North Carolina
Where the Crawdads Sing
After a period of intense serious studying of the ethical variety I felt the need for some lighter air. Ahah, time to visit a 2018 runaway bestseller which has been sitting on my shelf tempting me to play truant.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a one off. 
It combines the expertise of a real-life naturalist with the instincts of a lyrical author; a mix of murder mystery and a coming of age narrative and gentle romance. Descriptions of the lagoons and channels of the North Carolina coast in the1950s and 60s, the native birds and insects, the shells and grasses, are amazingly evocative, and form a perfect ongoing backdrop to the story, a veritable peon to nature.
Catherine Danielle (Kya) Clark is a child abandoned in stages – first by her mother when Kya is only 6, then by each of her siblings, and finally her drunken father. She’s left to live a solitary life in a rundown shack on the marshes with no income save that gleaned from selling the mussels and oysters she garners from the mud before daylight. The Truant Officer manages to get her to school for one day, but she contrives to elude the authorities thereafter, determined not to expose herself to ridicule and abuse from people who know her only as the Marsh Girl. She may be unable to read or write but she’s super-observant when it comes to the wildlife of the marshes, and she painstakingly amasses a collection of feathers and shells and grasses, painting identifying pictures on brown grocery bags to tell their story – a prelude to her eventually becoming an acknowledged expert and renowned published author of many books.
Not one of the town’s church groups or families holds out a helping hand to this abandoned child, but a black couple who supply fuel for her boat, keep a kindly eye on her, slipping her small sums of money and cast-off clothes. And in time, a local lad, Tate, approaches her territory sensitively and kindly, sharing her love of nature, and teaches her to read.
When Tate moves on to University to become a scientist, Kya feels abandoned yet again, making her all too susceptible to the wiles and false promises of handsome seducer, Chase Andrews. Kya is by now a beautiful but unfathomable young woman, made the more vulnerable by her isolation and lack of social awareness. But she’s learned the hard way how to look after herself, so when Chase attempts to abuse her she fights back and leaves him wounded and vengeful.
Some years later when Chase’s body is found sixty feet below a tower not far from Kya’s patch, minus a shell necklace she had made for him, the finger of suspicion points to Kya, even though there is no evidence at all to show she was anywhere near the tower on that night; on the contrary she was visiting her publisher faraway at the time in question. But the zealous Sheriff arrests her and locks her in a cell for two months before her case is heard in court. – a severe punishment in itself for a wild-child who has never been confined anywhere. But listening to the evidence, the townspeople finally begin to appreciate the enormity of their neglect and the sheer resilience and strength of this self-sufficient girl. I won’t spoil things for you by divulging the result of the trial, suffice to say the unexpected ending leaves one’s sympathies exactly where they should be.
This is a debut novel, but Owens is a spectacularly good writer. Just a few examples must suffice:
Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws – not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes.
As she rounded a stand of tall grass, suddenly the ocean’s face – gray, stern, and pulsing – frowned at her. Waves slammed one another, awash in their own white saliva, breaking apart on the shore with loud booms – energy searching for a beachhead, Then they flattened into quiet tongues of foam, waiting for the next surge.
Berkley Cove served its religion hard-boiled and deep-fried. Tiny as it was, the village supported four churches, and those were just for the whites; the blacks had three more.
The limited use of the local dialect is pitch perfect, and the sympathetic portrait of our heroine is both moving and unsettling. The pace is slow and exactly right for a backwater small town, but nevertheless the tension created by the side-by-side narratives of Kya’s struggle to survive and the unravelling of the mystery of Chase’s death, is maintained to the end. If I have a niggling complaint it’s that very occasionally the author shares the thoughts of secondary characters, which doesn’t work for me.
I was dismayed to discover that both the author and the major film which followed the book are shadowed by unsavoury criticism, so I stopped researching further lest more revelations should taint my enjoyment of a superb piece of literature. Craven and dishonest, I know, but still …
Eugenics: fact and fiction
You’ve probably already heard of the American Eugenics Sterilization Program, in operation in the late 19th, early 20th century. If not … a quick résumé by way of context for today’s post.
The ‘program’ was designed to preserve and improve the strongest and ‘best’ within the society, and it did so by preventing the birth of babies to men and women with mental and social problems: the ‘mentally defective‘, ‘morons‘, the ‘feeble-minded‘, those with epilepsy, families on ‘welfare‘ – the very language makes us cringe today, doesn’t it? But sterilizing these unfortunate citizens was considered to be in the ‘public good‘. It was later judged – rightly – as a terrible violation of human rights, but it’s only in the last few years that any sense of justice or compensation has been offered.
Most states stopped this practice after World War II, uncomfortable with the comparison with the Nazi eugenic experiments in Germany, about which much more is known, but North Carolina continued, and is said to have carried out as many as 7600 such operations between 1929 and 1975. North Carolina was also the only state to give social workers the power to petition for the operation for specific individuals; elsewhere it was limited to those already in institutions.
It’s against this shameful period of American history that Diane Chamberlain 
sets her novel, Necessary Lies. As a former social worker herself, she’s probably got a certain edge when it comes to writing on this subject; she beautifully captures the ambivalence some professionals felt in determining what was in the best interests of their clients at a time when few choices existed; punitive views relating to sexual behaviour were prevalent; little was known about genetic inheritance; racial intolerance was rife; and class distinctions were very much the norm.
Jane Forrester is a young idealistic woman, newly married to a doctor, Robert, who disapproves of wives working. Jane unilaterally decides to postpone having children herself in order to become a social worker and help vulnerable families. When she encounters the Harts – two teenage girls, an illegitimate son, and an ageing grandmother – living in abject poverty, she simply cannot stand by while their rights are abused by well-meaning professionals. Before long she’s in deep trouble with her husband, her colleagues, and the police.
Chamberlain herself acknowledges that this was a research-heavy novel, but it doesn’t come across that way. The simplicity of the narrators’ voices, the un-sensationalised story line, the authentic emotions, combine to make this tale both challenging and gripping, heart-stopping and powerful. I’m not sure I’d have had the courage to be a Jane Forrester, but I’d definitely have wanted her on my side, deceptions and head lice notwithstanding! How about you?