On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
 Kaye Gibbons
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1998 G.P.Putnam's Sons
 ISBN: 0399142991

Emma Garnet Tate Lowell remembers her long life during interesting times. From daughter of a slave & plantation owner to wife of a New England doctor during the Civil War.

On my first attempt to read this little book, which fits neatly into my coat pocket, I had to put it down. I even thought about returning it unread to the library, so shocked was I by its opening page. Then I remembered I really like Kaye Gibbons' works and trust her craft. So I picked it up again and allowed Young Emma Garnet to lure me further into the pages.

Old Emma is waiting for death in the house where her husband died many years before. She is now reminiscing, looking back along her long life, pondering on her blessings: the treasured memories of her brother; the miracle of her husband's love and integrity; the travail of her children's lives in changing times; her new life up north away from all she had known and yearned to leave.

Kaye Gibbons has created a profoundly evocative account of an era long since demolished by that horrible internecine war we fought. We see that time, the 1840s along the James River, through the eyes of Emma, one of the children of a self-made, wealthy plantation owner and his long-suffering blue-blood wife and their slaves. Because she was young enough to be mostly cared for by her father's original and most trusted servant, she could step between the worlds of the big house and the slaves' quarters; she can speak both the language of the white man and the thoughts of the slaves' sight.

Young Emma introduces us to all-knowing and fearless Clarice, to the history of their plantation and river, to other landowners and the ubiquitous slave population. We see Emma's home, her family and her beloved older brother with the bright, unflinching eyes of a child. As children are wont, her thoughts and observations ring true and are not at all sugar-coated.

Old Emma is making her peace, letting down the burden of her memories of her father's dreadful behavior. Even as Emma aches to believe in whatever Clarice confides to her as to what made her father who he is; when her father does arrive in their midst, it is only with her husband's strength that Emma learns how to free herself from her father's battering ways.

Kay Gibbons makes you look the beast in the eye, makes you smell its rank breath and makes you stare it down until all you see is one pitiable, perishable moment when unkind and ungentle times made for hard choices turning hearts rigid. All through her life Emma Garnet has kept her heart flexible and now, on the occasion of her last afternoon, she invites us to hear her stories for the last time and to walk away with our own memories of a story well told.

A very different read is this one. I liked it immensely and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca