In college, a certain Literature 101 professor of mine foisted upon us many works of southern writing. Flannery O’Connor was among them, and he took particular pleasure in recounting part of one of her essays:
“Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man.”
I liked the section of class on southern writers, but, in retrospect, I’m sorry Professor Fagen left out Kaye Gibbons and her creation, the indomitable, so-pithy-she’s-a-freak Ellen Foster.
Ellen is but eleven years old. She’s a whole person, though, observant and astute, who loses her mother in the first few pages of the book and lands in a foster home. The book picks up with Ellen, happy in a home she likes, with a “new mama” she likes, reflecting on her life, and how she got to where she is today.
The book reads, for the first few pages, as if it’s going to be all flashback, peppered with a few little glimpses on what life is like now for Ellen. But Gibbons executes a compelling story line, slowly revealing what happens from Ellen’s point of view and in her wonderful, complete voice. Somehow, although the past takes up the bulk of the first part of the book, by the middle of it, the scales have shifted to be weighted more heavily with Ellen’s current life, and you’re wondering how she got to the magical foster home she’s in. She’s such a great narrator that you’re willing to see her through until you know she’s safely in the home for good.
You meet Ellen’s relatives along the way, and you meet her best friend, Starletta, who happens to be black. Through her interactions with the folks she meets on the way to her new home, you get a complete picture of who Ellen is, and even who she’ll grow up to be. Gibbons’ turns of phrases and her capability to channel an 11-year-old white girl living in the segregated South are scary-good, and the speed at which the story moves is lightning-fast: you cover over a year in 126 pages.
This is not an earth-shattering book. It does not attempt to answer cosmic questions about why we are all here, and it does not want to be all things to all people. But there’s an old story, isn’t there, about a guy who spent all day walking up and down a beach, chucking star fish back into the ocean? When asked why he’d engage in such a meaningless task, as there were hundreds of starfish littered up and down the shore, he picked up another one, flung it back into the ocean, and said, “It made a difference to that one.”
Ellen Foster’s story made a difference to me.