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Josephine Humphreys: Nowhere Else on Earth
- University of South Carolina Press
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Josephine Humphreys Nowhere Else on Earth Clara Juncker A Biographical Sketch On the first page of Josephine Humphreys’s fourth novel, the so-called Queen of Scuffletown raises a question: What is history? And with her question she joins a long line of southern writers and characters who take upon themselves the burden of the past and offer up their interpretations of this elusive subject. In her fiction Josephine Humphreys has sought to dream up her own historical scenarios, at odds with established historical accounts. Her characters insist on self-narration and self-definition, as does Rhoda Lowrie, the narrator of Nowhere Else on Earth (2000). On November 3, 1890, Rhoda begins the account of her people and the place where they live. During the Civil War and its turbulent aftermath, she takes on the role of historian of the Native American community in Scuffletown, on the Lumbee River in Robeson County, North Carolina. Josephine Humphreys’s birth in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 2, 1945, links her to a rich historical heritage, which other Charleston writers, Mamie Garvin Fields and Pam Durban among them, have also explored. Humphreys earned degrees from Duke University, where she completed undergraduate work in 1967, and from Yale, where she received her master’s degree in English in 1968. After completing her course work toward her doctoral degree at the University of Texas, Austin, she accepted a position at the present Charleston Southern University in 1971, where she taught until she decided to become a full-time writer in 1978 (Perry and Weaks 2002, 579). Her four novels all engage the history of the South, directly or indirectly, but Nowhere Else on Earth places the past at center stage. Humphreys’s first three novels prepare the ground, or the swamp, for the history of the Lumbee Indians in North Carolina that Nowhere Else presents. In Dreams of Sleep (1984), awarded the Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel in 1985, Will and Alice Reese go through a marital crisis, which their babysitter Iris Moon, a lower-class, no-nonsense white girl, witnesses and helps bring to a tentative end. At one point in the rocky Reese marriage, Will escapes from his family and a sea resort to Bloody Marsh, where the Spanish were 30 Clara Juncker defeated, and to Fort Fredericia, where the English first settled in Georgia. History comforts him because it is alive and authentic, and his present place is not (76). In Rich in Love (1987), adapted to the screen by Metro-GoldwynMayer , the historical echoes sound in the story unfolding around the seventeen -year-old narrator Lucille Odom, her collapsing family, and her brief affair with Billy McQueen, her brother-in-law. He is a historian looking for work in Charleston, where “history was in the making all around us” (53). Lucille ponders the function of history, “to get it down on paper, to be the official human memory” (52). She seems particularly enthralled by the Indian pottery hiding in the marsh. These “relics of ancient men” (130) reassure her and allow for a panoramic vision of her own adolescent struggles and joys. “Everything is history ,” as Billy explains when helping Lucille with her high school exams (215). The Fireman’s Fair (1991) revolves less explicitly around the southern past. It describes the existence of a single, thirty-something Charleston lawyer, Rob Wyatt, who in the aftermath of the Hurricane Hugo disaster reevaluates his life and his loves. As in other of Humphreys’s novels, Rob must come to terms with his individual history before he may escape from loneliness, passivity, and indecision . But his post-hurricane surroundings, in which pianos rest desolately on flooded lawns and water invades houses and streets, suggest a world turned upside down and the hybrid nature of history that Nowhere Else on Earth explores. As with Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Nowhere Else takes place in a remote region of the Civil War South, and it is Josephine Humphreys’s most explicitly historical work. Like other southern writers, she explores how the history of the region is being altered and recovered. Nowhere Else on Earth As Gayle Graham Yates tells us in “The North Carolina Lumbee People” (2008), Lumbee Indians sided with the colonists during the American Revolution and were charged with pro-Union sympathies during the Civil War. The original Lumbees considered present-day Pembroke in Robeson County their home; in the nineteenth century it was called Scuffletown. Soldiers from both Civil...