On Agate Hill: A Novel

On Agate Hill is a delicious book, one you can lose yourself in. Lee Smith's indomitable heroine Molly Petree is a Civil War orphan. We follow her adventures through diary entries and letters over a period of 55 years. The reader first encounters 13 year-old Molly at Agate Hill, the run-down plantation where she seeks refuge in a cubbyhole from a strange menagerie of folks who inhabit the mansion after the death of her aunt, its former owner. Simon Black, Molly's mysterious benefactor, sees to her education at an academy for girls, then follows her career as a schoolteacher in the back hills, near the border of Tennessee, and subsequent marriage to a charming backwoods banjo player. Lee Smith has woven a captivating story with her inimitable style and scintillating voice. On Agate Hill will delight anyone who loved Fair and Tender Ladies. It is a mystery to me why this author has not received more acclaim for her body of work.

This award-winning author's novel of the post-Civil War south succeeds because - and in spite of - its iconic plot devices and choppy plot construction. The bundle of old diaries, letters and other documents that tell the story of Molly Petree's life have been collected in the present day by the self-named Tuscany Miller, a funny, sassy example of modern southern womanhood. A beauty pageant veteran whose father has recently undergone a sex-change operation and remarried as Ava, Tuscany wants to return to college and proposes to use the documents to design a new thesis. We meet Molly, an orphan, in 1872 on her 13th birthday. She has lost not only her parents but her four siblings as well. Two of her brothers and her father were killed in battle and childbirth took care of the rest, including her beloved aunt, mistress of Agate Hill. "I live in a house of ghosts," writes Molly in her new diary. The diary ends the day she is rescued from neglect and rape by a brooding mysterious benefactor and sent to a girls' boarding school. From this point on, we view Molly mostly through others' eyes, with two exceptions. The first is Molly's letters to an invalid friend, which continue throughout her life, despite the early cessation of replies, and the last is an appendage to her diary after years of tumult, tragedy and striving. Other views include that of Mariah, the dour, repressed headmistress who hates her (Molly has caught her creepy husband's eye), and Agnes, Mariah's sweet, spinster sister, a teacher at the Academy and a good friend to Molly. The first section of the book is the strongest. Molly's young, grieving, bewildered voice is nonetheless strong and full of life in the aftermath of devastating war. The plantation lies in ruins from lack of money, and the house servants - ex-slaves - stay on unpaid through lack of means and fear of the unknown. It's a time of lynchings and bitterness. Uncle Junius, Molly's guardian, is ill and dying and in thrall to his housekeeper, Selena, a lusty, scheming woman who's trying only to keep body and soul together as best she can with her three wild daughters. She gets Junius to marry her so she can keep the plantation when he's gone. She neglects Molly and is roundly despised by snooty visiting relatives and resident ex-slaves alike, but she works her fingers to the bone and keeps the place going until Junius dies and the unpaid servants leave. It's only then, when her best friend Washington is leaving, that Molly learns the boy's real name, Elijah. " `Washington my slave name, give to me by your Uncle Junius.' `But it's a good name, isn't it?' I said. `Don't you like it? It's the president of our country after all.' `Not my country,' Washington said." Then Molly too is gone, whisked off to the girls' academy. Her diary ends and the reader's intimacy with her is interrupted. Only scattered letters allow us a glimpse of her thoughts and feelings. Molly is growing up. She blossoms at the Academy, popular

Lee Smith's new novel, On Agate Hill, is the story of an orphan and what happens to her in the reconstruction era South. That is the short plot, but this book is so much more than that. Smith fascinates us with all kinds of details of everyday life in a period many of us know little about. Though Molly Petree's life unfolds in ways we do not expect, it is really Smith's sense of place and time that are the stars of this book. The South of the reconstruction was hardscrabble and desperate. The land had been everything to so many and when there were no slaves to work it and no money to pay for working it, where did folks go? The novel takes us through the massive upheaval of an agrarian way of life, shows us how the white farmers dealt with change and what happened to the men who came home and the women who were left to fend for themselves on land they could no longer work. The characters in the book are where they landed as the story begins. Molly is the orphan of a dashing, war dead father and a mother who had, before the war, never brushed her own hair, having had others to do that for her. Junius Jefferson Hall, her mother's cousin is now Molly's guardian. Hall's house in Agate Hill, North Carolina, is overrun with 30 people, black and white alike, trying to stay alive as the only livelihoods they have known vanish. Fannie Hall, Molly's mother, has died in childbirth and 13 year-old Molly determines never to have babies. "The things that people really want the most like to kill them, it seems to me, such as war and babies." It is 1871. Molly's story is pieced together by modern day Tuscany Miller, a former graduate student from Atlanta, who writes to her old professor in hopes of persuading him to allow her to return to finish her thesis. While Tuscany has her own very modern tale to tell, and I must say it is hilarious and Smith might consider using this character again, here she provides the vehicle for the author to introduce Molly's diary so that the story unfolds in first person. The Civil War cost at least 620,000 American lives. The economy of the South was destroyed and, like the pictures we see of war and disasters around the world today, the refugees hung on, then peeled away to find new lives when nothing of the old way worked. Molly was, she said, a ghost girl, with a ghost family. She belonged to no one and she kept bits of this and that in small box in a cubbyhole at Agate Hill, the sum of her possessions. Having been somewhat educated on Agate Hill, she steps into a different world when, though good luck, she arrives at The Gatewood Academy for young ladies in Virginia. Boarding schools were not uncommon in towns and villages of the pre-war South. We learn educated young women were taught elocution, history, art and Bibles studies, among other things. The character of Mariah Snow, the Headmistress at Gatewood, demonstrates that human nature is what it has always been. Marriages are made of more or far less than love and

Lee Smith's latest novel, ON AGATE HILL, covers 50 years or so-- 1872 to 1927-- of the life of one Molly Petree, who is orphaned as a youngster, is taken in by relatives on a run-down plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina, goes away to school for young girls called Gatewood Academy, teaches in a one-room school in the North Carolina mountains and ultimately marries a wild banjo picker. The tale unfolds through diaries and letters that Tuscany Miller in the present has gotten hold of from her former father Wayne, who because of modern medical technology is now Ava, and her husband Michael. They (Michael and Ava) found a box full of diaries, songs, poems, etc., when they purchased Agate Hill to turn into a bed and breakfast. As always, Ms. Smith writes with delightful humor. Tuscany, who has renamed herself in high school, had decided not to do a thesis on "Beauty Shop Culture in the South: Big Hair and Community." The sexually repressed Mariah Snow endures the marriage bed by reciting in her head portions of Milton's "Paradise Lost." There are beautiful passages as well, for instance, when the young Molly's uncle asks her if she came to help him with the sunrise. Ms. Smith also has perfect pitch when it comes to dialogue and common sayings from the Appalachian Mountains: "Cat got your tongue?" A character is "old as the hills." Another is "tickled." Farmers raise "banty roosters." Children are "younguns." And finally the strange construction that I hear sometimes in these parts, "I taken." In spite of all the frivolity here, this novel can be as serious and sad as a country burying. The period immediately after the Civil War was hard for everyone, black and white folks alike. Some children lost parents in the war; others died in infancy. Ms. Smith chronicles the times, writing about friendship, love, sorrow, grief, but also living life to the fullest. She has also writen an eloquent essay about the numbing experience of losing a son at 33 and how writing this book saved her life. She says she made her son a character near the end of this long, sprawling novel in Juney, who calls Molly "Mammalee." This novel can best be summed up in the words of the character BJ who says that we are all looking for some "kind of a life of our own." ON AGATE HILL is certainly as good as anything I have ever read by Lee Smith.

Like most of Lee Smith's novels, this is excellent. It reminded me of "Jane Eyre", the classic British novel about an orphan girl who faces tremendous challenges in her life. It may also remind you of "Gone with the Wind", with the post-Civil War setting (except that the Ku Klux Klan in this story have no redeeming qualities at all- which is more accurate), and the amount of suffering experienced by the heroine. The first part of the story, Molly Petree's childhood, is really the best- it is haunting. The rest of it is nearly as good. At one point Molly writes "I gave it my whole heart. I would do it again." That also describes how I feel about this book. Smith clearly did a great job with her research to make this story feel so real.