Marly Youmans, who grew up in Cullowhee, N.C., sets A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage in Depression-era Georgia and conceives an array of obstacles for the hero Pip Tatnall to overcome. He escapes his young brother Otto’s death by riding the rails and survives by working day labor jobs across the country. He bears savant-like “oddities of memory and behavior [that] might have been diagnosed and his syndrome named” if he’d been born 70 years later.
Pip and Otto were the youngest of Gilead Tattnal’s 24 known offspring, but their older siblings couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take them in. Life at the orphanage is rough, but the boys have each other, until the morning Pip awakes to find Otto missing. Otto’s death sends Pip toward the rails where he makes a home for many years, floating from town to town, pilfering books from public libraries to feed his brain. One day a bull, a railroad security guard, catches up with him in a yard near Savannah and beats him about the head severely. Excelsior Tillman, a retired railroad man, rescues Pip, nurses him back to health, and gives him a home along with other boarders: Countess Casimiria a histrionic octogenarian, and a young couple, Bill and Clemmie Shook. Over the years, Pip searches for identity, acceptance, love, and belonging—a universal theme. Youmans’ amazing writing transforms Pip from a hardened boy who lets hurt roll off his back and who doesn’t let people “set hooks into him” into a young man with hope in his heart.
Washed in the Blood by Lisa Alther. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, October 2011.
In Washed in the Blood, Lisa Alther imagines an answer to the mystery of the Melungeons’ origins, which spans five centuries and several continents. With mostly sympathetic characters (and an evil conquistador), Alther presents the complexity of racial dynamics during the European’s exploration and conquest of the Americas and how they played out through subsequent generations. Instead of focusing generation by generation, Alther divides the book into three parts and depicts key moments in southeast settlement such as Diego Martin’s arrival in La Florida in 1567, Daniel Hunter’s move from Philadelphia to Virginia in the 1830s, and the Martin family’s life in east Tennessee in the early twentieth century.
Diego Martin is a Spanish pig herder whose mother urged him to go to the New World to earn his fortune and convert the heathens to Catholicism. After a miserable eight weeks crossing the Atlantic Ocean, they land at Hispaniola, endure much hardship, and Martin learns that the heathens are not eager to hear how much God loves them. Eventually, the leader of the expedition, Don Sebastian de Silva, receives word to return to St. Augustine, and Martin and several others are left behind. They ally with a small tribe of Indians to survive.
By the nineteenth century the people living in the southern mountains of Virginia are isolated and illiterate. Daniel Hunter, a Philadelphia Quaker, establishes a school in the community and teaches children and adults. Torn between duty to his fiancé and his lust for Galacia, the mother of one of his students, Hunter must make a choice to be true to himself or to his religion. He breaks other laws by teaching black children to read—then illegal in Virginia—and helping escaped slaves to freedom. Cherokees fleeing from the Indian Removal Act were granted asylum by members of the community. By a turn of events, Hunter is able to offer land for some to live on, as well as members of the Martin family who were forced off their land due to questions about who the property was deeded to, despite their family having farmed it for many generations.
Alther deftly incorporates a myriad of themes and political intrigues in this epic tale with likeable characters, perplexing situations, and asks many important questions about race, identity, and ethnicity.