, the plaintiffs in the gallery take a breath and hold it,” Addison writes.

His prose is poetic though, at times, a bit overwrought. “The pain and sorrow of memory, together with the labor of years and dreams of days yet to come, are at the altar before them. Contrary to the tale of greed and opportunism being spun by politicians and poohbahs across town, they aren’t thinking about a million dollar payday as they wait for the judgment to be delivered. Instead, they are whispering a simple prayer, the prayer of verdict day, of verdictum. Please, Lord, let them believe us. Let them believe that we told the truth.”

In the ensuing scenes he gives readers a sense of history about land in the coastal plain that has been passed down from generation to generation among Black families who are standing up against the nemesis they say is responsible for them being unable to enjoy the life they, and their ancestors, once had.

This thoroughly researched and reported narrative ends with a visit to Joyce Messick, one of the plaintiffs in the nuisance cases who saw the hog farm near her family’s property shutter.

While Messick told him she finally felt as if she could breathe clean air, others have not gotten to that point. “Most have yet to see the change, to fill their lungs with liberated air, to stand upon emancipated ground,” Addison writes. “The dollar is still the lodestar of Smithfield Foods, and the legislature is still its domain.” Nonetheless, Addison concludes, there are people who will be relentless until commitments by the pork industry are realized.

To open her book about Hunt, Zerwick explains why she felt compelled to revisit a case she had chronicled in a series for the Winston-Salem Journal, one that led to new court proceedings that resulted in his exoneration.

“Beyond Innocence is my attempt to finish a story I began long ago,” she writes. “In 2003, when I wrote about the wrongful conviction of Darryl Hunt for the Winston-Salem Journal, Hunt was in prison then for the 1984 murder of a newspaper editor who had been raped and stabbed to death, not far from the newsroom where I worked.”

Hunt, who maintained his innocence throughout, was exonerated after 19 years of legal battles and the help of tireless advocates who refused to let the wrongful conviction stand.

“To the outside world, Hunt was the man who walked out of prison without rancor or regret,” Zerwick writes. “But the past haunted him, and the heroic narrative of a man who fought for justice masked a deep despair.” Zerwick decided to revisit Hunt’s story after he was found dead in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck that had been parked by a busy road with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

She was grief-stricken, as were many others. Then she went into reporter mode.

“I wasn’t done with the story after all,” Zerwick writes. “I started looking into his death soon after the funeral. Rather than tackle the big question about the failure of the justice system, I focused first on the facts.” Answers began to arrive as she interviewed the people around him, studied photographs and Facebooks posts, and pored over correspondence Hunt had with his lawyers.

“Hunt’s death taught me a great deal about the limits of journalism and forced me to question my motives,” Zerwick writes. “Does the public’s right to know, that righteous principle we journalists invoke, justify exposing the secrets I hoped to find? Does shining a light in the dark places really help, as we claim it does? Who am I to tell a story Hunt had not told himself?”

In the end, though, Zerwick brings new layers to the saga of Darryl Hunt, the heroic advocate for reform, and the often-told recounting of his wrongful conviction.

“Long before politicians began campaigning against mass incarceration, Hunt saw the system he had left behind for what it is, a trap that condemns millions of men and women, and their children, to living on the fringes, barred from jobs, housing, bank loans, food assistance and more, barred, in short, from a reasonable chance at a decent life,” Zerwick concludes, and she wishes Hunt was here to be a part of the reforms.

Both Zerwick and Addison have crafted new, nonfiction accounts of old cases that tested the justice of the justice system. They should be read from cover to cover. PS

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades.

2022 Department The Omnivorous Reader