‘Under Cedar Shades: A Novel’ by Helen Lavinia Underwood
By Joan Ruddiman Special Writer
Readers of historical fiction love to look for the “history” in the story. Though it is usually more fun — and faster — to read novels full of conflict and characters revealed in dialogue than reading through a non-fiction historical text, part of the fun in reading historical fiction is to see how well the “real” is woven into the tale.
What better way to satisfy this curiosity than talking to the author?
I recently had the pleasure of reading “Under Cedar Shades: A Novel” (Xlibris, 2008) by Helen Lavinia Underwood, an old friend who came back to town to share a dramatic reading of her first novel. Though the novel is based on Helen’s family history, it mirrors a significant piece of America’s complex story.
Context is important in understanding the value of this family story and its relation to America’s conflicted past.
Helen’s family hails from northern Alabama — closer geographically and culturally to their Tennessee border than Birmingham. The stories of the five generations of women told in “Under Cedar Shades” encompass descendants of Portuguese explorers from the 16th century, and the first people — including the Cherokee, Welsh and Scotch-Irish immigrants — who settled in a mountainous region much like their homelands, and Africans who first arrived as someone’s property. Helen claims all these people as her collective heritage.
“The intermingling of blood” is a basic fact of life in America, she says. “Most Americans are mixed blood.” But the reality of racism is also part of America’s story, and plays a tragic role in the lives of Helen’s characters, as well.
When she is asked what is real and what is fiction in her book, Helen says, “ ‘Cedar’ is all real and all fiction.” The characters are real, “but fictionalized … as I breathed life into them.”
The Prologue is a poem by Helen that reads in part,
“I search for thousands of long-ago lovers
To unravel the secret of who I am …”
Ably assisted by her husband, Joel, Helen spent five years of research in “musty basements of courthouses,” and many libraries and museums, reading through many historical works particularly on the Cherokee removal and the Trail of Tears, and visits to every place mentioned in the book.
The payoff for the reader is a narrative rich in description of landscapes and hamlets, many of which are still hidden from the glare of our busy world. Reviews of the book in particular praise the author’s ability to capture the unique beauty of Middle Tennessee.
The scope of the historical novel includes struggles with displacement, color discrimination, famine, the Civil War, and the exploitation of workers during the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 20th century. Readers who appreciate history will be pleased to find a complete listing of resources which Helen encourages others interested in history or genealogy to use.
For those who enjoy good fiction, the novel is carefully crafted in seven “books,” each dedicated to the story of lovers beginning with Greenberry and Analeha. These gentle Cherokees are one family of many caught up in the travesty of the American government’s “safe removal” of Native people from their well established homes, farms and businesses in northern Alabama and Tennessee to an Oklahoma reservation.
A child from each generation becomes the protagonist of the next “book” as Helen follows the Cherokee orphan over two centuries to Hetty (Helen) who learns her grandmother Susie’s long-held secret. Readers will appreciate and will refer often to the family tree the author provides with the prologue to the book. The intertwining branches of the ancestral tree help to clarify the complex relations of characters Helen uses to build the compelling stories across generations to Grandma Susie.
It was on Susie’s farm that a very young Helen found her “affinity” for cedar trees. The title of the book, Helen shared, comes from a deep-seated connection she harbored since early childhood when she played under cedar trees on her grandmother’s farm. Years ago, she titled a self-published book of poetry “Under Cedar Shades.”
“It was not until I began the research for this book into Cherokee history, however, that I learned that the cedar tree is considered sacred — a unique gift from the Creator,” she said. “I found this referenced in a footnote! I was astounded to recognize that my affinity for cedar trees must go back to my very early Cherokee ancestry.”
Helen thoughtfully uses the cedar of the title as a central image in the novel embodied in Greenberry’s flute carved from cedar that passes like a talisman through the generations of his descendants. Helen notes that “good historical fiction joins the past and the present,” and the scope of her novel pursues that intent.
“Under Cedar Shades” does what the study of history should do. Helen, who holds an undergraduate degree in history, admits that the onslaught of dates and facts in her college history classes did little to inspire her.
Helen noted, “I heard a historian say, ‘History is a narrative about people.’ I so agree! When I was in school, I wanted to know, ‘What did the women and children do during the Civil War?’”
In her book, from the stories she has unearthed from forgotten archives and family reminiscence, Helen tells a dramatic and entertaining story of American history through the lens of families who lived it. In doing so, she has found answers to “what about the women and children” that will resonate with readers who recognize a version of their own families’ stories.
According to Helen, her book “is about endurance in the face of adversity, discrimination and injustice – hardships that continue to define the lives of many Americans. It is, as well, the story of family love, loyalty, and the ability to persevere.”
As Helen notes, “I believe that what I have written will resonate with many whose own family history and stories may well, in some respects, mirror my own.”