The Accidentals Page 31
My thanks also for encouragement and commentary go to my colleagues and friends in the writing, scholarly, and teaching community at UNC: Bill Andrews, Gaby Calvocoressi, James Coleman, Pam Durban, Karen Booth, Elyse Crystall, María DeGuzmán, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Ed Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Marianne Gingher, Laura Halperin, Fred Hobson, Jennifer Ho, Heidi Kim, Randall Kenan, Susan Irons, Lori Ostlund (at UNC for an all-too-brief two years), Ariana Vigil, Alan Shapiro, and Linda Wagner-Martin. I appreciate too the encouragement from my graduate students past and present at UNC, particularly Jameela Dallis, Gale Greenlee, Mary Alice Kirkpatrick, and Harry Thomas.
Thank you also to Southern Cultures for publishing “The Girl Who Went Away,” taken from one of Grace’s chapters.
Far-flung friends and family members too numerous to name have been cheering me on these past nine years. Thanks especially to my cousins Jane and Linda Jane Barnette and to the remarkable Salvaggio clan. As always, my daughter and son-in-law, Carol Gwin and Shaun Leverton, top this very long list.
Thanks to the incredible production staff at William Morrow/HarperCollins, especially copy editor Kim Lewis, whose scrutiny of the novel’s half-century time line saved me from more missteps than I’d care to admit.
Animals abound in The Accidentals, so it seems appropriate to thank my cats Violet and Pumpkin, who prostrated themselves on either sides of my laptop, providing the most comfortable of armrests, while hoping against hope that an accidental would fly off the screen and into their clutches.
Finally, this book is dedicated to Ruth Salvaggio, who showed me the giraffes one beautiful morning in New Orleans and who later read and commented on more pieces more times than either of us can count, bringing an intelligence and attentiveness to nuance that shine through what is best in these pages.
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About the Author
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Meet Minrose Gwin
About the Book
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How I Came to Write The Accidentals
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Minrose Gwin
MINROSE GWIN is the author of The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, acclaimed by Kirkus Reviews as “profound and Faulkner-ian”; and the memoir Wishing for Snow, cited by Booklist as “eloquent” and “lyrical”—“a real life story we all need to know.” She has written four scholarly books and coedited The Literature of the American South. She grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, hearing stories of the Tupelo tornado of 1936. She lives in Austin, Texas.
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About the Book
How I Came to Write The Accidentals
I generally see the kernel of a story in a flash of something that catches my eye, in one compelling image. The Accidentals, however, unfolded in the shape of three. The first was a picture I found several years ago after someone told me that a little mutt I’d adopted at the local pound looked like the first Sputnik dog. A small, mild-mannered female named Laika, she was unlucky enough to have been strapped in a capsule the size of a rural mailbox and launched into space by the Russians in 1957, much to the world’s amazement.
With the picture of the beautifully marked little dog came a story. Found wandering the streets of Moscow scrounging for food, Laika was calm, friendly, and compliant. She easily adjusted to small spaces. In preparation for the space mission, she was held in smaller and smaller cages for ten to twenty days at a time. The evening before the launch of Sputnik 2, one of the Russian scientists felt sorry for her and took her home to play with his children. The next morning she was strapped into her capsule. Sections of her skin were shaved, and medical sensors were placed on her body.
The picture I found shows Laika sitting inside her capsule before lift-off, looking happy and relaxed and trusting.
After lift-off, the Russians told the world there was no plan to bring Laika home. Later, they announced that Laika had died after several days in orbit. Actually, she died a few hours after launch when the thermal apparatus of her capsule failed and the temperature inside reached around a hundred and five degrees. She may have also succumbed to stress and panic; her pulse was three times its normal rate at launch and then dropped dramatically below resting level at the start of weightlessness.
The name Laika means barker, and little Laika is said to have barked until the capsule became her coffin. Bearing her remains, it orbited the Earth 2,570 times before burning up on reentry.
The second image came to me at the rear of Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. In the back of the zoo there is a relatively large area adjoining the giraffes’ enclosure where the giraffes can walk about fairly freely. One day I was watching two of them walk around together and suddenly they began to do something called “necking,” using their long necks to hit each other with a resounding whap. At intervals they stopped and rotated their necks in circles and then went back to the whapping. It was highly stylized and beautiful, and it looked like a giraffe form of dancing.
As I watched this strange and fascinating activity, entranced by the giraffes and at the time not knowing what they were doing or why, a picture slipped into my mind: two young girls peering through slats in the tall fence, as I was doing in that moment, watching these giraffes performing their magical giraffe dance—doing this natural thing with their bodies—while at home the girls’ mother, entrapped by a third pregnancy, lay delirious, bleeding to death from a botched abortion.
Both of these images took me to the plight of girls and women in the 1950s—pre-pill, pre–Roe v. Wade—and the sense of entrapment and constriction so many girls and women experienced then, in stark contrast to the optimistic expansiveness of space travel that culminated in 1969 in the first man walking on the moon, proclaiming “one giant leap for mankind.”
And these two images—Laika in her capsule and those two wistful, innocent sisters watching the giraffes “dance”—seemed in many ways in tension with each other: the little doomed dog an image of entrapment and constriction and the giraffes the very picture of imaginative freedom within a constricted space, their flamboyant pushback against the enclosure of the zoo. I thought of growing up in a small (and for the unmarried, pill-less) Mississippi town a decade later: the girls I knew in high school who “went away” to have their babies, who were quickly put up for adoption, or those who barely escaped with their lives after going to backwoods “chiropractors” to have abortions performed with kitchen utensils; the resiliency of those girls and women who made the choice to keep their accidental children and in the process lost or postponed their own dreams and plans. I thought about shame. I wanted to write about those girls and women and children and the children’s caretakers, who had their own children to worry about, and what happened to them: how they lived or didn’t; how they created their own freedom within such tiny, limiting spaces; how brave and fierce and irrepressible they were.
Finally, the third image of the book arrived in the form of a painted bunting at my backyard feeder in North Carolina. With its royal blue head, orange-red chest, and yellow and green-tipped wings, this rainbow of a bird took my breath away and reminded me of another bird with drop-dead plumage, the extinct Carolina Parakeet. An accidental, my birder neighbor said of the painted bunting: off track from its normal migration path, seldom observed in the piedmont area of North Carolina. I’d never heard that term used as a noun, and the whole concept of being an accidental struck me as enormously generative. Each of these characters is an accidental, in the sense of getting off track in life’s great migration; each finds her or himself in foreign territory, having been blown off track by the winds of chance.
All of these thoughts took shape in the pages of The Accidentals. Whether it’s about a frustrated woman’s fixation on the freedom of birds, a mother’s devotion to her brilliant but troubled son at the cost of her
own career, the extended confinement in jail for the orphanage carer who makes the mistake of thinking about her own children while she works, a high school girl’s unconventional love for her “boys” that extends over the decades, or a father’s dream of his own pregnancy, there is a powerful life force here that defies repression, that bubbles up. There’s a doom to it, deep tragedy and wrecked lives, but there’s also beauty—the giraffes’ dance, the bird’s irrepressible call: joy.
So the central story of Grace and June McAlister, the two sisters of the novel, came to me through the images and blessings of animals. The third chapter of The Accidentals—Grace and June watching the giraffes dance—is the first thing I wrote. It’s the launchpad—and the accidental heart—of the whole book.
—Minrose Gwin
Reading Group Guide
In her essay “How I Came to Write The Accidentals” Minrose Gwin cites a photograph of the first Sputnik dog, the doomed little mutt named Laika, as the spark that fired the novel. Where do images of Laika or allusions to her surface in the book and in what contexts? In those contexts, what is their immediate effect and purpose?
The first part of the novel explores the stark contrast between the expansive era of the 1950s and 1960s and the constricted lives of women and girls, especially regarding sex and reproduction. Where is that constriction most visible and troubling and what are its long-term effects in the novel? How is that constriction policed? What are the most powerful images of constriction in the book?
Laika is certainly not the only animal in The Accidentals. There are reticulated giraffes, multiple dogs, a revelatory cat, a rapacious sparrow, and an extinct parakeet—just to name a few of the creatures that inhabit these pages. How do animals enrich our understanding of the characters in the book? What other functions do animals serve?
The Accidentals is an episodic story, told by seven characters in the first person. Why did Gwin use so many narrators’ perspectives to tell the story? How do those perspectives intertwine with one another and to what effect? How would the book be different if only one character or an omniscient third-person narrator told the story?
The time line of the novel covers more than sixty years, from 1957 to 2008. What’s the effect of this sweeping time line and the important historical events that occur over the course of it, such as the first man on the moon and the Cuban Missile Crisis? How do these events shape the characters? How does Gwin move through time in the novel? Given the broad time span, how does she prevent the novel from becoming too diffuse and vague?
This is a book about the effect of a central tragedy, which occurs in the first chapter and is narrated by Olivia, the mother of June and Grace and the wife of Holly. Olivia disappears physically from the novel after that initial appearance, but her presence hovers over and haunts her daughters’ lives throughout the rest of the novel. Where in the novel is Olivia’s presence felt most powerfully? How do you think she affects her daughters’ lives and decisions?
The women in The Accidentals make different choices regarding unwanted pregnancies. What are those choices and how do they affect their lives? What does this book have to say about the limitations of such choices in the 1950s and 1960s South? How does The Accidentals resonate with current debates around women’s reproductive issues?
As children, the two sisters, Grace and June, are extremely close, but they become estranged through an act that Grace perceives as her sister’s betrayal. Afterward, as their lives propel them in different directions, the sisters remain distant. However, there are several key moments tucked into the book when the spark of sisterhood rekindles between them, sometimes only briefly and sometimes just in the mind of one of the two sisters. Where are those moments and how do they prepare the reader for the book’s ending?
At the end of the novel, Ed Mae Johnson, the visionary of the novel, observes: “There’s a dark energy pushing things along, stellar explosions and supernovae, black holes, dormant and active. We all burn, shapely and bright, in space and time.” In the context of the book, what is that “dark energy” and where is it most strongly felt?
Why do you think Gwin entitled her novel The Accidentals? How is the concept of being an accidental—that is, being blown off track into new, unfamiliar terrain—central to understanding these characters’ challenges? Is anyone in this novel not an “accidental”?
Praise for The Accidentals
“Evocatively depicting the small town of Opelika, Mississippi, in 1957, Gwin (Promise) tells the heartrending story of a mother feeling trapped in her life, whose death throws her family into turmoil. A satisfying fable of errors and consequences in a tumultuous era.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In The Accidentals, Minrose Gwin tenderly recounts the lives of two sisters shattered by the shocking loss of their mother. The unique voices of outsiders enrich their story, and Gwin pulls together the threads of all the characters’ lives into an elegant and surprising tapestry. I’m still thinking about this rich, exquisitely crafted story.”
—Diane Chamberlain, New York Times bestselling author of The Dream Daughter
“This is the story of a family, but mostly, it’s the epic tale of two sisters, and, in the end, we are left with sublime memories of empty sparrow nests, chicken ‘coke awe vine,’ and reticulating giraffes. A stunning book you will want to read and reread.”
—Margaret McMullan, bestselling author of Where the Angels Lived
“The Accidentals is a major work by someone whose earlier novels already marked her as one of this generation’s great novelists. Like migratory birds who have flown off course and are therefore termed ‘accidentals,’ its characters’ lives unfold, each claiming his or her space as well as intersecting with each other. Their lives are finely crafted and hold unexpected surprises. And it is not only character and plot that make this book so readable; the writing is pure poetry. Gwin has done it again!”
—Margaret Randall, author of Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959–2018
“If Eudora Welty channeled Charles Dickens she’d have written this novel about orphans and strays and the accidental ways they lose and find each other. It’s a happy, sad, sweet page-turner, a great book.”
—Debra Monroe, author of On the Outskirts of Normal
“The Accidentals may be Minrose Gwin’s best yet. A family saga set in the black-and-white South of a generation ago, every page of this gripping drama shines with unexpected flashes of beauty and brilliance. A gorgeous book.”
—George Bishop, author of The Night of the Comet
“The Accidentals is a whirlwind of a book, spanning sixty years of American history as experienced by one southern family. Regardless of your attitudes on abortion, civil rights, and the space race, this novel will lift you out of your comfort zone before shaking you out of your complacency. Urgent reading for our times.”
—Sharon Oard Warner, author of Sophie’s House of Cards
Praise for Promise
“Minrose Gwin has spun a breathtaking tale against the harrowing background of a deadly tornado. Promise is an extraordinary novel purely for the vivid detailed account of this historical event, but it is also a compelling tale of Biblical proportions: one of racial divides, good and evil, destruction and salvation, and those clear moments of grace and humanity that bring hope into the most desperate times. I could not put it down.”
—Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life
“Promise is that rare work of fiction that takes on a historical event and completes it, challenging accounts that record only the effects of the Tupelo tornado on the white population, accounts that ignore the large African American community that was equally devastated. Gwin’s gift shines in the complexity of her characters and their fraught relationships with each other, their capacity for courage and hope, coupled with their passion for justice. Within a few pages we care deeply for the citizens of this doomed town. The energy on the pages literally propels us with the force of that fierce and deadly wi
nd, ripping apart the racial barriers, revealing the terrible secrets kept by whites and African Americans alike. I couldn’t put this novel down, and I don’t think you’ll want to either.”
—Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife
“A compelling powerhouse of a story that grips us from the horrific tornado at its start to its stunning, heart-wrenching finish, Minrose Gwin’s gorgeous new novel is a masterpiece! . . . A painstakingly researched, poignant, beautifully written novel, Promise explores a tragic Tupelo, Mississippi, history that resonates today. This book is a monumental achievement, and Gwin is a fiercely talented writer.”
—Jaimee Wriston Colbert, author of Vanishing Acts
“Minrose Gwin’s Promise is a haunting yet hopeful tale of a Mississippi community shaken to the core by a historic tornado, indiscriminate of age, race, or social status, even as the townspeople cling to long-held prejudices and norms. . . . Lyrically precise, taut, and realistic, Promise kept me absorbed from beginning to end.”
—Julie Kibler, author of Calling Me Home
“Promise is a powerful story about yet another forgotten chapter in our great national drama. Minrose Gwin knows her characters well and writes about them and their place and times with sympathy and wisdom.”
—Steve Yarbrough, author of The Unmade World
“Minrose Gwin is equal to the challenge of leading the reader through a terrible national disaster, the tornado which struck and all but destroyed the small city of Tupelo, Mississippi. The victims, black and white, are portrayed with compassion and insight.”