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Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Western Virginia weekend and "A Tidewater Morning"

By PRESTON BRYANT
DEC. 15, 2003

In a day when Virginia politics, budgets, and tax debates are too much with us, it's nice to settle in on a snowy, icy weekend and lose yourself for an extended while in a book about the Virginia of yesteryear written by a Virginian who lived it.

One of America's greatest modern writers is William Styron, whose best known novel, "Sophie's Choice," was made even more famous by Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning performance in the movie that grew from it. A decade ago, though, this Newport News native gave us three stories wed in a single collection by a common, autobiographical protagonist, Paul Whitehurst. And it's these stories that can provide an escape when an escape is needed.

In "A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth," Styron gives us young Paul, seen out of order in the stories as a 20-, 10-, and 13-year-old. And it's through Paul that Styron reflects back on his own episodic youth and helps us explore some themes we'd often rather not, such as war, race, poverty and death.

A few years ago, the Library of Virginia honored Styron, its native son, for his contributions to American literature, and in "A Tidewater Morning," we again see why. For it's here that Styron mixes character, landscape and emotion -- all from scenes on the Virginia Peninsula, an "enclave of ancient counties as fanatically segregated as darkest Alabama" -- to keep the pages turning.

The early-20th century Virginia the three stories take us back to is an era framed by the Great Depression and World War II, and we're given lessons on the effects from each. The stories offer up vignettes of black and white poverty, where the human condition, social and physical, is painfully on display on every page.

In the first story, "Love Day," we see Paul, a Marine on a ship steaming ahead for possible landing at Okinawa. He's wrestling with the virtues of war while also reflecting on his Tidewater childhood, defined by his father, Jeff, a civilian shipyard engineer whose machinery-of-war income afforded the Whitehursts a bourgeois comfort lacked by so many others, and his mother, Adelaide, a high-minded Pennsylvanian ill at ease in brackish Virginia.

At its core, though, the story really is about war and how eager or un- one should be to engage in it. Would Paul's mission to Okinawa materialize, or would it not? Would he hit the beaches, or would his ship be recalled, as rumored? He debates how comfortable he is with -- and within -- himself at this 20-year-old mark in his life, and he keeps telling himself, "You love the Marine Corps, it's a terrific war, you love the Marine Corps, it's a terrific war …"

This, being read on a snowy, icy western Virginia weekend, when so many young Americans -- and Virginians -- are in the sands of Afghanistan and Iraq. This, being read on a day when Saddam Hussein would be nabbed.

"Shadrach" is Styron's second story. No war in this one, just the pangs of poverty and race and history. We meet the Dabney family, a poor, trashy lot whose F.F.V. ancestors lost standing when one married a "half-breed Mattaponi or Pamunkey Indian girl from the York River," and who were further done in by the Great Depression. Way back when, though, a hundreds years or so prior, the Dabneys were somebody. They had slaves, and this story picks up on one in particular, Shadrach, who at 99 years old, half blind, and near death, has made his way -- on foot -- from Alabama back to King and Queen County so that he can die and be buried on the Dabney land where he was born.

The Dabney kids are 10-year-old Paul Whitehurst's playmates. He's with them, in the Dabney's junk-strewn front yard, when old Shad hobbles up. He's with them also when Vernon Dabney, the tattered, moon-shining patriarch, struggles to make sense of Shad's end-of-life mission and struggles even more to make sense of his own uncharacteristically noble desire to comfort the old fellow in his last hours and give him the burial he desires.

Death matched with the day-to-day struggles of the mid-1930s is what's much more central here than Virginia's slave history that lurks in the story's background. A handful of years after the Great Depression, whites were at times as bad off as many blacks, and the Dabneys were proof of it.

"Death ain't nothin' to be afraid about," Vernon bemoans. "It's life that's fearsome! Life! … Life! … Life is where you've got to be terrified!"

This, being read on a snowy, icy western Virginia weekend, when so many in this part of the state are wondering when today's jobless economic recovery will stop being so jobless. This, being read on a snowy, icy western Virginia weekend, when what's best for the least fortunate among us is what's at the center of ongoing state tax-reform debates.

But despite what Vernon says, it is indeed death, and the reality of it, that mightily impacts the way we live. It's this theme that carries us from "Shadrach" to the title story, "A Tidewater Morning," where Paul's mother is in her last days of a long battle against cancer, and his dad is struggling to hold himself together.

Among the three stories, it's in "A Tidewater Morning" that Styron impresses us most with his characters' fullness, each set against an oppressive September heat that stills drooping sycamores and amplifies cicadas and makes mom, dad, and son dig deeply within to beat back all that's stacked against them.

It's through Paul's adolescent eyes that we see -- and feel -- Adelaide's unbearable pain and hold sympathy for his father, who's constantly at her bedside. We're also reminded of the ways things used to be, when doctors made house calls and families took care of their own.

Styron presents three stories here, written in the early 1990s, from his own Tidewater Virginia youth in the 1930s. Their poignant themes of war and race and poverty and death, however, are still relevant, a fact that's both good and bad.

If you find yourself homebound on a snowy, icy weekend -- or even if you don't -- the tales in "A Tidewater Morning" are a worthy read.

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