On Agate Hill

by Lee Smith

  6. What do you make of the author’s choice to write a majority of the novel in journal entries and letters? How would the novel be different if she had chosen to tell the story using straight prose?

  7. In the September 22, 1873, letter to her sister, Agnes relays the story of how Molly first came to be accepted by her peers at Gatewood Academy (page 157). Why did the rest of the girls choose to accept Molly instead of shunning her after Ida and Adeline Brown made fun of her background? What does this say about girls and group mentality?

  8. In her May 3, 1874, journal entry, Mariah Snow writes (referring to women), “We lose our names as we lose our Youth, our Beauty, & our Lives” (page 163). What does this say about her character? About how women were treated in general at that time? How is that different from how women are treated now? Do you know women who feel the way Mariah does? Do you feel that way about your life?

  9. What do you think happened to Mary White?

  10. In the beginning of the section titled “Up on Bobcat,” Agnes writes in her “Final Impressions,” “I wonder if I could have done anything different, if I could perhaps have waited and chosen a less drastic course, and what would have happened then . . . but it is impossible to wrest a decision out of its time and place, and even now I cannot think what I should have done” (page 219). In your opinion, could things have been different? What are other possible outcomes? Would a different outcome make the story less or more interesting in your opinion?

  11. When Simon Black visits Molly in the mountains in February (page 241), Molly doesn’t discuss with Agnes what transpired between them. What do you suppose was said?

  12. After Jacky’s funeral, why do you think Molly asks BJ to take her to Icy Hinshaw’s cabin, and then leaves without saying a word? Later, she asks BJ to give Icy and her children her house, the one she shared with Jacky. She says, “take care of them, for they are Jacky’s. They are yours” (page 325). What exactly does she mean by this?

  13. Who do you believe killed Jacky (with the first shot in the stomach, not the second shot in his neck)? Why do you suppose BJ helped Molly cover up what really happened to Jacky?

  14. Discuss this quote: “love lives not in places nor even bodies but in the spaces between them, the long and lovely sweep of air and sky, and in the living heart and memory until that is gone too, and we are all wanderers, as we have always been, upon the earth” (page 328).

  15. What are the reasons behind Molly’s decision to go back to Agate Hill in the end? How does this illustrate the change in Molly from the beginning of her life to the end of it?

  16. Which character do you relate to the most in the book, and why?

  A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR

  There are so many narrative layers to your novel, including, of course, the rich historical material. How much research did you do in the writing of On Agate Hill? And what was the process? Did you do research first and then write or did you do research as you were writing?

  I’d never thought about writing a historical novel in my life. The only time I’d ever used history in my previous books was when I was writing about the lives of the older mountain women I was privileged to grow up among—lives I considered heroic and wrote about in novels such as Fair and Tender Ladies and Oral History.

  But then my husband and I moved into a very old house next to a Civil War cemetery in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where we found heart-breakingly short dates and “C.S.A.” carved into many of its mossy stones. I started walking my dogs in this cemetery at dusk, trying to imagine these lives. And I visited the county historical museum right down on the corner and its friendly curator, Dr. Ernest Dollar, a recent PhD from the Southern studies program down in Chapel Hill—a young man on fire with history. Ernie gave me a dusty diary kept by a young girl in boarding school in the 1870s. “You might be interested in this,” he said.

  But best of all was the old man who came knocking on our front door before we had even unpacked our stacked-up boxes. “Honey,” he rasped, wheezing and leaning on his cane, “Let me in. I’ve got to tell you a story about your house”—the words every novelist is dying to hear! It turned out to be a story about obsessive love, which in turn came to obsess me.

  So what was the next step?

  I started reading and couldn’t quit. I read for a couple of years, immersing myself in books, letters, diaries, and journals about the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. First it was a pleasure, then an addiction. I was especially fascinated to learn how many, many Southerners of all races and stations were refugees of one kind or another, displaced by the war. The roads were clogged. Everybody was on the move. Everybody was far from home. This sense of displacement resonated with me. It reminded me of an old gospel song I used to hear while I was growing up, “I am a pilgrim and a stranger, traveling o’er this wearisome land.”

  Finally I realized that I was going to write a novel.

  Talk a bit about Tuscany. At what point did she make her entrance? Did she introduce herself to you before Molly did?

  Tuscany is always with me, sort of an alter ego, I guess (I was once Miss Bituminous Coal). Some readers hate Tuscany because they think she is such a ditz, but I have to confess, I love her. Here, she and Molly have some character traits in common, I think. They are both spunky girls who make some bad choices, and they both come through hard times to a new understanding of their lives.

  But I put Tuscany in this book for another—and very important—reason, as well. As a founding fellow at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and a lifelong oral historian, I have always been struck by the haphazard, arbitrary nature of history. History doesn’t care who finds it, you know. It might just as well be Tuscany as, say, Arthur Schlesinger, or any other famous historian. And what we come to accept as historical truth—the official version—depends entirely on what information happens to come to light, and how: who finds it, who interprets it, how it is disseminated and publicized . . . and who knows how many boxes or artifacts and documents are sitting right now up under how many eaves, just waiting to be discovered by a carpenter? This idea has always fascinated me.

  There’s a heartbreaking ballad at the pivotal moment in the story. Did you write this ballad yourself?

  The ballad form comes naturally to me, perhaps because I grew up on ballads and stories. Sometimes I think that our sense of language is forever formed by how we first heard speech—by who was talking to us, or singing to us, and under what circumstances and how they sounded. My sense of narrative was formed by sitting out on the porch listening to stories and songs, often sung or told by somebody who loved me. So I am more of a storyteller than a writer, in a way, and On Agate Hill is more like a ballad than a book—it’s episodic; it’s tragic and violent; its themes are the classic ballad themes of love, loss, and betrayal; and there are various kinds of repetitions holding it together.

  That probably explains the intimate way the novel unfolds. But what inspired the moments of magic realism—Molly and her best friend see fairies, for instance; the farm animals kneel at Christmas; and Virgil and Old Bess fly away over the snow.

  Well, a novelist is like a magpie—you are always gathering up bright little bits of memory or lore or information. Over time this becomes a “habit of being,” to use Flannery O’Connor’s term. Sometimes you’re not even aware of it—but then when you need it, there it is. I didn’t consciously set out to write magic realism; those moments just happened while I was in the act of writing those scenes. If I think hard, though, I know where two of them came from: my best friend and I really did believe that we saw fairies in the woods when we were little girls, and there is an old Appalachian legend that all the farm animals kneel wherever they are, in the barn or the pasture, at midnight on Christmas Eve. As for Virgil and Old Bess, that was a complete surprise to me. I could see them rise up over the snow in my mind’s eye as they left Agate Hill. Months later, while I was visiting my son and his family in Nashville, I was amazed to pick up a book of plantation
history and read that the flying slave is a familiar motif—an obvious emblem of freedom—in slave narratives. So, go figure.

  How incredibly satisfying that must have been! Was that the most surprising thing that happened in the course of writing the book?

  It was one of the most surprising things that happened in the book—and a harbinger of things to come. Sometimes, if a novelist has done her homework (so she doesn’t have to break the flow by stopping to look up a date, for instance, or figure out what color somebody’s hair was back in chapter one), she gets very, very lucky: the characters really do take over, and the book takes on a thrilling life of its own, and all you have to do is hold on to your hat! Or your pen, or your computer, as the case might be. Just show up for work and wait with bated breath to find out what’s going to happen next. It’s like transcribing rather than writing. This has only happened to me twice before, but it happened here. I was astonished (and very moved) by the last part of the novel. I mean, I knew that Molly would return to Agate Hill, but I never suspected the turns that her life would take there, or even the very existence of Juney. He just appeared like a blessing in the end.

  As Molly took over, did you find yourself judging her or disagreeing with her actions? Or any of the other characters’, for that matter?

  Of course, there’s a part of me that is practically screaming, “Don’t do it, honey!” when she runs off with Jacky . . . that same part of me that desperately wanted her to marry Ben Valiant, such a fine young man, or even the more dubious Henderson Hanes, who could have at least offered her some measure of security, which she has never had. But Molly is off on a different journey, one that will take her from being a “ghost girl” hidden away in her cubbyhole, chronicling rather than participating in her own life, to a “real girl” who will finally “give all her heart” and “live as hard and love so much I will use myself all the way up like a candle.” It’s that old question, whether one should follow the head or the heart. Molly makes her own choices and takes control of her own life, for better or worse, a hard thing for a woman to do in those times, and I admire her for it. I’ve always been kind of a candle girl myself.

  Did you keep a journal while you were growing up? Do you keep one now?

  I did keep a little official diary, with a lock and key, when I was a child. Now I fill up notebook after notebook with not only my own experiences and observations but also with sketches, notes on whatever I’m reading, story ideas, place descriptions, lines of dialogue overheard in the line at the grocery store, whatever hits me. Lists, recipes, and phone numbers often appear in these pages, too. Obviously, I’m a born scribbler! So the diary format comes natural to me. And since I had steeped myself in diaries of the period, Molly’s more formal language came natural, too. I have always loved the diary form anyway, for the intimacy it immediately establishes with the reader and the instantaneous character development it affords. I love to read diaries as well as write them.

  Reviewers have compared On Agate Hill to Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, even to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! In what ways have these books informed or not informed your novel? Are there certain authors or books that have shaped and influenced you as a writer?

  Well, I’m honored by these comparisons. Actually I have never read Anne of Green Gables, but Absalom, Absalom! and Jane Eyre are touchstones in my life—books I have read and taught several times. I’d have to say that William Faulkner has been a major influence on my work, as he has on twentieth-century writing as a whole. In twenty-five major works, he gave us twenty-five different narrative strategies, opening up the form of the novel forever. I’m sure that my fascination with first-person voice derives from him—especially from As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, with their multiple narrators. And certainly his themes of race, loss, memory, place, and the importance of the past can be found here in On Agate Hill. As for Jane Eyre, one radio interviewer referred to my book as “Jane Eyre with sex”—I got a good laugh out of that, but had to admit it was not so far from the truth! There’s the boarding school section, and I suppose that Simon Black is a mysterious figure akin in some ways to Mr. Rochester. But Molly is very much her own girl and always has been, ever since she took pen in hand and wrote, “I am a spitfire and a burden.”

  Who’s got a hold of your pen now?

  Zelda Fitzgerald, for one. I’m researching a novella about her tragic, glamorous life right now, and I’ve got a country music star with another story waiting in the wings. I seem to be gravitating toward shorter fiction at the moment, and I’m just full of ideas, very stimulated by working in this different form for a while. So, stay tuned!

  LEE SMITH is the author of twelve novels as well as three collections of stories. Her previous novel, The Last Girls, was a New York Times bestseller as well as a co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, Smith lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Visit her Web site at www.leesmith.com.

  Other Algonquin Readers Round Table Novels

  Saving the World, a novel by Julia Alvarez

  * * *

  While Alma Huebner is researching a new novel, she discovers the true story of Isabel Sendales y Gómez, who embarked on a courageous sea voyage to rescue the New World from smallpox. The author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez captures the worlds of two women living two centuries apart but with surprisingly parallel fates.

  “Fresh and unusual, and thought-provokingly sensitive.” — The Boston Globe

  “Engrossing, expertly paced.” —People

  AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-558-2

  Water for Elephants, a novel by Sara Gruen

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  As a young man, Jacob Jankowski is tossed by fate onto a rickety train, home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Amid a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, Jacob becomes involved with Marlena, the beautiful young equestrian star; her husband, a charismatic but twisted animal trainer; and Rosie, an untrainable elephant who is the great gray hope for this third-rate show. Now in his nineties, Jacob at long last reveals the story of their unlikely yet powerful bonds, ones that nearly shatter them all.

  “[An] arresting new novel. . . . With a showman’s expert timing, [Gruen] saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Gritty, sensual and charged with dark secrets involving love, murder and a majestic, mute heroine.” —Parade

  AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-560-5

  The Ghost at the Table, a novel by Suzanne Berne

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  When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include her sister, Cynthia. But tension mounts between them as each struggles with a different version of the mysterious circumstances surrounding their mother’s death twenty-five years earlier.

  “Wholly engaging, the perfect spark for launching a rich conversation around your own table.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “A crash course in sibling rivalry.” —O: The Oprah Magazine

  AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-579-7

  Responsible Men, a novel by Edward Schwarzschild

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  When a divorced man from a family of mostly upstanding salesmen decides to change his less-than-honorable ways, things do not go exactly as planned. This is the story of three generations of men struggling to be good sons and good fathers in a world of big dreams and bigger temptations.

  “Marvelous. . . . It’s impossible to avoid fallin
g for Max.” —Entertainment Weekly

  “A compassionately and deftly told story.”

  —William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Irowneed and Roscoe

  AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-543-8

  Brave Enemies, a novel by Robert Morgan

  * * *

  Set during the Revolutionary War, Brave Enemies is the story of two people brought together by chance and the ravages of war. Alone and lost in the woods, sixteen-year-old Josie Summers accepts a young preacher’s invitation to assist in his itinerant ministry. When he’s kidnapped by British soldiers, Josie, disguised as a man, joins the militia in a desperate attempt to find him.

  “Readers of Morgan’s Brave Enemies. . . are unlikely ever to take their eyes off the page—or even take a breath.” —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Impressive. . . . Morgan deftly conveys the complex world views of people in the past.” —The Charlotte Observer

  AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-578-0