Out of the Night That Covers Me
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Stephen Ambrose
Children's Authors
Stan and Jan Berenstain |
Lyrical new novel captures South's communities and conflicts
INTERVIEW BY ELLEN KANNER Born and raised in Alabama, novelist Pat Cunningham Devoto harnesses the place she knows and remembers. She writes lyrically of the South's geography and honestly about its dark history. "Themes are universal, but a lot of writers use a locale they are comfortable with to espouse things they believe in. I'm comfortable in the South," she said. That's not just any river on the cover of her novel, Out of the Night That Covers Me. It's the Alabama River, and Devoto, who took the haunting picture herself, makes it serve in her story as the divide between whites and blacks, the entitled and the disenfranchised. "The history of the South is one of huge contrasts in economic conditions between blacks and whites," said Devoto from her home in Atlanta. "This book was set in the 1950s, a time where the reader will see the kind of situation that prompted the first strike for civil rights." It's set in Kay's Bend, a marginalized black community based on a real place called Gee's Bend in the rich-soiled area known as the Alabama Black Belt. Devoto depicts it in her book as a forgotten spot with "very few cars or tractors, no paved roads, little indoor plumbing, and no telephones. It didn't matter to . . . the people of Kay's Bend. Home was a place of common experience, of standing together." Witnessing‹and mirroring‹the plight of the people of Kay's Bend is eight-year-old John McMillan, a character who first appeared in Devoto's debut novel, My Last Days as Roy Rogers. Once coddled by his mother, John is orphaned and finds himself sleeping on the floor of his uncle's sharecropper cabin, forced to work the sunbaked cotton fields. Luckily for John, an eminent local banker takes an interest in the boy's plight and hires him to work as a helper in the afternoons. That's how John meets Tuway, the judge's assistant and liaison between the black and white communities. A college-educated black man whose skin has weird patches of white, Tuway straddles both worlds. He is loyal to the judge but also to his own people, and when the cotton crop fails, he secretly helps people hop freight trains out of town. Hoping to run away from his brutal, alcoholic uncle, John thwarts one of Tuway's missions. His secret exposed, Tuway has no choice but to bring the boy to Kay's Bend where he sticks out like "the dot on a domino," as one of the characters puts it. Initially the butt of people's resentment and doubt, John must earn their trust, their respect. From the creek where people fish and the fields they tend to the rough-hewn homes where they live, Devoto makes Kay's Bend come alive on the page. She had great help from two Gee's Bend matriarchs in getting the details right. "Aunt Robina and Aunt Tommy, they're in their mid-90s now, have lived there for 50 years. They're walking, talking histories of the area. I would just go and be ready to listen. They kept a scrapbook, sometimes two or three, for every year they had been there, so they had all this wonderful information," said Devoto. "I would sit in the parlor every night when everybody had gone to bed with the fan on‹they had no air conditioning‹and began to formulate my characters. It all came out of those visits down there, it fell into place." Just as Kay's Bend is based on a real place, John is based on a real person. "I had a friend when I was a child who lived up the street from me, the only son of a mother who had adopted him late in life. I always thought his life was so cloistered, so predicted. I wondered what would happen if his life changed in some drastic way. The character of John grew out of that childhood friend," Devoto said. "The interesting thing to me about John as a character is he had no concept of life except in his narrow world and was appalled to find people clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder, who for generations made their livelihood doing that," she said. A mother with grown children and a former elementary school history teacher, Devoto is drawn to writing about childhood with its "sense of wonder, of I can do anything and there's no holding me back." Devoto also ran an after-school play group in an inner city community a few years ago. "That kind of put me back in touch with kids, especially African-American kids, the way they perceive things, the wonderful outlooks they have," she said. "That was very affirming." Both Devoto's novels reflect the growing awareness of shifting social roles in the 1950s. "Roy Rogers is a lot about the constraints of the '50s, the fear people felt about not conforming," said the author, whose own mother blithely flouted convention. Set a few years before Out of the Night That Covers Me, My Last Days as Roy Rogers takes place during the summer polio scares, a time when Devoto's mother feared for her children, though Devoto and her five brothers and sisters remained blissfully naive. "We were out having a wonderful time, not thinking about it," she said, her voice evoking sticky Alabama afternoons. In fact, Devoto's drawl is so much the voice of the South, she narrates the audio version of Out of the Night That Covers Me. "I'd never done that before," she said. "You stand there in this booth all by yourself and they're watching you. I tried to do the different voices, change my inflection a bit. I couldn't do them like an actor, but it was great fun and real interesting." And a very different process from the writing itself. She prefers to work at "a little lake place in Alabama that I helped design and build. I have to have long stretches of peace and quiet; I can't be tempted by television or by people calling. My children are grown, I'm divorced, I'm by myself so I can set any hours I want, which is great," she said. "I read stories about authors with four or five kids‹they carpool, they get up at 3:00 in the morning to write. My hat's off to 'em, but I love this time of life for me. I'm really able to concentrate on my writing and I love it." The more she writes, the more Devoto finds herself returning to the past, reexamining it. Compared to the innocence of her first book, Out of the Night That Covers Me has a hard-earned knowledge, dealing more directly with the disparity of wealth and position between races in the South. Devoto isn't done writing about it or about John and her other characters. "When I first started writing, I didn't realize I would follow John and these other characters, but it feels like a natural thing to do," she said. "I see so much more that I want to say."
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