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Growing Seasons
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10624 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
1,626 Words |
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Lucy Mazareski
Lucy Mazareski reviews frequently for Catholic publications. |
HER OWN PLACE
Dori Sanders
Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 1993
252 pp., $16.95
Mae Lee Barnes is so real, so delightful, so unsinkable, and so unintentionally funny it's a pity she can't be tracked down in Rising Ridge, South Carolina, for a chat on her front porch. From teenage to senior years she inhabits the chapters of Dori Sanders' second novel, Her Own Place. The amazing thing about her in the end is her immutability--life's hard work and whacks have changed her little; she knows how to adapt without sacrificing heart and principles.
She is introduced in her teens, the only daughter of black South Carolina small farmers; she is sixteen when Pearl Harbor comes under attack. Jeff Barnes, the boy of her dreams, enlists in the Army, and Mae Lee agrees happily to marry him before he goes off to fight the war. The day after the wedding she waves good-bye to her husband as he boards a Greyhound bus--and that is the last she hears from him until he shows up a few years later, "back from the war without a scratch" and with no explanation why he never answered her steady stream of letters. But she never scolded him in her letters for not writing: "If he happened not to make it through, she didn't want him to die angry with her." She welcomes him home with love and with some surprises: During those war years Mae Lee has worked shifts at a munitions plant as well as on her family farm, putting away enough money to buy an empty farmhouse on her own piece of farmland. It was to be a "real big surprise" for her husband.
But Jeff Barnes has little interest in rural farm living. After the birth of their first child, daughter Dallace, he leaves home to look for work in the city. "Jeff would come home for a few weeks, she would conceive a child, and then he would be off again. He never announced when he was coming, he just showed up. If he was earning a decent salary where he worked, it almost never took the form of bringing money home." Mae Lee tells herself that eventually he will settle down with his family. Her disgusted parents know better but say nothing.
Finally after the birth of her fifth child, Mae Lee decides to give up her beloved land and house and follow her husband, come what may. During his next visit she announces her decision and is so excited by it "that she misread the pained disappointment in her husband's eyes, the crack in his voice, as signs of his surprise and
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