By Linda C. Brinson Special to the News & Record — Maybe, Susan Rivers said, the roots of \u201cThe Second Mrs. Hockaday,\u201d her novel about a young wife whose Confederate husband was off at war, go back to her student days at Ponderosa High School in Shingle Springs, Calif.<\/p>\n
A true crime story from Civil War days was the immediate catalyst, but the seeds had been planted decades earlier.<\/p>\n
The high school\u2019s librarian, a transplant from Alabama, fired Rivers\u2019 imagination about what it meant to be a Southern woman. \u201cThis was before \u2018Steel Magnolias,\u2019\u201d Rivers said in a recent interview. \u201cShe told me all Southern women are schizophrenic. She said, \u2018We have to be all soft and pretty and sweet and cream and sugar on the outside, and on the inside, we\u2019ve got to be hard and tough and able to throttle a bear, so we\u2019re crazy.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
Other teachers at the small school opened her mind to different ways of thinking about \u201cliterature, storytelling, humanity \u2014 the way people approach life and family and love and ideas.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do wonder if all that is what prepared me for living in the South,\u201d she said, because the South \u2014 the Carolinas, specifically \u2014 is where she\u2019s lived and written for the past 20 years.<\/p>\n
Before moving to North Carolina, Rivers had been active in theater in California. She acted and wrote plays, with considerable success. The playwriting grew out of frustration: \u201cI wrote my first play at 24, when I was working with friends in the theater. I began to realize there just weren\u2019t enough roles being written for women, for good actresses. The plays were all written by young, white men, and the women in them were all prostitutes or mothers,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
So she wrote \u201cMaud Gonne Says No to the Poet,\u201d about the woman who was the object of the poet William Butler Yeats\u2019 long, unrequited love. A production of that play in San Francisco gave her career a boost.<\/p>\n
But after marrying a man who was a director and actor, Rivers began to see the theater world differently.<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized that all of these brilliant actors that I worked with were going to AA meetings or calling their exes on the phone to talk to their children. I thought, \u2018Oh my God, I can\u2019t stay in theater. I want a real life. I want a family.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
So she and her husband quit theater. She wrote nonfiction and short fiction. He went into the corporate world. \u201cWe wanted to be somewhere where things were done differently,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
A job offer for her husband in Wake County was as different as they could imagine, so in 1995 they moved to Wake Forest.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so beautiful \u2014 the woods, the birds in the morning, the lightning bugs, the seasons, the people,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was so quiet, so sleepy. Our daughter was 7, and she loved it. I said, \u2018Maybe we won\u2019t fit in, but we have to have the experience.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
Everything seemed great. They had their dream home. Their daughter loved her school.<\/p>\n
But after about a year, Hurricane Fran came through, devastating their neighborhood and their house. And her husband was downsized out of a job.<\/p>\n
He interviewed for a position in Silicon Valley, \u201cbut when he got off the phone and we looked at each other, we shook our heads and said we didn\u2019t want to go back.\u201d<\/p>\n
So he took a job in Charlotte, a \u201cvibrant\u201d community they enjoyed. Their daughter grew up and headed off to college at Chapel Hill, and Rivers went to school as well, earning an MFA in creative writing at Queens University.<\/p>\n
Then the recession of 2009 led to the closing of the plant where her husband worked, and the couple made one more move: to the town of Blacksburg in Cherokee County, S.C.<\/p>\n
One hot day in July 2014, she found herself in the History Room of a nearby library. She\u2019d been trying to work on a novel about a middle-age woman alone on a farm during the Civil War, but the book didn\u2019t seem to be going anywhere.<\/p>\n
Then she found an obscure book of true stories about the Civil War era in Georgia, written by one Hu Daughtry, including the account of an inquest into a charge that Elizabeth Kennedy, the teenage wife of a Confederate soldier, had concealed the birth and death of her illegitimate child while her husband was away at war.<\/p>\n
Intrigued, Rivers sent for records from the relevant county. Her research unearthed theories about whom the father might have been and information that the charges were eventually dismissed. And, though Arthur Kennedy had filed for divorce, the couple reconciled.<\/p>\n
\u201cReading that just fired up my imagination, unlike with anything I\u2019d ever written before,\u201d she said. \u201cI read that she never told anybody except perhaps her husband what happened to her, who fathered the child and how the child died. I thought, of course she couldn\u2019t tell the story in 1865, but I\u2019m going to tell it in 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had been looking for inspiration for that piece I had started, but I just set that aside and never went back to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
As she wrote, she drew on the many visits she and her family had made over the years to plantations and historical sites from Monticello to Charleston, S.C, and beyond, including Stagville State Historic Site, an antebellum plantation in Durham. The slave cabins, which were falling down when they visited, lingered in her mind.<\/p>\n
Though she was drawing on history, Rivers said, she wanted her story to feel like \u201cnow,\u201d and that dictated the novel\u2019s structure. \u201cI wanted to bring home to the reader what it felt like for the people in the South to have an invading army \u2014 the fear, panic and feeling of being abandoned that a lot of women experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n
The novel she\u2019d been working on was in third person, but once she decided to tell the teenage wife\u2019s story, \u201cI jumped immediately on a less filtered way to get to her voice. I didn\u2019t want to do just first person, because I knew I also wanted to deal with her descendants,\u201d she said. Her extensive research into primary sources also influenced her, as did her theater background.<\/p>\n
So she created letters, journal entries and court documents to tell the story with the kind of \u201cimmediacy\u201d found in a play, she said. No narrative, nothing, comes between what the characters have to say and the reader.<\/p>\n
She hopes that story will further understanding of the past, not just of the South, but of the United States. \u201cThe more I study, the more I realize that the history of the South is the history of this country, because of how we developed from our earliest beginnings,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to find a way to acknowledge that period and how these issues tore us apart, and then find a way back to some kind of reconciliation and progressive policy. \u2026 I just wish we could acknowledge that this is how the country was created. We have to view that, acknowledge it and just move on. We all belong here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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