Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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JANUARY 27 - FEBRUARY 2, 2016 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Former Civil Rights journalist turned college professor Frye Gaillard came to town earlier this month at the behest of the North Carolina Civil War History Center Foundation (full disclosure — I serve on the foundation board). Gaillard discussed his most recent book, Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family's Civil War Letters. It is a curated account of one family's Civil War experience through their letters, vividly illustrating yet again the excruciating ambivalence and pain that accompanied our nation's deadliest conf lict. Gaillard's book also reminds us, as if we needed reminding in this election year, that we have yet to resolve many of the issues that troubled Americans 150 years ago. Gaillard headed back to A labama, leav ing his audience with much to think about regarding long-running current s in American life, but I was struck as well by another of his work s, The Books That Mattered: A Reader's Memoir. A lifelong consumer of book s, I was inst antly transpor ted to my earliest memories of book s that have become par t of me. Before I could even read, my mother read to me. We wept together when Christopher Robin decided it was time to put Winnie the Pooh away as a childish toy. We laughed when Scuppers the Sailor Dog hanged a " hat on the hook for his hat and his rope on the hook for his rope." Later I lost my self in Frances Hodgson Burnet t 's Secret Garden and resolved to live in a tree house like the Swiss Family Robinson. Event ually, I moved on to the Nanc y Drew series, biographies of famous women, and by the time I was a teenager, I read ever y thing I could get my hands on, including some tot ally age-inappropriate book s, probably swathed in blanket s in hopes no one would notice me and my reading material. From the time I could read, I did so until my eyes watered — sometimes under the covers with a f lashlight and later boldly with my best lamp blazing. Fr ye Gaillard reveals that his love of reading began a bit later in life. He was not smit ten by fair y t ales, most of which seemed to him to involve eating lit tle children. At 9, though, he discovered Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain, a Revolutionar y War t ale which t urned young Fr ye into a lifelong reader. The grown up Gaillard organizes the book s that speak to him by theme, with "Southern Voices" including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, still among America's best selling book s over f ive decades af ter it s publication. His "Dark ness" chapter includes book s that explore human ev il, including Night by Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank 's Diar y of a Young Girl, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kur t Vonnegut and John Hersey 's Hiroshima. A Southerner as well as a Civ il R ight s journalist, one would expect Gaillard to delve into issues of race and he does through African-American writers such as R ichard Wright, James Baldwin and Henr y Louis Gates as well as fellow white Southerners William Faulk ner and one of my favorites, Walker Perc y. In "Poetr y, Prose and a Sense of Place" Gaillard confesses that his favorite book is Rober t Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a book both so Southern we can imagine it even today and so universal that people in other nation's underst and it s truth. In "Family Values" he reminds us of the lessons A lex Haley teaches in Roots and those pounded in, perhaps inadver tently in The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. He gives a nod to Cumberland Count y 's own Tim McLaurin, an author whose snake-handling ways and Keeper of the Moon, his memoir of a boyhood on the east side of the Cape Fear R iver, makes me sad that our paths never crossed. Finally, Gaillard k nows that while reading is how human beings have learned for millennia, sometimes we do it just for f un. Book s resonating in that categor y for him include James Herriot 's A ll Creat ures Great and Small, a favorite of the young Dick sons, Walking Across Egypt by Nor th Carolinian Clyde Edger ton and the always wonderf ul Lee Smith, a Virginia girl who got to the Tar Heel st ate as soon as she could. My list of book s is long and, unlike Gaillard's, tot ally unorganized, but reading his, we share many of the same book s that have meaning for us. One of mine that did not make Gaillard's list is The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a novel by Rock y Mount native A llan Gurganus. A 99-year woman delivers nothing shor t of a spect acular monologue about her marriage at 15 to a 50 year old Civ il War veteran, touching along the way on slaver y, racism, the horrors of Reconstruction, the mysteries of marriage, raising children — in shor t, the human condition, a f ictional account of some of the same themes Gaillard's ancestors recounted in their let ters. A tome by anyone's def inition, it is both a romp through things Southern and things true. We all have our own list s, and Gaillard's book pushes me to think about mine. I would love to hear about yours. We Are What We Read by MARGARET DICKSON OPINION MARGARET DICKSON. Columnist. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com. 910.484.6200.