Southern Recollections

Fred Hobson is one of the most astute students of southern life who is writing today. The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays is a miscellany rich with appreciations, literary criticism, and biographical and autobiographical ponderings. Age often transforms intellectual and abstract musings into the particular and the familial. Two of Hobson's best pieces explore the lives of family members—that of his great-grandmother Emily Mullen Gregory who committed suicide in 1881 by jumping into a well and that of his great aunt Lelia Tuttle, who taught in China from 1909 to 1941, initially at a Methodist secondary school in Shanghai, then at Soochow University, where she was dean of women.

Rarely do family lines scan. Instead of breaking into neat quatrains, family histories shatter into mysterious allusions and complex free verse. As a result stories about family members resemble literary interpretation and often reveal more about the teller than they do about actual events. I spent childhood summers on my maternal grandfather's farm in Virginia. Every Friday my mother, grandmother, and I drove to Richmond and visited my great aunt Lucille, grandmother's sister. Aunt Lucille and grandmother always talked about Bub, a beloved brother living in Florida. Never did they mention another brother living ten miles away. Only at his death when I was in my forties did I learn about his existence. No relative attended his funeral. His death was simply recorded, then shoveled out of conversation. Was he a drinker? Had he married inappropriately or squandered borrowed money? Occasionally I have wondered about him and his family—if he had a family. But I have never investigated his story, the old saw. Let sleeping family members lie governing my inaction. In any case I don't know his Christian name or even where he lived, the ten miles being just something I heard my grandmother say.

Only when Hobson's mother was seventy did she learn about her grandmother's suicide. "I wonder," Hobson writes, "if ever my grandmother, Emily Gregory's own daughter, knew." Intrigued and having reached the age at which genealogy becomes more intriguing to one than literary criticism, Hobson sets out to discover if Emily Gregory really killed herself and, if she did, why. He rummages through cartons of musty records: cemetery, church, newspaper, and family, this last the most unreliable record of all. He finds little until a librarian directs him to a microfilm reprint of the Greensboro Patriot, in which he discovers an obituary. The obituary does not mention suicide. Shelved next to the Patriot, however, is microfilm copy of the North State, a newspaper not mentioned by the librarian. Amid pages that hawk cure-alls for "torpid liver and catarrh of the bladder," he finds an obituary that mentions Emily Gregory's suicide.

At the funeral for Hobson's great-grandmother, the preacher took as his text "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom." In his essay Hobson mediates wisely, speculating about family history and women's lives in late nineteenth-century North Carolina. Postpartum depression may have influenced Emily Gregory. She was the mother of nine children, the youngest only four months old. Hobson resists the temptation of an easy answer, however. Suicides are almost as common in southern families as alcoholism. In my family, lives unaccountably stop mid-page. Since my family rarely discussed suicides, I don't know the number of close relatives who killed themselves. I suspect suicides were not discussed, not because of shame, but because of the fear that children would overhear and consequently see suicide as a...