Although a work of fiction, this book was inspired by events surrounding Nova Scotia’s Goler Clan. Some of the dialogue during the trial in the final chapter is taken from transcripts I found in On South Mountain—The Dark Secrets of the Goler Clan, by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths. I want to acknowledge my appreciation to Cruise and Griffiths for their book.
The sermons at the beginning of various chapters came, in some cases, solely from my imagination. Others are direct quotes. The sermon quote by Reverend Charles G. Finney is taken from an article published in The Oberlin Evangelist, September 29, 1852, entitled “The Salvation of Sinners Impossible,” and the one at the beginning of Chapter Ten (although attributed in the text to the fictional Reverend Joshua Cotton), is excerpted from another Finney article in the same publication, entitled, “The Wrath of God Against Those Who Withstand His Truth,” December 9, 1857. The quote at the beginning of Chapter Seven comes from a sermon delivered by Reverend Sam P. Jones on August 2, 1885, at a camp-meeting near Cincinnati, Ohio. The poem quoted at the beginning of Chapter Fourteen is excerpted from “Tom Gray’s Dream,” written by Illinois poet Retta M. Brown. The quote at the beginning of Chapter Nineteen is excerpted from a pamphlet first published in 1960 by Herbert W. Armstrong, The Ten Commandments.
Lastly, I thank my husband, Ron, because every time I get lost in the dark woods he finds me and leads me home.
Lauren B. Davis on
the Story Behind the Novel
I write to figure out what I think about things and to attempt to find meaning. I try to find metaphors through which to explore my feelings about what obsesses me. One of the things I’ve been troubled by in the past few years is the increasing polarization I see around me. It pops up in any number of places—religion, politics (both local and international), public rhetoric, the media, and the like. We don’t have to look far for examples—perhaps no farther than our prisons, or the
town next door, or even our own families.
As I pondered these ever-widening gaps, a story from my past kept rising to the surface. I lived in Nova Scotia for a brief time in the early 1970s. While there, I heard stories about a community based on a nearby mountain. They were terrible stories, involving incest, aborted and deformed babies, prostitution, and so forth. I told myself that these dreadful tales couldn’t be true. I believed, naïvely, that if they were true, surely someone would have done something. Then, a decade later, one of the children of the Goler Clan told her story of generational abuse to a teacher. This teacher came from another province and hadn’t been in Nova Scotia very long. She in turn called an RCMP officer who was also new to the community. They insisted an investigation begin, and eventually many of the clan’s adult members were put in jail and the children placed in foster care.
I was horrified, but also mystified. If all those rumours had been true, why had it taken so long for someone to intervene? The answer seemed to be that the people who lived on the mountain had, for generations, been considered “Those People,” as in “What do you expect from those people?” The residents of the prosperous Annapolis Valley nearby, who lived in communities founded on Puritanical religious principles hundreds of years earlier, believed their neighbours were so “Other” as to be beyond the pale.
The extreme marginalization of the community and the terrible repercussions of ostracism haunted me. The episode seemed the perfect framework for exploring how such ordinary people could do such dreadful things, or permit such dreadful things to continue.
I have had several instances in my own life of feeling like the “Other.” Although I explore the theme more personally in my previous novel, The Stubborn Season, in which a young girl battles the tyranny of living with a mentally ill mother during the Great Depression, the character of Ivy Evans in Our Daily Bread is based on some of my own experiences with marginalization. My family, afflicted by mental illness and alcoholism, was going through a rough time the summer I was nine. I was an only child, adopted, bookish and prone to making up stories, all of which helped to make me an outsider in the eyes of some of my peers. That summer, a lady who owned a little antiques shop near my house let me hang around the store. I’m sure she never knew how much that meant to me. It was a refuge from loneliness and bullying, and I’ve never forgotten it.
An Interview with Lauren B. Davis
The Goler Clan trials inspired your novel. How difficult was it to write about that type of activity?
It was awful. What went on up there was ghastly in the extreme. Whereas, in non-fiction, I think an author can, and should, speak the facts exactly as they are, as a fiction writer I’m trying not simply to state a chronological series of events, but to explore some greater truth or question inspired by those events. Thus, I chose not to include some of what I learned during my research, simply because it was too hideous for fiction, too gag-inducing. I didn’t want to write a book that either exploited the victims or was too salacious. I did, however, use some of the court testimony verbatim in the final chapter. I had nightmares and shed tears, I can tell you that.
Is there any particular message you are trying to pass on through the book?
I was trying to explore what happens when we view our neighbours as “The Other” and also to look at the transforming power of unlikely friendships. I don’t really write “message” books; I merely hope the reader will ask himself some questions he might not have otherwise. My own conclusion, by the time I’d finished writing the book, was that I do have a responsibility to try and live more empathetically, to speak up wherever I perceive an injustice, and to refuse to banish someone to “Otherness.”
There certainly are a lot of “Others” in the book: Albert is an outsider to his own family, as is Ivy to the other kids, Bobby to his family, and even Tom and Patty as unmarried parents in a Bible-thumping town. How many classes of “Other” do you think there are in a typical community?
That would depend on the community, but when you consider all the possible divides—religious, economic, racial, gender, not to mention all the boundaries erected through conflicts over land, or noise, or behaviour, or personal slights of one sort or another—the possibilities are endless. I wanted to encourage people to ask themselves who might be considered “Other” in their own communities and what they were willing to do to perhaps cross that divide.
While the Erskines are to Gideon as the Golers were to Wolfville, your book focuses more on the various outsiders within the town itself. Are you trying to make any particular statement?
Well, for one thing, I wasn’t writing Deliverance (fine work though that may be). I didn’t want the reader to spend the entire novel gawking at the horrors of mountain life; I felt that was simply too exploitive and salacious. What we see in the opening of the novel resonates, I hope, through the rest of the text, even when the focus is on the townspeople.
I think it’s easy to point a finger at people we have decided, for any number of reasons, are different than us and call them outsiders, but sometimes we do the most damage closer to home. Sometimes the people we relegate to societies’ hinterlands are our family members, our classmates and our neighbours.
Which character do you view as the most tragic figure in the book?
Albert, I think. He’s held back from what he desires not only by the external conflicts of his appalling relations, the weight of family history and society’s expectations, but also because he has been so damaged, so broken, by what’s happened to him. He has, in many ways, accepted society’s judgment and doesn’t really believe he could ever break free of it. Still, he tries so hard, in his way. There’s an irony here because hopefully the reader sees something fine in him, albeit under a layer of grime, but still some seed of potential that Albert himself can’t see.
Then, too, Patty is a tragic figure, since she has so little understanding of herself. I think many of us have, alas, known people like this—restless, irritable and discontent, always looking
for the next bright, shiny thing. You think, “Good Lord, doesn’t she know how good she has it? Will nothing ever make her happy?” Watching a person like that self-destruct is heartbreaking.
You’ve said that Ivy’s character is based somewhat on a rough summer in your own life. How much so, and how true is Dorothy to the woman who owned the antiques shop near your house? How important was she to you getting through that period?
Dorothy is a combination of several women I’ve known, but certainly she is true to my memory of the woman who owned the antiques store. She was a haven, and a sanctuary and a life-saver.
Are any of the town’s residents based on people you knew while you lived in Nova Scotia?
No, they aren’t. I hope I’ve made it quite clear that although the story is inspired by the Goler Clan, I’m not really writing about Nova Scotia. I wanted to create a fictional town that could be anywhere, and hopefully readers all over might even think it could be their town. Where I live now, in Princeton, New Jersey, people have asked me if I’m writing about the Ramapo Mountain people, or about a group known as “The Hopewell Hillbillies”—so I like to think I succeeded.
Which character is the most intriguing to you?
I keep coming back to Albert. There’s something about a person struggling against such great odds, with so little help, that just pierces me. What might have been? I keep asking. What might have been?
About the Author
LAUREN B. DAVIS is the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed novels The Stubborn Season and The Radiant City, as well as two collections of short stories, An Unrehearsed Desire and Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives. Born in Montreal, Davis lived in France for ten years. She now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Visit her at www.laurenbdavis.com.
Copyright
The characters in this novel are fictional creations.
Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental and unintended.
Our Daily Bread
Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Lauren B. Davis
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