“The Fabled Earth” Fuses Fantasy and Southern History https://ift.tt/y7xNpWw
When I visited Cumberland Island with my wife in March 2025, the first thought I had when I stepped off the boat — beyond “Dear God, how could I forget bug spray?” — was “Someone should write a novel about this place.” A seven-mile, forty-five-minute ferry ride from St. Mary’s, Georgia, Cumberland Island looks and feels, to a writer, like a step back in time. Once inhabited by the Timucuan Indians, Cumberland Island is now a place where horses roam freely, where tourists can navigate the ruins of the Carnegie mansion, Dungeness, and where, if you believe it, magic still exists. Kimberly Brock’s novel The Fabled Earth, set in and around the island, uncovers that magic.
Alternating between 1932 and 1959, The Fabled Earth follows three women whose lives overlap in the summer of 1959, a time when race relations are tense, the Korean War is a recent memory, and a storm of the century looms over Cumberland. In 1932, Cleo Woodbine is the granddaughter of Dooley Woodbine, the first (fictional) artist-in-residence to the Carnegie family whose self-published book of stories has inspired her own artistic ambitions. Twenty-seven years later, she is the middle-aged, unofficial artist of the island known to locals as a witch, still caught up in a drowning accident from 1932 that took the lives of two of the island’s residents. Audrey Howell is a twenty-year-old widow, soon-to-be mother, and canny photographer who operates an inn. Frances Flood is a twenty-seven-year-old folklorist and aspiring academic whose newly-deceased mother was a prior acquaintance of Cleo. When their lives cross, they women uncover legends, and ghosts.
Brock skillfully blends folklore with realism, and I enjoyed deciding for myself how much of the magic was real and how much only fable. Cleo, for example, enjoys the company of a number of “tagalongs” — a girl, a fiddler, and a black dog, visible only to her — born of her grandfather’s stories. Audrey, meanwhile, experiments with photography as a way to enhance the ghost tours in the nearby town of Revery. Even by the end of the novel, when many of the book’s mysteries have been resolved, I felt torn between natural and supernatural explanations for the apparitions that appear in some of the photographs. Frances’s very visit to the island is at the behest of her deceased mother, and she searches the island for remnants of her mother’s past, and finds these remnants, and ghosts, in Cleo’s stories.
Yet folktales are not the only stories of interest in the novel, and The Fabled Earth reveals Southern history, as well. While reading, I continually found myself impressed by the extent to which the book reconstructs the rich, and controversial, history of the American South in the mid-twentieth century. The year 1959, for example, falls firmly within the so-called “Golden Age of Hollywood,” and true to that spirit, one of the characters operates a movie house in Revery. Brock also does not shy away from the ugliness of race relations in the years after Brown v. Board. Delicately yet unflinchingly, she uncovers the cruel realities of racism faced by Blacks and American Indians in the South. A scene of racially-based violence that occurs two thirds of the way through The Fabled Earth was, for me, one of the book’s most riveting and tragic moments. And without giving too much away about the book’s plot, it seems fair to point out that the year 1959 will forever go down in Cumberland Island history as the year Dungeness burned for the second time.
A novel like The Fabled Earth is difficult to categorize and perhaps even harder to criticize. It provides a snapshot of a quiet corner of Georgia history that, to this day, remains something of an enchantment. Flannery O’Connor may have been right when she called the South “Christ-haunted,” yet The Fabled Earth, with its seasoning of folktales and Germanic myths, shows the region is haunted in other ways, as well. Not all fairy tales, the book suggests, are love stories. And the ghosts of the South, it would seem, are not always holy. Yet for the sake of critique, I will make two points. First, to some extent, I felt that the strength of three strong female leads could have been even greater if their narrative voices had been more distinct. While Cleo’s and Audrey’s and Frances’s stories are unique and overlap beautifully, I felt at times like the voices of the characters blended together. In some ways, showing the intersection of the characters’ lives seems to be exactly what the novel intended; in others, I would have appreciated more nuance in each character’s interior monologue. Second, as niche as it may be, I also felt mild disappointment when I turned the last page and realized that, although many animals appear in the book — bobcats and horses, alligators and wild hogs, a menagerie of birds — the armadillo is not one of them. They live all over the island, and anyone with a boat ticket, a pair of eyes, and a healthy fear of leprosy can go and see them. I
These points notwithstanding, The Fabled Earth haunts in ways that few books can, for the ghosts of this book are our own stories, real and imagined, breathed to life by the magic of Cumberland Island. As Cleo, echoing her grandfather, tells a group of men gathered on a riverbank to hear the story of the siren Lorelei one fateful day in 1932, “All stories are ghost stories — our own ghosts.”
FICTION <a href="http://<p><span class=“dropcap”>RThe Fabled Earth
By Kimberly Brock
Harper Muse
Published October 1, 2024
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