Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell - Softcover

Douglas, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452281024 ISBN 13: 9780452281028

Publisher: Plume, 1999

Synopsis

In four haunting episodes, the author seeks out the truth about herself, her white Mississippi ancestors, their relationships with African-American Mississippians, and ultimately about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. Reprint.

About this title

From the Publisher

Description

In four haunting family stories, Ellen Douglas seeks to track down the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. Progressively searching further and further back in time, each of these four family tales involves collusion and secrets. In "Grant," a randy old uncle dying in the author's house is nursed by a beautiful black woman while his white family watches from a "respectful" distance. Who loves him better? When truth is death, who is braver facing it? In "Julia and Nellie," very close cousins make "a marriage in all but name" back in the days of easy scandal. The nature of the liaison never mentioned, the family waives its Presbyterian morality in the face of family deviance. In "Hampton," her grandmother's servant, who has constructed a world closed to whites, evades the author's tentative efforts at a meeting of minds. And finally, in "On Second Creek," Douglas confronts her obsession with the long-lost--or -buried--facts of the "examination and execution" of slaves who may or may not have plotted an uprising. Having published fiction for four decades, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact. It's a book, she says, "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling." It's about secrets, judgments, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It's about the truth in fiction and the fiction in "truth." Praise for Ellen Douglas: "It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer."--Richard Ford; "Proust wrote in one of his last letters, 'one must never be afraid of going too far, for the truth is beyond.' Ellen Douglas has taken this very much to heart and has sought the truth in a region beyond falsehood; through falsehood, in effect. It's a fascinating performance."--Shelby Foote.

From Back Cover Copy

ELLEN DOUGLAS "is like nobody else."*

"[She] attacks with unladylike power and gusto, with a style at once cheerful and sardonic, with a kind of black-hearted good humor, and with an inventiveness which puts some outlandish folk up to some wondrous doings." -- Walker Percy

"Unsettling. Brilliant. Urgent and relentless in [her] search for truth--a truth." -- Ursula Hegi

"For all her deceptively quiet manner and muted ton, [her] own perception is fierce." -- Elizabeth Spencer

"She demonstrates a mastery of technique that brings to mind the exquisite texture of Philip Roth. But finally, she is like nobody else." -- *Michael Dorris

"It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer." -- Richard Ford

From Flap Copy

"Proust wrote in one of his last letters, 'one must never be afraid of going too far, for the truth is beyond.' Ellen Douglas has taken this very much to heart and has sought the truth in a region beyond falsehood; through falsehood, in effect. It's a fascinating performance." -- Shelby Foote

Now that she has outlived those who might have objected to her telling four family secrets, Ellen Douglas does just that.

A novelist revered for her storytelling, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact to tell four stories in which she seeks the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately, about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. In collection, they make a book its author describes as "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling. It's about secrets, judgements, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It's about the truth in fiction and the fiction in 'truth.'"

Josephine Haxton, who took the pseudonym Ellen Douglas in 1962 to protect her family's privacy upon publication of her first novel, is the author of seven previous books, all fiction. Two of them, A Family's Affair and Black Cloud, White Cloud were both included in the New York Times Book Review's Year's Ten Best listings. Her fourth novel, Apostles of Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. At seventy-seven, Douglas has won respect as a novelist who dared to chip away at the wall blocking communication between Southern Whites and blacks.

Now she turns her extraordinary powers of observation directly onto events that involve her own blocked communications and the struggle to make sense of them. The result is perhaps this complex and important writer's most complex and important work. As USA Today has said of her work, "Racism is not simply a failure to understand others, Douglas suggests, but most profoundly a failure to understand one's own condition. To find a so subtle and important an idea...[is] as rare and welcome a thing as wisdom."

Author Biography

Ellen Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest settlements in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Her fiction has won many prizes, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She lives now in Jackson, Mississippi.

From the Back Cover

ELLEN DOUGLAS "is like nobody else."*

"She attacks with unladylike power and gusto, with a style at once cheerful and sardonic, with a kind of black-hearted good humor, and with an inventiveness which puts some outlandish folk up to some wondrous doings." -- Walker Percy

"Unsettling. Brilliant. Urgent and relentless in her search for truth--a truth." -- Ursula Hegi

"For all her deceptively quiet manner and muted ton, her own perception is fierce." -- Elizabeth Spencer

"She demonstrates a mastery of technique that brings to mind the exquisite texture of Philip Roth. But finally, she is like nobody else." -- *Michael Dorris

"It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer." -- Richard Ford

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0452281024
• ISBN 13: 9780452281028
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback