Book Notes

Alabama native weaves childhood memories into documented history

By: Joan Ruddiman
   Sena Jeter Naslund wrestles with demons from her youth in her emotionally evocative "Four Spirits" (HarperCollins, 2003). She says her "fictive account" is deeply rooted in actual events, as well as people both known to history and known intimately by the author. The work is both brutal and spirit-filled.
   In the early 1960s, Ms. Nashlund was a high school student in Birmingham, Alabama. She recalls Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s demonstration in front of Phillips High.
   Years later, she learned of the random black man snatched from the street that day and brutalized as a "lesson for Shuttlesworth." Though she was aware of civil rights actions, some publicly violent, the extent of the atrocities against blacks struggling for civil rights came as a horrifying surprise.
   Like the Germans in Nazi Germany, "we knew, but yet we didn’t know," she relates with a guilt that cannot be assuaged.
   Birmingham was just one of many cities and small towns across the South that saw lunch counter sit-ins, street demonstrations and many rousing church services that called attention to the injustices of century-old segregation laws. Violence and murder was often the response to followers of Martin Luther King who practiced his message of non-violence.
   Birmingham, however, is still remembered for the brutalities of those terrible times. Men, women and children dressed in their Sunday best were viciously knocked down by fire hoses and chased by unleashed police dogs and policemen with clubs spurred on by the racist police commissioner Bull Connor.
   But the most horrifying moment was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963. Four girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — were killed by the blast.
   Ms. Naslund, a renowned author and respected professor of writing at the University of Louisville and now at Vermont College, confronts the terrors of those times, keeping a vow she made as a high school girl to someday tell the story of the struggle for integration in Birmingham. She says, "I wrote the novel because there was no big literary book that dealt with this very important page in American history."
   The novel is framed around spirits, real and imagined. Four spirits leave this earth in the first chapter, and then four other innocents are violently blown from this life in the middle of the story.
   The novel ends with the funeral of four more innocent victims of racist hatred. Ms. Naslund’s hefty novel encompasses the lives of 129 characters total — by her count — that tell the story of a society in transition.
   At the center of the story is Stella Silver, an orphaned child raised by her maiden aunts. As the book opens, we meet Stella at age five, on the day her parents and two brothers are killed in a freak car accident.
   Flash forward to Stella the college girl, whose gracious southern life is challenged by the civil actions engulfing Birmingham. Stella is a work-in-process, easily swayed by love, friendship, a sense of duty and guilt. She comes of age with and through the civil rights movement and the powerful people who inspire positive changes.
   Stella’s friend Cat Cartwright is a dominant force in her life. Cat is wheelchair-bound, crippled from an unnamed degenerative disease.
   In a subtle aside, Cat’s fight for civil rights for blacks foreshadows the battle for civil rights for the disabled. Her character is based on a hometown friend of the author’s who became a leading advocate for the American with Disabilities Act — just one of several connections in the novel to Ms. Naslund’s youth.
   Fortunately, however, readers don’t have the sense that they are in Ms. Naslund’s story, but rather can just appreciate the rich details that the author draws on to create a dynamic novel.
   Other historic personalities like Ralph Abernathy and Rev. Shuttlesworth share scenes with fictive characters patterned on men and women from all walks of life who shape Birmingham’s story. In keeping with her desire to create characters and not one-dimensional stereotypes, the author establishes a context for each that keeps them real.
   "No one is all evil," Ms. Naslund said in an interview. However, though she does attempt to flesh out a background for the Klu Klux Klan member who takes such pleasure in bombing and tormenting innocent people, his story is thin and ultimately too abruptly resolved. She admits it was difficult for her to humanize that character.
   The novel has been described as "panoramic." Perhaps with such an ambitious scope, it is impossible to develop each defined character’s story completely.
   However, this is overall an insignificant limitation. The novel is both entertaining and deeply thoughtful. Ms. Naslund effectively intertwines southern sensibilities about ghosts and mythical ancient souls who hold the secrets of lives past, present and future with the history of the traumatic early 1960s.
   In the context of her setting, these spiritual elements ring true and add another level to the novel, which recreates reactions to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, as well the injustices in "Bomb-ingham."
   For those who appreciate good writing and storytelling, Ms. Naslund has several works that are worth reading. She is noted for creating fiction from bits of history or existing stories.
   Her first novel "Sherlock in Love" (David R. Godine Published, 1993) sees Dr. Watson as a narrator looking back on events in the life of his old friend, Sherlock Holmes. Reviewers noted the "feminist sensibility" as Ms. Naslund zeros in on a brief tale from early Doyle and revitalizes the Irene Adler legend.
   In "Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette" (William Morrow, 2006), Ms. Naslund addresses the harsh realities of the French court through the eyes of a very young, naive woman who is offered up to serve the crown.
   Those who are fans will recall Ms. Naslund’s breakout novel "Ahab’s Wife or The Star Gazer" (William Morrow, 1999). Just as she considered a life beyond the books for Sherlock Holmes, Ms. Naslund builds a story around the idea of the infamous Captain Ahab having a young wife and child at home.
   And as she did with "Four Spirits," Ms. Naslund draws on the history and the people of the times to tell Ahab’s wife’s story of life on Nantucket Island, which was populated by a fascinating blend of scientists, activists and intellectuals.
   Next week, in part to honor Women’s History Month, Book Notes will take a look back at "Ahab’s Wife" and explore some of the amazing women — fictive and real — who figure in that novel.
Joan Ruddiman, Ed.D., is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.