This journey began years ago when I went on a Southern literature kick. All I ever wanted to read was novels about the South by writers from the South. I consumed the works of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, then went onto Robert Penn Warren, and Dorothy Allison. Later I refined my parameters to novels written by North Carolinians: Maya Angelou, Thomas Wolfe, Kaye Gibbons, and Doris Betts. I also made room for writers who had spent time in North Carolina, like Lee Smith and Anne Tyler. Something about Southern writing appealed to my taste and affirmed my own experiences. It also offered a pushback against the silencing of Southern attitudes and accents I had encountered so often in mainstream media and higher education.

Southern writers served up stories steeped in the deep-fried flavors I was used to. They excelled at dialogue with sassy backtalk and themes of twisted family relations and the dark wounds everyone saw but refused to speak.

I love any well-written novel, of course, but Southern fiction speaks to me.

It was during this reading jag that I encountered Clyde Edgerton and began devouring his novels one right after the other.

Edgerton grew up in a small town outside of Durham, North Carolina. The little town, Bethesda, is now mostly part of Durham, but during Edgerton’s childhood it consisted of a single flashing traffic light, a Southern Baptist church, and a wreath of woods all the way around it. The town was very similar to Wake Forest, where I grew up.

And like Wake Forest, Bethesda shared in the same clutch of rules, nosey prohibitions, and gossip whispered in church pews and over sweet iced tea.

I felt an uncanny affinity for Edgerton. He understood the double draws of race and religion on those of us who grew up in the South. He was able to poke fun at small-town Southern morality without denying his love of Southern eccentricity. In one of his novels, he even describes six generations of a family named Copeland.

It was Edgerton’s novel Raney (1985), though, that drew me in. I had the strange sense of seeing my own life reflected there.

Raney describes the “first two years, two months, and two days” in a marriage between small-town Raney and her more worldly husband, Charles. Raney, nurtured in a close-knit family, is fiercely loyal to her Freewill Baptist church in (fictional) Liston, North Carolina. Charles hails from the big sin-filled city of Atlanta and follows (when it suits him) the teachings of the Episcopal church. The drama in the novel—told via stinging satire—unfolds in the “culture clash” between Raney’s fundamentalist grounding in Christianity and all of its puritanical teachings and Charles’ more liberal, self-focused approach to life and its enjoyment.

I read Raney one winter when I was home in Raleigh, visiting with my parents. My husband Dennis and I were then living in Japan where he had a professorship with International Christian University.

In many ways, we resembled Raney and Charles. My family was Southern Baptist; Dennis’s was Lutheran. My parents did not drink; his family enjoyed imbibing. My parents were frugal; his were more apt to spend money on entertainment. My parents grew up in rural areas with roots as deep as the first white settlers. His parents were from New York and had closer claims to Europe, particularly Scotland, but also Jamaica.

When Dennis and I got married, we held the reception at my parents’ house in Raleigh to keep costs down. (He and I certainly had no money!) Because a few of my parents’ religious relatives would be in attendance, we were not allowed to serve alcohol. This infuriated Dennis. His family had flown down from the Northeast—the least we could do was give them a drink!

Dennis used salty language. I hadn’t yet acquired such a colorful vocabulary.
While we were in Tokyo, we took advantage of our winter breaks to travel, venturing to Burma (now Myanmar), Thailand, and China. For me, though, Christmas was a time to spend with family, and, yes, go to church. I enjoyed adventuring with Dennis, but I wanted to be in North Carolina for the holidays.

He agreed to a hometown visit on one of our returns from an adventurous European trip.

In 1989 we flew to Europe as soon as the autumn term ended. We had a rail pass and traveled from Amsterdam to Germany (where we spent Christmas in a hotel) to Switzerland to France and finally to England, where we celebrated the New Year.

Author in Paris, winter 1989

Somewhere along the way, I began to feel weighed down by fatigue. I felt like I was fighting a cold, but the majority of the pain was in my lower back. I assumed I was just experiencing worse-than-usual monthly cramps and tried to push through. In Paris, I was the one who had to negotiate for our accommodations. (We had not made any previous reservations, as Dennis claimed we’d get a better rate if we did so on the local economy.) I was surprised that I had retained enough of my college French to communicate, but once we were in our snug lodgings, I was too exhausted to venture out to savor Paris nightlife. My head pounded, my chest felt tight, and my breathing was labored. By England I was in so much pain, all I could do was curl up in a ball in our hotel bed. Dennis managed to get a heating pad for my back—which was throbbing—but as we were still convinced I only had menstrual cramps, he resented me for not being “tougher” and for ruining our fun.

To return to the US we had to fly from England back to Amsterdam and from there to New York. We’d been upgraded to business class—on account of our frequent flying—and treated to good food and drinks, but I don’t remember any of it. I slept the entire way, aided by prescription painkillers Dennis had bogarted after some injury or another.

It was only after we reached his parents’ place in Allentown a week later that I was able to see a doctor. The doctor diagnosed my condition as pleurisy, an inflammation of the pleura or the membranes that cover the lungs and chest cavity. I had not even considered a lung ailment, since most of my pain was focused in my lower back, but the doctor explained that the heaviness caused by the inflammation could feel as if it were centered in the back.

He prescribed antibiotics which ended my agony. And when he told my husband that pleurisy was indeed extremely painful, I felt slightly vindicated.

I still needed time to recover my strength before I could fly back to Tokyo. We decided that I would remain in Raleigh with my parents, and Dennis returned to begin the new term.

Once he had left, my mother fussed over me as if I were a child. She fixed me all my favorite comfort foods—tomato soup, macaroni and cheese, cool jello salads—and she placed a humidifier with Vicks Vapor Rub near my pillow. I burrowed under the covers, secure in her care.

It was then that I read Raney.

Something about the way Raney and her husband came into conflict on things that felt so vital to each of them—things like the way they understood family, religion, the world and their place in it—reminded me of the challenges Dennis and I often faced.

In the novel, Raney is conservative, and Charles is liberal. In my marriage to Dennis, he was far more politically conservative than I was. And I wasn’t exactly “unworldly.” After all, it was I who introduced Japan to Dennis.

Even so, we had that Southern-Northern thing going on. There was a palpable difference in the way we experienced life, and it was largely this difference that had attracted me to Dennis in the first place.

Raney put things into perspective.

I mean, in reading Raney, I could see us.

I could see us as characters with problems that felt so consequential and weighty but in fact were really kind of funny. Hilarious, actually. Both Raney and Charles were products of their families, their churches, their geography. And both were able to grow beyond their upbringing, more or less.

For all her uptightness, I loved Raney. And through her, I loved myself.

Later I learned that Clyde Edgerton had confronted considerable turmoil because of the satirical way he portrayed the Baptist church in Raney. He was then employed at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, a very conservative, Southern Baptist school. He wrote the novel just as the religious fundamentalists were consolidating their power in the church and TV evangelists like Falwell, Bakker, and Graham were drawing attention to themselves and their conservative agendas. This was not the best time for Christian satire.

Edgerton resigned from Campbell as a result.

That made me like him even more.

Raney and Charles overcome their differences and succeed in their marriage—at least they do at the end of the novel, but who knows what becomes of them later, in the chapters that were never written.

Dennis and I did not have such a happy ever after.

We came to the end of our own novel and found new paths that took us in different directions.

It’s always sad when a marriage ends, but I’m grateful for the adventures Dennis and I had along the way, and the stories I collected that I’ve yet to tell.

Like Edgerton, I also own my southern roots….and I’m glad to have found my way back to them—both in books and in reality.