Marjorie Hudson on Repressed History in “Indigo Field” https://ift.tt/HVhZ9FW
Marjorie Hudson’s debut novel, Indigo Field, is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind. Set in rural North Carolina, the novel follows multiple characters – pitch-perfect voices that struggle with tragedy while navigating the complexities of race, class, and identity in the American South. The novel opens with an arboreal chorus, the native gooley pines that are long-living witnesses to everything that has passed beneath them. And like the novel’s looming multitude of convergences, their spring pollen is unbound, released to touch everything and everyone.
Hudson is the award-winning author of Accidental Birds of the Carolinas (stories) and Searching for Virginia Dare (history/travelogue). Her work has appeared in Garden & Gun, American Land Forum, Wildlife in North Carolina, Our State Magazine, and North Carolina Literary Review, among others. She was Features Editor of National Parks Magazine and Copyediting Chief at Algonquin Books, and earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives on a century farm in North Carolina, where she “mentors writers and reads poetry to trees.”
I recently spoke with Marjorie over email about creating the thick complicated world of Indigo Field and about her long and rich writing career.
Indigo Field is first and foremost about place with a capital P. How did you come upon the idea to distill so much emotion and history into such a small piece of land? The Field of Secrets…and those omniscient gooley pines.
The emotional connection to place comes from my love of where I live – on a few acres surrounded by an old family farm in central North Carolina, with rolling hills and pine forests and open fields. I’ve observed the natural life of plants and wildlife and birds here for more than thirty years. It’s in my blood. It’s a spiritual connection and it restores my soul. The pines here are important citizens of the landscape. I’ve witnessed clear-cuts and read poems to stands of trees. I speak to trees almost every day. I think of the novel style as “mystical realism” – a style that allows for the palpable sense of connection to the land around me infused by spirit and a sense of ancestors. It’s also the setting for all the dramas and ups and downs of my life, and the place I go to for comfort when things seem dire. So, I am inviting readers into my life in this novel, in a way. The land here makes me incandescently happy every day. It’s also my comfort place. And the place where I dream my fictions.
I started writing the novel during a time when there were signs that development was heading our way, and there was talk of clear-cutting the family land and dividing the estate. There’s an elegiac feeling in the novel, I think; it’s a love letter to the land and a eulogy for it as well. Fortunately, the land around us remains a beautiful haven, even though many things have changed.
There’s a collision of worlds that sets the novel in motion – the moment Randolph Jefferson Lee (a loaded name), the retired colonel from the luxury retirement community, literally runs into the car of Miss Reba, an elderly Black woman. Collision – I went to the physics definition – “an event in which two or more bodies exert forces on each other in a relatively short time.” Can you talk about all the collisions that are going on in this novel?
Yes, it’s a loaded name. Many of the names are cues to deeper meaning. And yes, there are dramatic collisions in the story line – I wanted to write a big dramatic story. There’s a near-collision between Miss Reba and the man who murdered her niece when she brings a gun to court, planning to kill him. There are also collisions and near-collisions between Miss Reba and the young teenage white boy she takes into her home – she doesn’t like him being there, his presence offends her so deeply, his habits, his very existence, his foolishness, his blood line – so she cracks on him constantly. Then there are collisions between the colonel and his thirty-something son Jeff – both are yearning for a chance to get past their history, but without Anne there as a softening influence, they inevitably fight, and it’s the kind of damaging fight that only fathers and sons can have, a fight that tilts toward mutual destruction. There are also more subtle collisions between the rising history of the past and the present manifestations, between the spirits and tricksters who own the field and the newcomers who aim to dig up its secrets.
This is a choral novel. Did you have a sense of the characters before you started, a sense of who would need to do the telling, or did they develop as you wrote?
I love that term! I knew there would be three families from the start – the single mom who struggles to run a goat dairy and raise a boy, the elderly Black neighbor who keeps deep family secrets, the colonel newcomer who knows nothing about his life or his new world, and lives inside a flawed and narcissistic vision of self.
In my first draft I had a big literary voice that kept distance from each character, but I ditched most of that for the more intimate and flexible mix of distant to close third person, which allows subtle language differences and differences in tone between the characters. Rand’s story is told with a more sardonic tone at times – he’s disconnected from his own life in a way, so it’s a little fun to judge him. Reba’s voice emerged in two ways, the close third, but also the powerful first-person voice for out-loud storytelling to spirits. This was a strategy for allowing her to keep secrets while also telling them, and to keep from mediating her past, her deepest self, with an external narrator governed by the white literary conventions of narration. My idea was that “first person out loud” gives a solid place for her to stand and speak her truth, which is the warm center of the novel. Of course, then, that white boy TJ spies on her and his reactions mediate reader reactions and allow for humor and perhaps readers’ awareness of their own confusion and stereotyping.
And then of course there are the trees. I wanted them to have a voice as well, to be characters in their own right. I think the wisdom they impart from time to time through summary is essential. That’s the remnant of the original big literary omniscient voice I was playing with, but the trees had more knowledge of the situation, the big picture, than I had.
What about your earlier work on Searching for Virginia Dare and the lost colony of Roanoke Island. Did that inform your choice to use an archeological unearthing of the dark past that happens in Indigo Field?
About ten years after I began writing Indigo Field, I set it aside to work on Searching for Virginia Dare, which ended up being my first book. I visited archeology sites, interviewed archeologists and historians about their work, and read primary source materials about first English contact with Indigenous people. I’d already studied the early 1700s and the time of the Tuscarora War for a different project, but this new research gave me more of a sense of the movements and shifts in tribal life from the start of English presence in the New World in the 1580s. The tribal world was vivid, beautiful, precious, and particular, and my fascination with it began to work its way more deeply into the novel, accessed through Reba’s dual identity and her storytelling.
I love the world that lives under our feet. Archeology is a great metaphor for uncovering the living world of history our lives are based on, and, in the novel, it helps expose the differences between how conventional wisdom and research see history as “other” and how Miss Reba would see it as her own story. It’s also a way of communing with the dead, though certainly not how Miss Reba would.
That shape shifter and trickster, grief, is also at the core of this novel. Can you talk about how this emotion finds expression through each of the central characters and how you found the voice of grief unique to each of them?
The colonel reacts like a trapped animal to the sudden, surprising news of his wife’s death at first – he wants to sue the hospital. Then, as the world turns and funeral rituals play out, he goes into a kind of stunned disbelief, as if he’s had a physical blow, a concussion. Small things set off his memory and pain. The smell of his wife’s clothes. The name of her perfume: Happy. He’s even more trapped in his privileged world than before, but now he’s completely isolated and increasingly aware that he made his wife’s life difficult, so guilt seeps poison into the empty days. When he runs into problems, he hears his wife’s voice in his ear cajoling, confronting, truth-telling, a living thing that he can no longer block out. He attempts to escape to the mountains, but there deeper griefs, the losses of his childhood, rise to greet him. Back home, he realizes he does have company – his wife’s caged birds need looking after. He begins talking to the birds. And they talk back. They forge a tentative affection, a strange feathered family, together. He wonders if birds grieve. I know they do. I looked it up to make sure.
For Miss Reba, the grief of losing her beloved niece is a sharp blade, honed with a fiery sense of injustice, a surging need for vengeance. She feeds off her rage; it protects her from the gaping dark hole that is her deepest losses. Spirits begin to speak to her – just the way Rand’s wife’s voice speaks to him – making certain demands, urging her toward vengeance, then asking for stories of the past. It’s the voice of Danielle that sets her on a path of processing grief through storytelling and truth-telling.
Jolene Blake keeps the banked coals of the loss of her husband ten years ago alive by talking to him from time to time, remembering, and through allowing desire to rise in her body. Grief never ends. It follows her like a hungry dog.
Can you talk about the unique perspective of being a relative outsider brought to this work? What impressed you most about the region when you moved there?
When I moved to the North Carolina countryside, I instantly fell in love with it. I was home. Just as travel writers have their skin prickle with vivid awareness on their adventures, I was swept up in the new world here, surrounded by nature and wild birdcall, charmed by voices and the Southern penchant for dramatic storytelling. Like an explorer on a new planet, I saw the big picture in small things. I might have taken the musical accents of Southerners for granted if I’d grown up with them. I felt I could see the big picture as from a distance, the shapes and separations of communities as I traveled between and among them, not particularly identifying with any single clan. That gave me a distance that perhaps born Southerners would not have from the work, nor would they want it. I had a different prism, the prism of hyper-awareness, trying to read people and places without context of experience. Like Henry James advises, I became someone on whom nothing was lost.
I think of the dissension that has arisen around American Dirt’s Jeanine Cummins, essentially about who is Latina enough to tell a story about the Latin American migrant experience. The story of a grieving Black woman drives Indigo Field—did you hesitate in taking on a Black woman’s story? And have you experienced any negativity around doing so?
I think when you study the Cummins controversy, the sparking complaint was that her book was getting huge amounts of attention and money, whereas other Latina writers who addressed similar subjects or who might personally live more closely to dire experience got very little. That’s a serious problem, but it’s a problem of who owns the economy of publishing, not of the writer’s choices in creative expression.
Regarding Miss Reba: Toni Morrison says you must write what you’re called to write. I write about what bothers me and what delights me. I’ve been working on this project for 30 years. I learned that what white people know about Southern history is very different from what Black people know. It bothered me, so I did something about it. That was a lot of the impetus for writing Miss Reba’s story.
I did a lot of soul searching about how to handle Miss Reba’s voice. Miss Reba is not “the Other” to me. I was in a position to lift up her story. She IS the story. As one whose life bridges different worlds, I felt I was in the unique position to help her tell the story.
I have three guidelines: exploring characters whose culture does not seem aligned with mine must be done with respect, with empathy, and with accuracy. But I use that rule for all of my characters. If you look closely, none of my characters are much like me. It’s part of what fiction writing is all about.
So far, I have not been criticized for including Black and Indigenous people in this novel. If by a fluke of fate or luck the book gets wide attention, I could hear this kind of criticism. I welcome the conversation.
Can you talk about your writing path? How did you learn to write and in particular the labor of love that was writing this book.
Like most writers, I loved to read growing up. I admired authors. I had a crush on Thomas Wolfe. That grew into a full-blown love affair with beautiful writing. I subconsciously believed that you had to be a man to be a writer. Those were the examples before me most of the time. Not having any idea that a creative writing career was available to me, I studied journalism, got a magazine job where from time to time I could veer off into lyrical description of nature. I wrote poetry on the side.
Moving South, learning history, reading Southern literature, these were the portals that made me want to turn to writing fiction myself. I had some early success with short stories – I about had a heart attack when Lois Rosenthal (of Story magazine) left a message on my answering machine.
I had a different novel draft that didn’t quite find an agent. I decided to write something else. I had a vision of a novel that would express all the things I loved and wanted to express about my new world – the secrets beneath the surfaces, the repressed history. My problem was I was fascinated with creating three different worlds that did not intersect. Plot requires intersection. So, I had a lot to learn. And many, many revisions.
I had no idea how hard it would be to complete this novel. But the story showed up in my sleep and I kept coming back to it. I think my combination of pride and stubbornness and willingness to take punishment were all required of me. It was character-building in more ways than one.
I may eventually be forced to become a Buddhist. I think I’m heading that way.
You can find Marjorie Hudson at several upcoming North Carolina events. For more information and appearances, visit her website.
Indigo Field
By Marjorie Hudson
Regal House Publishing
Published March 14, 2023
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