Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell

In four haunting family stories, Ellen Douglas seeks to track down the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. Progressively searching further and further back in time, each of these four family tales involves collusion and secrets. In "Grant," a randy old uncle dying in the author's house is nursed by a beautiful black woman while his white family watches from a "respectful" distance. Who loves him better? When truth is death, who is braver facing it? In "Julia and Nellie," very close cousins make "a marriage in all but name" back in the days of easy scandal. The nature of the liaison never mentioned, the family waives its Presbyterian morality in the face of family deviance. In "Hampton," her grandmother's servant, who has constructed a world closed to whites, evades the author's tentative efforts at a meeting of minds. And finally, in "On Second Creek," Douglas confronts her obsession with the long-lost--or -buried--facts of the "examination and execution" of slaves who may or may not have plotted an uprising. Having published fiction for four decades, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact. It's a book, she says, "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling." It's about secrets, judgments, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It's about the truth in fiction and the fiction in "truth." Praise for Ellen Douglas: "It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer."--Richard Ford; "Proust wrote in one of his last letters, 'one must never be afraid of going too far, for the truth is beyond.' Ellen Douglas has taken this very much to heart and has sought the truth in a region beyond falsehood; through falsehood, in effect. It's a fascinating performance."--Shelby Foote.

"It is impossible to make sense out of stories that purport to be true," Ellen Douglas writes in the recollections she titles, perhaps ironically, Truth. "Something is always missing. To give them form, extract their deepest meaning, one has to turn them into fiction, to find causes, or if, as is usually the case, causes are unfindable, one has to invent them." But in these four anecdotes taken from her family's past, Douglas is determined to avoid invention altogether. The author of seven masterful books of fiction set in her native Mississippi, here Douglas only flirts with the fictional possibilities of her tale and then lays them aside. Instead, she patiently unsnarls the complicated strands of history, rumors, secrets, and outright lies that make up what we typically call "memory"--and what publishers typically call "the memoir." In "Grant," she chronicles her own abandonment of a dying uncle as well as his complicated relationship with the beautiful black woman who cares for him. "Julia and Nellie" explores the social and religious consequences for two cousins who live for years as man and wife, while in "Hampton," her family's longtime black servant stubbornly resists all her attempts to imagine her way into his life. The final story, "On Second Creek," knits together the book's overarching themes--familial secrets, race, religion, the unreliability of memory--into the story of an 1861 massacre, when local landowners hanged 30 slaves they suspected of plotting an uprising.

The least of Truth's many pleasures is the way it bears grave, unsentimental witness to a mostly vanished or vanishing South. When the family friend Miss Adah says dismissively of Natchez that it "isn't a real town, is it? ... Faulkner might have invented it," Douglas can only reply, yes, but it's also where I grew up. "Think first, not of Tara and hoopskirts and ruthless Southern belles," she advises the reader, "but rather of churches, bells ringing for Sunday services and Wednesday night prayer meeting, of ladies and gentlemen and children in worn but respectable clothing." Douglas possesses a novelist's eye for detail--for instance, the bees that swarm at her uncle's death--and an unerring ear for the way Southerners actually speak. But, at age 78, what she has above all is a lifetime's worth of story-making, and the sense that now it is time to give the sources of her fiction their due. The result is an unusually subtle and perceptive look at the way we tell stories as well as the often-elliptical relation these stories have to truth. --Mary Park