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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 53 > Reviews >Joanna Catherine Scott's Child of the South

Child of the South
Joanna Catherine Scott
The Berkley Publishing Group
ISBN Number: 978-0425226025

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          Full of rich language, passion, and tension, Joanna Catherine Scott’s Child of the South continues the story of her characters first introduced in The Road to Chapel Hill. Her new novel is set in the years immediately following the Civil War, told from the point of view of two star-crossed lovers: 24-year-old Eugenia Mae Spotswood, the assumed white daughter of a failed Wilmington businessman and now a nurse for the Freedman's Bureau in Wilmington, and Tom, a former slave who owns a large farm outside Chapel Hill. They initially met as mistress and slave. Eugenia gave Tom his freedom papers and after his capture he eventually became a scout for the Union army in New Bern under the leadership of a dashing mulatto, Abraham Galloway, who instilled in him the importance of standing up for himself, and taught him to read and write.

          Galloway is an actual historical figure who died under mysterious circumstances, which Scott fictionalizes. Abraham was one of three black senators to the North Carolina General Assembly where he championed voting rights for blacks and public schooling for all children, both white and black. Bucking convention and stirring black pride before it existed, he declares blacks superior over whites: “Would you not rather side with the virtuous half of you that has been wronged than the half that has done wrong?”

          More than anything, Eugenia wants to find her black birth mother, whom she believes still lives around Wilmington. After nursing new amputee Clyde Bricket (Tom’s former enemy and eventual partner), she leaves him in the care of his mother and Tom’s mother in Chapel Hill and hops on a train bound for the coast.

          But she’s scared that once she does find her mother she will have to choose which side of the color line to live on. As a result, Eugenia procrastinates for four years in her search as Conservatives and Republicans fight over the issue of political and social rights in the New South. This reviewer had a hard time seeing Eugenia as a mixed-race person because although we learn that Eugenia has curly, unruly hair, there aren't many other clues to her African American heritage. Perhaps Scott could have at least had Eugenia fixate on a feature that didn’t seem white. It seems that no one suspects she could have any black blood in her, not even her former Confederate cousins in Wilmington. But on the other hand, her cousins don’t resist her wishes to nurse the poorest blacks in town for the Freedman’s Bureau. After she befriends Abraham Galloway, however, he knows that she’s of mixed race right away, and tells her she must choose sides.

          Capturing local dialect is one of Scott’s gifts. As a poet she has a natural ear for language and for the tight arrangement of words on the page. Her narrative is filled with “fell to eating” or “took to wandering,” expressions that are still used today in North Carolina. One of the ways we know Tom is capable and ready to assume the responsibility of land ownership is by observing Tom’s impeccable grammar. His proper speech at first threatens Clyde Bricket, since he is illiterate as so many whites were in those days. To his credit, Clyde rapidly lets go of his traditional Southern notions and embraces Tom as both brother and partner.

          Besides creating realistic dialogue and language, Scott renders stark and gritty images for her readers that go straight to the point. For instance, in this scene Eugenia recounts to a sympathetic doctor the moment she stumbled upon her father after his suicide.
          Tears sprang to my eyes. I could not tell him. I could never tell a soul. That shameful dying. That despair. The horrid details. How his body, letting go its fluids, stained the cabin floor and soiled the crimson velvet slipper fallen from his foot. The way his body swung so gently while his pale blue eyes bulged from his head as if he had seen something dreadful in the other world.
          Eugenia's story is told in the first person and Tom's is in third person, which is really the only way that all of the historical perspectives can be discussed since Eugenia can't always be in the same place as the decision makers who drive this story. However, Eugenia is a catalyst in her own right when she interacts with her patients and stands up for her beliefs at dinner parties. The war is over, but there’s no way the South wants to be on equal footing with its former slaves. Scott does a great job of making sure Eugenia doesn’t go too far beyond the historical attitudes of illegal fraternization between blacks and whites, although at times Eugenia comes across as too liberal-leaning for her times.

          Eugenia’s doubts and internal conflicts make her a more interesting character than hopeful and enterprising Tom. She gives us a true picture of what those times smelled, felt, and tasted like, and she is someone who has faith in her intuition and knows what she can and cannot do. In her time as a nurse, she sees how her supervisor’s attitude towards his work is different from hers:
          It was their souls Mr. Ashley loved, I would then tell myself, and not their bodies. His fervor was not that of a saint, but of a missionary. He had been sent down here to educate, but if he failed at that, he had done his duty if their souls were saved. But increasingly I saw that to be a missionary was not the same as being a nurse. My duty was to the body. I must be practical, I must comfort and relieve. I was not required to love.
          Scott never shies away from addressing post Civil War politics so that we see the great class and race divide that still haunts us to this day. At the same time she also addresses what a family is and how it’s possible to find connections that were once thought forever lost. What is refreshing is how she reminds modern readers that although people living in the 19th century were used to tremendous loss and grief, this loss did not make them hard and uncaring; rather, great loss made them more determined to seek love.

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