Truth

January 12, 1998
After 40 years of exploring Southern life through fiction such as the NBA finalist, Apostles of Light, Mississippi native Douglas turns to nonfiction in these deeply felt reminiscences full of family skeletons, tragedies, crises and the ghosts of the Deep South. In "Grant," her husband's uncle, dying of cancer at 82, befriends an illiterate, devoted black caretaker and nurse, while his white relations virtually abandon him. In "Julia and Nellie," a tale of kinship, identity and religion, Julia Nutt, a family friend, defies convention and her Catholic upbringing by shacking up for decades with her married-but-separated Presbyterian first cousin, Dunbar Marshall. "Hampton" concerns Douglas's attempts to break down the wall of reserve and condescension surrounding her grandmother's African American gardener/handyman/ butler, Hampton Elliot. The final true-life tale is her convoluted investigation of the brutal execution by whipping and hanging of 30 slaves in Natzchez, Miss., in 1861, after a summary "trial" occasioned by apparently phony allegations of plotting a slave uprising. Douglas digs up a distant cousin's handwritten, firsthand account of the massacre and meditates on the sins of her slaveholding ancestors--none of whom, to her knowledge, were involved in this incident. At 78, Douglas has delivered a beautifully written book that is haunted by death, by the weight of the past and by the myths that hold together or sunder families and friends. Author tour.

July 1, 1998
In recounting these stories of her family and friends in Mississippi, Douglas, the author of seven books, including the novel Apostles of Light (Univ. Pr. of Mississippi, 1994), and a finalist for the National Book Award, writes her first work of "truth" after a career in fiction, although as she points out, fact and fiction can become blurred when reaching deep into memory. From the description of the black woman who nursed her uncle as he dies of cancer to the exploration of her family's involvement in the execution of slaves suspected of plotting an uprising, her writing illustrates the relationship between her Mississippi forebears and the blacks they interacted with. More than memoir, these stories grapple with the race question in America since the Civil War, suggesting that understanding comes from knowing one's own condition as well as the other's. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.--Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

July 1, 1998
In her latest book, this highly esteemed Mississippi novelist is like a good friend letting her hair down to tell family stories she was reluctant to share before. Her tone is as genial as a Mississippi summer is long as she talks about her husband's uncle who came to live with them during the last year of his life and whom she abandoned because dying was so disgraceful to her; and talks about two cousins living in an unsanctified but no less workable marriage; and talks about other people and incidents that have stewed in her consciousness over so many years. As a fiction writer, Douglas sees these family stories for their inherent drama; as a southerner, she releases some guilt about her family's race relations in the past; and as a nonfiction writer, she is as delectable a truth-teller as she is a "maker-upper." Admirers of southern fiction will find these gems as suitable to their fictional taste as a collection of Eudora Welty stories. ((Reviewed July 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)