SOURCE: “Kaye Gibbons: Her Full-Time Women,” in Southern Writers at Century's End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins, University Press of Kentucky, 1997, pp. 112-22.

[In the following essay, Lewis praises Gibbons's characterization in her novels and discusses some of Gibbons's memorable heroines.]

“I think the Southerner is a talker by nature,” said Eudora Welty in an interview twenty years ago, “but not only a talker—we are used to an audience. We are used to a listener and that does something to our narrative style” (Conversations 94).

Storytelling is a Southern tradition. In local stores, on porch steps, the storyteller has had an audience of family and neighbors, and through generations of storytelling, much of local custom, character, and mores has been retained. Southern writers are proud of their past and of their literary heritage. In a changed and changing South, writing from an increasingly confused and complex background of shifting social scene, they've held on hard to their roots and maintained their distinctiveness. Despite the merging of the cultures of the North and the South, Walker Percy said in 1972, “perhaps it is still possible to characterize the South as having a tradition which is more oriented toward history, toward the family, toward storytelling and toward tragedy” (Welty, Conversations 95).

Contemporary Southern writers of fiction have been criticized for ignoring changes in the evolving South, the urbanization, the homogenization, and the dissolution of family—that element on which so much Southern writing has leaned. They have been admonished for continuing to exploit the rural scene and presenting a disingenuous family image. In 1989, in a piece in The Nashville Scene titled “When Is Southern Literature Going to Get Real?” the author finds current writers Jill McCorkle, Bobbie Ann Mason, and others dated and unrealistic. He teases them for holding fast to an outdated perspective. But indeed there's been good reason for the Southern writer to keep a particular nostalgia and pride in the few regional differences that were strong enough to survive the outcome of the Civil War and the nationalism that followed. Though there's no longer the rural isolation of the past, there is a legacy of speech and custom, and the family bloodline still flows. But as Eudora Welty says, “now there are so many layers of life, so many blurrings, so many homogenous things together that you have to send a taproot down perhaps deeper” (Conversations 105).

There is a present flowering of Southern writers, perhaps a third generation Southern Literary Renascence that would include Allan Gurganus, Jill McCorkle, Randall Garrett Kenan, Lee Smith, and Gail Godwin. Among this third generation is Kaye Gibbons, a writer who has written five remarkable novels in ten years: Ellen Foster was published in 1987, followed by A Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams, and in 1993, Charms for the Easy Life. A fifth novel, Sights Unseen, was published in the fall of 1995: the story of a girl growing up with a mother who lives on the edge of madness. As in her other novels, Gibbons develops her characters with affection and humor, and, allowing us to share their intimate emotions, makes us feel an almost proprietary sympathy with them. With a vernacular authenticity that leads us to believe she didn't need to do her homework, she has presented us with stories and characters most definitely real, uncontrived, and of their time. She has given us, in particular, some memorable women.

From the frontier days, Southern women have shouldered rugged responsibilities. Since men are “generally a bad and incompetent unobservant pack,” women have tended to turn to each other for help, for good company, and for general local information. In A Cure for Dreams, even while favorable signs in prospective suitors are being looked for, “all this information was traded freely between women with daughters, like meringue secrets or geranium cuttings.”

Kaye Gibbons creates women with backbone. We see them as an unspoken community, for they recognize the needs and strengths they have in common and perforce. They are experienced in “the areas of loneliness, abandonment, betrayal, and other furious pursuits” (214), as the narrator of Charms for the Easy Life observes in her mother and grandmother. We come to know them as individuals, learning self-reliance the hard way, facing misfortune with ingenuity and grit. As Gibbons shows us in A Cure for Dreams, they never “glorify in tribulation” (6), but rather seek a way out or a way to cope.

Ellen Foster, in the novel with that title, is the first of Kaye Gibbons's heroines, and she is eleven years old. The straightforward first-person narrative, dramatic for what she's telling us, never garish in the telling, is a story of pain and abuse, a recounting of her meeting with one harrowing situation after another, but it's told by a survivor. From the first pages, opening with the line “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy” (1), we realize that Ellen is a remarkable, spunky little girl. Because her voice rings so true and because she's so clearheaded and honest and so funny to boot, we have absolute faith that she will find a way out of her troubles.

Ellen's brutal, drunken father is accountable for the suicide of her invalid mother. Orphaned soon after by his death from drink, Ellen must find a way of life for herself. Always practical, she realizes that in order to survive she must find herself a family. So she resolutely searches until at last she finds the right one, a kindly foster family from which she takes her last name. From the blessed comfort of her new home, where she tells us “I had me a egg sandwich for breakfast, mayonnaise on both sides. And I may fix me another one for lunch” (2), we are taken through her trials and are increasingly drawn to this plucky heroine.

After her father's death and a brief, happy stay with a sympathetic art teacher, she's placed by the court with her “mama's mama,” a demented old woman who blames Ellen for her daughter's death. Having been through the heart-wrenching trauma of seeing her mother die, Ellen is then witness to her grandmother's death. She describes these two events to us in her own vivid but unembellished words. As she lies beside her mother, who has taken a fatal number of pills, she says “My heart can be the one that beats. And hers has stopped” (10). Staying with her declining grandmother, she's determined to keep the vindictive old woman alive. “I tried to make her keep breathing and when she stopped I blew air in her like I should have. She did not live but at least I did not slip into a dream beside her. I just stood by the bed and looked at her dead with her face pleasant now to trick Jesus” (79–80).

For a while she lives with her aunt and cousin, a spoiled and trivial pair who exclude her from their closely woven lives. She sees them clearly for what they are and knowing she's unwanted tells herself she'll treat their home as if it were a hotel. “If a girl was staying at my house that I did not want there, I certainly would be pleased as punch if she announced one night at supper that you will only be seeing me at meal times unless we happen to pass each other on the way to the toilet” (96).

Ellen is sensible and smart. She's smart enough to recognize the absurdity of the school psychologist's questions during their weekly sessions. Exasperated, she says “I do not plan to discuss chickenshit with you” (89). She's smart enough to search out the new mama she needs. “I looked her over plenty good too before I decided she was a keeper” (95).

And, in one of the most poignant parts of the story, her intelligence leads her to become aware of the racial prejudice she'd harbored in her relationship with her black friend, Starletta. In the early days, even though she likes Starletta and is grateful for her family's kindness, she cannot bring herself to eat with them. “No matter how good it looks to you it is still a colored biscuit” (32). By the end of the story, she realizes from her own experiences that racism led her to feel superior. Starletta has come to spend the weekend with Ellen and her new family. Resting together before supper, Ellen muses, “I always thought I was special because I was white. … When I thought about you I always felt glad for myself. And now I don't know why. I really don't” (125).

Kaye Gibbons's accomplishment in creating this totally believable and endearing character was an earnest of things to come. She showed us in her first novel that she has the writer's gift Eudora Welty talks of: “A writer's got to be able to live inside all characters: male, female, old, young. To live inside any other person is the jump.”

Writing about Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda stories, Gibbons says that Porter's language “pulls the reader vertically towards submerged meanings and horizontally backward through time and memories.” In all her novels, Gibbons shows a deft hand in juggling past and present, and in her second novel, A Virtuous Woman, we see how artful she is. Here there are two narrators: Ruby, who is dying of lung cancer, and her husband, Jack Stokes. In their plain language, the alternating narrative tells their story, before and after Ruby's death. Through Ruby's voice, as she prepares to die, and Jack's as he mourns her, we get to know them, their views of themselves and of each other. Through each voice recalling the same scenes, their sweet love story unfolds. We're caught up in the most important moments of their lives and the people central to them—a memorable cast of characters including a handful of really nasty ones. The proverb given us in the epigraph proclaims that the price of a virtuous woman is far above rubies. Ruby is indeed priceless. “Strength and dignity are her clothing” (Proverbs 31:10–25).

She is four months dead when the novel opens, and Jack tells us he's already finished the food she prepared and froze for him in her last months, the gesture of a strong as well as a virtuous woman: “I can't do much” (7), she tells us in her fragile state, “but I can do something. There's not a whole lot a woman can do from the grave” (7). Like other women in Kaye Gibbons's novels, she survived hard times by her own strength. “I know now,” she tells us, “that this world is built up on strong women, built up and kept up by them, too, them kneeling, stooping, pulling, bending and rising up when they need to go and do what needs to be done” (13).

Jack, a childlike man with a sweet nature who introduces himself always as “Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes—stokes the fire, stokes the stove, stokes the fiery furnace of hell!” (3) is forty, twice Ruby's age, when they marry. Their love, based on a need for one another, deepens during a happy though childless marriage. Ruby knows she's “every bit of his experience” but she herself has already suffered from a disastrous match. We learn that at eighteen, babied by her fairly prosperous family, “lonesome and bored to tears” (25), she elopes with one of her father's migrant workers, a shiftless and surly man who degrades her and finally dies after a knife fight. During that brief marriage, Ruby works as a housemaid for the family who has hired her husband as a farm laborer. Here, where she is both prized and despised as coming from a higher social class than theirs, we meet the other characters central to the story. Tiny Fran, one of Gibbons's few unpleasant women, is the daughter of the household. Fat, pregnant, and unmarried when we meet her, spoiled and “mad at the whole world” (43), she is married off to one of her father's tenant farmers who takes her in exchange for the promise of forty-eight acres of good land. Her illegitimate son is a monstrous creation, a malicious rapist and woman beater who hangs Ruby's mule. The other child, neglected by Tiny Fran, turns to Ruby and Jack for nurturing, and becomes a treasure in their childless marriage.

The narrators are sympathetic people. We are attracted to them and touched by their hardships. They are plain country people; their speech rings of rural North Carolina, their metaphor is of the familiar. They are “versed in country things,” as Frost puts it. Jack's mama, he says, “was a tough, hard woman, skin like a cat's tongue” (15). Tiny Fran, “getting into her feedsack of a bathing suit must've been like cramming mud into a glove” (100). Softened by love, Jack says, “I knew the sound of Ruby crying for babies the way I know a robin's call, the same way I know the sparrow's” (103).

Gibbons's characters have their own verbal idiosyncrasies, but much of their talk is regional folk speech familiar to anyone who has lived in the South, especially the rural South. Gibbons accustoms us early on to the cadences, peculiar rhythms, phrases, and provincialisms of her characters. The phrase “used to” replaces “once” or “at one time”; Jack says “used to he used to go sit at the store” (81) and “used to I wouldn't turn my hand over for green peas” (3). “Might could” or “might would” is often used instead of “might be able”; “I might could try for this girl” (20); “she might would could've joined the 4H” (62). We hear Jack say, “I was so tired I thought I might liable not to be able to …” (79) and “It wasn't anybody else there I gave a happy hurrah about” (80).

Her characters' speech is in no way contrived. It is natural and right. “When it comes to hearing and replicating the way people speak, Kaye Gibbons has perfect pitch,” writes Anne Tyler on the cover of A Cure for Dreams, and other reviewers have noted her infallible ear. It is the voices of her characters that make them come alive.

A Cure for Dreams weaves a complex pattern of relationships, but the firm structure and the intimacy of scene and characters keep it within our grasp. We're quickly pulled into the lives of four generations of women, closely bonded by blood and by the very fact of their being women. Here, stronger than ever, is a feeling of party spirit and freemasonry.

Women's voices reverberate in all of Kaye Gibbons's novels and on the opening page of A Cure for Dreams, Marjorie, the first narrator, introduces us to her mother, Betty Davies Randolph, who has recently “died in a chair talking, chattering like a string-pull doll” (1). Marjorie says, “I had spent my life listening to her, sometimes all day, which often was my pleasure during snow and long rains—Talking was my mother's life” (1).

We hear Betty's voice comfortably narrating the family history to Marjorie, beginning with her grandmother, Bridget O'Cadhain, who, with her family, had come from Galway to Kentucky, to start farm life. Bridget's daughter, Lottie, tired of her meager surroundings, “perched on ready, hoping for a marriage proposal” (10), at sixteen marries a Welsh Quaker, Charles Davies, and they move to North Carolina. Charles is an ambitious man whose life becomes more and more obsessively centered on work in his farm and gristmill. He had expected his bride to share in the labor, but Lottie was not given to that traditional female involvement; she had married him for “love and rest” (13) and longed for babies. By the time Betty is born, Lottie has grown indifferent to Charles, and with no more babies coming, mother and daughter become increasingly close companions, sharing a life that hardly includes the driven husband.

Life at home being less than satisfactory, Lottie's energies, which are real and formidable, go into finding her own community, with little Betty always at her side, “her goal being to organize a gang of women for a habitual social hour” (30). These are lively meetings, full of gossip, politics, and gambling (this she tries to hide from Charles, who “hated gambling or anything at all involving the luck of the draw” [32]), and here we meet the women of Milk Farm Road. Betty tells us that her mother “remade herself into the Queen Bee, more or less organizing life through knowing everything” (100). She knows every household inside out and she dispenses help and advice to the point of officiousness, the justification for meddling being “anytime somebody's not looking after themselves it becomes your business” (97). But she is sagacious, sound, and of good heart, and her intimate and thorough familiarity with these neighbor women enables her to help them in extraordinary circumstances. She “knew the varying pitches of wives' wails” (43), and in one instance by hearing the cry of a woman whose husband has been murdered and by closely observing the domestic scene, she finds clues—a pie with one piece cut, a row of uncharacteristically messy stitches in a quilt the woman is making, the absence of burrs or dandelion seedwings from her cotton stockings—which lead her to deduce that the deed was done by the woman herself. Since the deputy sheriff investigating the crime has missed all these details and since the husband “was such a sonofabitch” (46), it's clear to Lottie that his wife had ample and justifiable reason to rid herself of a thoroughly bad lot.

Lottie is capable of keeping her own business to herself, of protecting herself from the nosiness of others. Her husband, Charles, undone in the Depression years by his failing farm and unsatisfied obsession with success, walks into the river and drowns himself. When a curious neighbor asks her how he was found, she replies, “Charles was discovered upside down, straight upside down on his head with the river rocks on either side, like bookends” (83). To satisfy the inquisitive questions of her Kentucky relatives, she creates a moving story of her husband losing his life while pulling a tramp from the path of a speeding train.

Strong as is her attachment to her mother, young Betty hankers to leave the confining boundaries of Milk Farm Road and see more of the world. She's encouraged by Trudy Woodlief, an exotic newcomer from Baton Rouge, introduced to us “with one leg high up on a bureau, smoking a cigarette and shaving her legs with lotion and a straight razor” (56). Trudy counsels Betty to leave her mother and Milk Farm Road, if that's what she wants, or to stop whining. Betty does have a try at the outside world. She gets as far as Richmond, Virginia, where an unhappy love affair sends her back home. Here on Milk Farm Road she marries and stays and talks. The last line of the novel is her daughter Marjorie's infant dream-memory of the moments after her birth. “But I wasn't sleeping, not for the sound of the women talking” (171).

Gibbons is increasingly adroit at handling time and place. In the stretch of years covered in A Cure for Dreams, there is no leap or disconnection; the conversational narrative transports us effortlessly from present to past and back again; the anecdotal style elucidates the past and introduces secondary characters.

Backgrounds become progressively more distinct in the novels, but though stage and scene are given in more detail, they are given only as needed for the development of the protagonists. Physical descriptions are spare—an occasional glance of green eyes, fresh lavender plaited into a braid of hair, a new dress with a row of lace at the throat—but each character is as vivid as if marked by a cicatrix.

In Ellen Foster, where the narrative is intensely inward, the time and place of the story are relatively unimportant. Landmarks have been sketched in to help us follow Ellen's journey from her unhappy parents' house to the clean brick house which is her home with her new mama and family and the setting for her new life. On the way to church, we pass houses and barns; then after going through “colored town,” we see white houses and yards, but our concentration is on what happens to the small central figure.

In the works that follow we're made more aware of background (fields, farms, rural landscape, the houses on Milk Farm Road), and of the times when events take place. In A Cure for Dreams, “homes were in the grip of Mr. Hoover and his Depression” (30). Charms for the Easy Life brings us into the Second World War, when our heroines volunteer in a veterans' hospital, and we're given background details such as jitterbugging being outlawed on the Duke campus (“not so much for moral reasons as because of the numbers of students landing in the infirmary with dislocated shoulders” [199]).

These particulars are not gratuitous or unimportant. We need them for the development of the stories and characters. Perhaps it is the Southern storyteller's inherited practice of honing and editing to please the listener's ear that has given Kaye Gibbons her skill in economy and structure. Even in Ellen Foster, she avoids the mistake made so often by writers of putting into their first novels everything they've ever seen, heard, or observed. Gibbons is never wasteful or extravagant. Her characters are always in prime focus: above all, the women and the voices of those women.

Admittedly there are some sympathetic men in these novels, and when a good man does show up he's recognized as such and appreciated with good grace. Jack Stokes in A Virtuous Woman has great appeal; Charlie Nutter, a figure in Charms for the Easy Life, is a winner; and we have every reason to believe that Margaret, the narrator of the latter story, has chosen well in Tom Hawkings. (He is approved by Margaret's grandmother, Charlie Kate, one of Kaye Gibbons's most astute protagonists.) But on the whole, men are an inferior breed. Ellen Foster's daddy was “a mistake for a person” (49). Men are represented as an unpromising lot, just by their nature, as we see in the deputy sheriff in A Cure for Dreams, whose ineptitude “had more to do with the fact that he was a full-time male than it did with the fact that he was merely part-time deputy and neither bright nor curious” (46).

Intelligence and curiosity are, on the other hand, qualities we find in all Gibbons's central women figures, who are certainly reflections of herself, for as Eudora Welty remarks in One Writer's Beginnings: “of course any writer is in part all of his characters. How otherwise would they be known to him, occur to him, become what they are?” (101).

These women, like their creator, are smart, alert, and literate, and their literary interests and intellectual curiosity are made to seem as credible as their speech. Ellen Foster tells us: “I told the library teacher I wanted to read everything of some count so she made me a list. That was two years ago and I'm up to the Brontë sisters now” (9). She is excited by the bookmobile, and she spends secret hours with the little plastic microscope she bought and presented to herself for Christmas. Enthralled with what she sees on the slides, she feels she “could stay excited looking at live specimens day in and day out” (104). In A Cure for Dreams, the narrator, Betty, “had hit the first grade running and moved right on through like I was born to go to school” (51). Margaret, in Charms for the Easy Life, spends much of her time in the two years after high school reading Sophocles, Euripides, Homer, and Aeschylus. It is her grandmother Charlie Kate's wonderful intelligence, as well as her healing powers and charismatic nature, that draws Margaret to her. “I became fascinated with her mind, enamored of her muscular soul” (46).

Charms for the Easy Life presents us with three generations of smart, strong-willed women: Margaret, the narrator; her mother, Sophia; and Sophia's mother, Charlie Kate, a character I'd match against any of the heroines I've admired in recent years. They are a vivid threesome, linked by blood and by their passionate natures. In the case of Charlie Kate and Sophia, the bond is made stronger when the men they have unwisely chosen, one way or another, leave them.

Charlie Kate, at twenty an accomplished and popular midwife, marries a man nowhere near her in spirit or intelligence and in 1910, moves with him and their daughter, Sophia, to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she becomes a curer of ills and a campaigner for good health and hygiene. When her husband leaves her, she has already established a successful practice “with sick people coming forth like the loaves and the fishes” (22). Sophia is her constant companion until she too marries a man far beneath her, handsome but a cad. Their child, Margaret, realizes, when her father dies, that it is not much of a loss. “I didn't think I'd have less of a life with him gone. I know my mother and I would have more” (49). Charlie Kate, who had so disapproved her daughter's bad choice in marrying that she refused to set foot in their house until begged to, on his death moves in with daughter and granddaughter, and their life together is the heart of the story. They are possessed of indomitable spirit and very much aware of their strength as women. As Margaret tells us, “If my grandmother could've populated the world, all the people would've been women” (93).

Charlie Kate's reputation as a self-made doctor continues to grow. Her genius is recognized by licensed medical doctors as well as by her patients, and she's proud of the fact that her fame has reached as far as the Outer Banks, where a leper hears of her healing accomplishments and walks a hundred miles to seek her help.

On her visits to the sick, Sophia and Margaret are her assistants, helping with every kind of grizzly operation; while at home, their daily life is occupied with voracious reading. “When a good book was in the house, the place fairly vibrated” (116). They approach reading with the vigor and passion with which they tackle everything. Margaret tells us that Charlie Kate “would sit for hours and contemplate the disappearance of the opening narrator in Madame Bovary with the same intensity with which she would line up a patient's symptoms and then labor over a diagnosis” (117). We don't wonder that Margaret can't bear the thought of leaving home to attend one of the fine colleges her school principal has proposed for her.

Charlie Kate is part of a tradition in the South of women healers whose cures and prescriptions are passed down from one generation to the next. In reading about North Carolina folkways and folk medicine, I've discovered that in some cases a certain amount of wizardry would seem to make the prescription questionable. A great deal of common sense, however, is usually behind these cures, plus intelligence and practicality. In a widely used volume called Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man's Friend, published in 1830 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the author, John C. Gunn, thanked God for having “stored our mountains, fields, and meadows with simples [medicinal plants] for healing our diseases” (15). Practical sense and economic necessity suggested the use of things at hand in the kitchen or garden, so remedies included local wild and cultivated plants, herbs, barks, and animals. One learns that sassafras bark or root thins the blood and prevents chills and fevers. Sage or horehound tea is good for general sickness, including colds, and bloodroot soaked in whiskey is used for liver trouble.

In her early days of healing, Charlie Kate refers to Gunn's medical manual and continues to increase her knowledge by keeping up to date with legitimate medical practitioners. “She refused to cross over the line from natural medicine into black magic, although, in many cases, if she had not combined useless folk remedies with treatments she judged to be therapeutic, her uneducated and overly superstitious patients would not have trusted her” (47). But although she's disdainful of voodoo and quackery and shows rationality and wisdom in her dealings with her patients, her prize possession is the charm given to her years ago by a lynching victim whom she had cut down and revived from near death. It is “the hind foot of a white graveyard rabbit caught at midnight, under the full moon, by a cross-eyed Negro woman who had been married seven times” (19). This is the talisman Charlie Kate has saved so many years and presents to her granddaughter, Margaret, to give to the man she loves (hence the book's title, Charms for the Easy Life).

The force behind all good writers remains the urgency to communicate. Doris Betts has said, “I write because I have stories I don't want to die with.” Certainly one feels, reading Kaye Gibbons, that her stories had to be told, her characters born. One recognizes her unfailing ear, her dazzling control of the passage of time. However, in the increasing rewards of rereading, a conscious probing fails to reveal the sleight of hand that produced these works: the translation of her talents from the inside of her head to the printed page remains a mystery. Even gazing hard at a painting by Vermeer, it's difficult to believe that these seemingly life-size portraits are contained within a canvas scarcely twelve inches square. With similar wizardry, Gibbons, in a condensed number of pages, sweeps us into the lives of her ordinary people, and they become living and three dimensional as she creates for us not only their present world but the past that has made them what they are.

Eudora Welty, in One Writer's Beginnings, says,

It is our inward journey that leads us through time—forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember: remembering, we discover: and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

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It is the expression of Kaye Gibbons's inward journey that helps to explain the distinctive accomplishments of her fiction.