"The Far Family" by Wilma Dykeman

"The Far Family" is a novel written by famed Appalachian author who is, perhaps, best known for her other novel, "The Tall Woman".  I have to admit that I have read little by Wilma Dykeman over the years and had tended to focus on a few other female Appalachian authors to my own detriment.  This is fine novel about a close knit but far flung Appalachian family who grew up in Nantahalla County, a fictional county which is somewhere in the area of Western North Carolina.  That area is loosely located somewhere in Nantahala National Forest and/or Nantahala Township.  The book is written in alternating chapters labeled "Yesterday" and "Today". In terms of actual time or current time, it covers a long weekend in which the family gathers together to assist one of the sons, Clay Thurston, who has just been charged with the murder of a friend or acquaintance, a black man named Hawk Williams during an all night long hunting trip which Clay organized for several of his friends.  Hawk Williams was hired to cook for the men on the trip because of his wide spread reputation as an excellent cook.  He is also acknowledged widely as a vicious and dangerous man.  The Thurston family is composed of Clay, his brother Kin, sisters Ivy Thurston Cortland, Phoebe, and Frone.  Their mother Martha is still alive but bedfast in Ivy's home being cared for by her daughter who is a widow after having married an older widower from New York State whom she had met while living in a boarding house in town while attending high school.  Ivy has a son, Phil, who happens to be a young, newly appointed United States Senator, who has also returned for the visit and its related attempt to keep Clay, a notorious alcoholic and ne'er do well, out of the penitentiary.  The "Yesterday" chapters of the book flash back to the developmental years of the brothers and sisters and tell the story of their father's repeated hopeless attempts to make a massive mark on the world around him and his eventual relatively young death in a sawmill he owned.  

 

The book is wonderful piece of work and shows a widespread, deft, and accurate depiction of life in Central and Southern Appalachia.  It discusses the massive exodus of young men and women from Appalachia indirectly in its discussion of the lives of Clay, Phoebe, Frone, and Ivy as they married, left the area, and in all cases except that of Ivy, never returned except to visit.  Ivy and her husband had chosen to sell his New York farm in the Mid-Hudson to return to North Carolina where she raised her son after the death of her older husband.  With the accusation of murder of a black man against a white member of a prominent family in North Carolina, the issue of race relations in the Appalachian South is a key focus of the story.  It is particularly addressed in one chapter when Phil, the US Senator, and his uncle Clay, the accused murder, visit the widow and other family members of the victim Hawk Williams.  As unlikely it is that a sitting US Senator would have ever made such a trip, it is a very impressively written scene in the family's shack as the two white men are welcomed by the widow and her aged father, who reminiscences about a time when a distant relative of the two men assisted him in a legal situation and saved him from conviction in a case which would have damaged the rest of his life.  It is an accurate depiction of life encounters between the races in the south in times past and, perhaps present.   

I won't ruin anyone else's reading of the book by telling the story of the outcome of the murder accusation against Clay and the conclusion of the book.  But it does involve another aspect of the race issue in the Southern Appalachians.  It is a wonderful book!  Read it!