Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 3, 1990 TAG: 9006060069
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The writer of a good memoir strikes a deal with the reader. "Read about my life," the writer says, "and I promise to leave you with more than the particulars. I'll share a time and place and leave you with a life so illuminated that your own life will shine brighter. I will build a bridge between yourself and myself - your time and my time - that will remain forever."
Virginia Bell Dabney has done all that and more in "Once There Was a Farm," her account of growing up on a central Virginia farm 60 years ago.
Hers was a matriarchal childhood, one shaped by a free-thinking and resourceful mother, two considerably older sisters and several domestic workers. In 1917 her mother and two sisters moved from a middle-class Chicago neighborhood to a 160-acre Virginia farm, leaving behind Dabney's father, who visited his family only during the summer and at Christmas. This was, she writes, "an arrangement that both my mother and father seemed to find perfectly acceptable."
Dabney, born in 1919, has only distant memories of her father. She paints a portrait of a lonely man, distant and unaffectionate. "My father was a man who preferred books to physical work outdoors . . . I approached him only at the urging of my mother, and, usually, unless he showed some affability, with timidity and the wish to be elsewhere.
"This was because too often I had rushed in, bursting out, `Father, I-' and had him slowly turn his head from his book, look down at me over his half glasses and say, `Can't you see your father's reading?' We never became friends."
Dabney chronicles with great respect her mother's efforts to run their small farm during the Depression. In a chapter titled "My Mother the Farmer," Dabney recalls the hog-raising venture, which ended in copious amounts of sausage, enough money to pay the farm's taxes and a $100 first prize in a Chicago Tribune essay contest. The topic: Overcoming Adversity.
With her purchase of a car in the late 1920s, Alice Bell took a job selling Wearever pots and pans. Her physical absence was keenly felt by her daughters, who were also aware of their mother's difficulty in talking to them about personal matters. In her characteristically understated prose, Dabney recalls watching out the window for her mother's return. " . . . Allison and I peered into the darkness from the kitchen window, looking for her lights to appear on a hill almost a mile away. Those were the years I started to sleepwalk."
Throughout her memoir, Dabney recalls her acute sense of being different: different from her classmates with their biscuit lunches and extended families; from her sisters, beautiful and talented Daphne and no-nonsense Allison; from the girls at dances who had learned the art of feminine wiles. Yet her memoir is remarkably free of bitterness, marked instead by respect and understanding. The prose is equally free of treacly nostalgia, borrowing instead from the rhythms of real life for its power.
Nowhere is Dabney's writing stronger than when recounting natural disasters. In a chapter titled "Drought," the horrors of a sweeping fire come to the reader in agonizing detail. The Bells watched as their house standing in the path of an approaching field fire was devoured: "The whole woods beyond our house, our orchard in its grassy clearing, were in flames. There was a crackling sound as branches broke and fell from trees like burning logs in a fireplace, showering sparks . . . We watched as a great ball of fire, tumbling and rolling on the wind, came toward our house . . . I stared long enough to see burning branches drop on our roof and the entire scene obliterated by smoke that had tongues of flames roaring through it."
In "Flood," she recalls the 1969 Nelson County flood, spawned by Hurricane Camille, in which 125 people died. With the finely observed detail so characteristic of her writing, Dabney remembers the loss of the Nelson County junior beauty queen. "She was dug out of the mud by a student who used to take her to dances. He had noticed something white in the mud; it proved to be her knee."
Dabney accepts willingly nature's disasters along with her beneficence and grandeur. Nowhere is her appreciation for the gentle rhythms of farm life clearer than when she writes about her present life in Bath County. Having lived for decades in Richmond, Dabney savors the rural delights of her "mushroom house."
"This land of deer is full of silences and sounds that I had not known for a long time: the crisp taffeta swish of the crow's passage overhead, the whistle of dove's wings, the low urgings of parent birds with their young in the dogwoods, the grasshopper's exuberant dance in the air, holding himself up in a frenzy of papery wingbeats until he falls heavily into the grass. Between all these are moments of silence, like rests in music, when the mind sharpens its attention."
It is her absolute honesty, her exact and lovely prose, and her stunning evocation of a time past that make Dabney an unforgettable writer. "It has," she writes, "taken me almost a lifetime to be ready to write about what I have learned." One can be glad for her restraint, for the ripening of her vision has produced a wondrous book.
by CNB