The cover art is from an actual photograph of the house where many of the events happened. Kilgo was fortunate enough to inherit a large cache of old family photos from the house after it was no longer occupied.
Photo: James Kilgo did not begin creative writing until he was in his late thirties, when he produced a series of outdoor columns for The Athens Observer. Those pieces later formed the core of Deep Enough for Ivorybills. Photo by Paul Efland.
By Phil Williams
In the early 1980s, James Kilgo and a cousin were chatting casually about an earlier generation when a name came up that Kilgo couldn't place.
"He mentioned this woman, Jennie, as though I knew who he was talking about," says Kilgo. "When he told me her story, I was blown away. I had no hint that such a thing had ever happened."
What actually did happen is still not clear, some 70 years after a murder and suicide that left two brothers dead and a South Carolina county scandalized. The conversation led Kilgo on a search for the elusive story.
Kilgo's imaginative recreation of the tragedy became Daughter of My People, recently published by the University of Georgia Press. Kilgo, who has been a professor of English at UGA since 1967, is well-known nationally for two critically acclaimed books of essays, but this is his first novel.
Early critical response has been enthusiastic. Kirkus Reviews called the book "a debut novel of considerable emotional force. . . sad, vivid and haunting."
The heart of the book is the relationship between brothers Tison and Hart Bonner and their cousin Jennie Grant, a mixed-race woman of considerable dignity and integrity. The novel recreates a rural world in which the unspoken relations between white men and black women evolve into a tragedy of almost classical dimensions. While the novel explores the events of a real murder-suicide, the characters in it are fictitious.
The cover art is from an actual photograph of the house where many of the events happened. Kilgo was fortunate enough to inherit a large cache of old family photos from the house after it was no longer occupied.
One of Kilgo's best sources was an older family member who had been in his teens when the tragedy unfolded. He told Kilgo much of the background but left out the story of Jennie. Then, in a dramatic moment only a few weeks before his death, the old man revealed the striking woman at the center of the events, and even gave Kilgo a picture of her.
In 1989, after several years of research in newspapers and courthouse records, Kilgo sat down with a pen and a yellow legal pad and began to write, unsure at that point whether the story would be fiction or non-fiction. He finally decided that too many people would be hurt by a bald retelling of the tragedy and so cast it as a novel.
"Once I started working on it, the characters started talking to each other," says Kilgo, "and that's when I really got excited."
After the two real-life brothers died, Jennie left to work for another family and lived well into the 1960s. Kilgo has not been able to trace her burial site, but he does know that she married and must have been about 85 at the time of her death.
While the events in the novel are dark and violent, the story is not without hope.
"First and foremost, I wanted to tell a story that evokes its time and its place," says Kilgo. "But I also believe in moments of transcendence, and I wanted to get that quality of light through language. I wanted to write a book that would touch and move people. . . . The stories we keep and repeat are stories where there is a possibility of hope and redemption. I wanted to discover the possibilities of redemption in those events."
