On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
Simon & Schuster Audio, $18
|
REVIEW BY ROSALIND S. FOURNIER
Kaye Gibbons weaves marvelous prose from the emotional havoc hateful fathers stir in their daughters. But as in Ellen Foster -- a tour de force told from the perspective of a young girl bounced from one unfit home to the next -- the daughters in Gibbons's stories are survivors. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is the story of Emma Garnet Tate, the daughter of Southern plantation owner Samuel P. Tate, "man of means, by God," who is fighting an eternal battle to overcome his lowly beginnings. A self-made man, he is fiercely jealous of his eldest son's opportunities, who confounds his father by rejecting his future inheritance: "I do not think I will ever live here," Whately demurs. "If I take up your living, I will take up your Negroes. Thank you though." Instead, Whately loves literature, a passion he instills also in Emma Garnet. This further infuriates their father, who craves a daughter with great feminine charms, not the bright and competent young woman Emma Garnet is becoming. To Tate's mortification, Emma Garnet marries a young doctor, Quincy Lowell, of a prominent "Yankee" family from Boston. The couple moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Emma Garnet lives with the greatest peace and joy she has ever known -- for a time. The Civil War is on the horizon, and the Lowells are in the thick of it. As the bloodshed mounts, Emma Garnet joins her husband tending to the soldiers in the hospital and later moves into their home. The Lowell home becomes a tight operation, run by Emma Garnet and Clarice -- a cherished slave from Emma Garnet's childhood whom she and Lowell freed and hired for wages. Though common throughout the war, there's a subtle irony in Clarice's care for the soldiers who would die for the South's right to own slaves. Never melodramatic, the story captures the lie of the war -- that there's honor in joining what Emma Garnet sarcastically terms "the chivalric dead." The author of five novels including A Virtuous Woman and A Cure for Dreams, Gibbons has considerable critical acclaim to live up to. In On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, she has exceeded it. Rosalind S. Fournier is a staff writer for Birmingham magazine.
|
Support your