On Agate Hill by Lee Smith (review)

Lee Smith. On Agate Hill. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006, 367 pages. Hardback. $24.95. In her usual fashion of giving us full family stories, Lee Smithwrites a novel that spans generations, although the focus is clearly on one Molly Petree whose life covers the years of 1859-1927. In some respects this is a Civil War and Reconstruction story, but it is also a human interest story in much the same vein as Ivy Rowe's narrative in Lee Smith's beloved 1988 novel, Fair and Tender Ladies. Indeed, I hear many echoes of Ivy Rowe, who dreamed of becoming a writer who would write of love. Molly Petree also writes of love to fulfill the requests of her childhood friend Mary White Worthington, but in each case the love story takes a very different turn from that imagined by the naïve, idealistic youngsters. Both books are told through the medium of written chronicles: letters composed by Ivy Rowe throughout virtually her whole life; Molly's diary and letters, others' journal entries, letters and reports, school and court records, all of which contribute to the story of Molly Petree and those around her. As one contemplates this book, yet another Lee Smith novel comes to mind here. Tuscany Miller, the 2006 would-be student whose letters to a professor frame and internally punctuate On Agate Hill, resembles Jennifer, the community college student who sets out to record happenings in a haunted house for a project inher Appalachian Studies class. The subsequent discoveries about the Cantrell family become the plot-line for Oral History, Smith's 1983 bestselling novel. Always intrigued by the mysterious and supernatural, Smith infuses Agate Hill Plantation with its own set of ghosts, most of whom have been victims in some form or other of the strife that was the War Between the States. Molly readily accepts them and even considers herself a "ghost girl," wondering at times if she is living or dead. As circumstances take her into totally different places and strange cultures, she remains susceptible to the mystical and mysterious, sometimes appearing to bring it with her, no matter the practicality of the environment. A ghost girl, both first and last. We meet Molly Petree at age thirteen when she begins to write in the diary that "pretty Nora Gwyn," the preacher's wife, has given her. We learn that she is an orphan, "a refugee girl," whose father was a fatality of the War in Bentonville, and whose mother and brother have recently died as well. Displaced from Columbia upon its fall to the Yankees, her family moved to Agate Hill in eastern North Carolina to the home of her mother's cousin. So many from the family have died 94 that indeed the house and plantation themselves seem to be dying. But as inanimate things have a way of doing, these outlive their owners and are still there years later when Molly Petree comes back to Agate Hill. Between the Agate Hill sojourns, Molly travels a circuitous and oftentimes tortured path into adolescence and adulthood, followed always mysteriously and somewhat ominously by Simon Black, her benefactor whose tragic life story we learn in bits and pieces that ultimately fit together near the end of the novel. From Agate Hill Molly goes first to Gatewood Academy, a boarding school for girls in Hopewell, Virginia, where she completes her education and stays on to teach for a year. This segment of the novel introduces one of the most interesting, albeit minor, characters in the large cast, Mariah Rutherford Snow, Headmistress and Director of Curriculum at the Gatewood Academy. Rigid and even cruel in her treatment of the girls, she is nonetheless a complex woman whose opportunities in life have, without doubt, been compromised as a result ofher gender, most blatantly by her husband, the Reverend Cincinnatus Snow, who turns out to be the real villain of the piece. Unfortunately for the reader (and poor Mrs. Snow), the author chooses to banish her to an insane asylum and thus out of the story. At the traumatic and abrupt close of the Gatewood years, Molly journeys with her beloved teacher and...