HOLLER

Chapman reckons with a family history forged in the white privilege and bigotry of the old South in this memoir.

The pivotal event in the author’s young life, the one that would determine the trajectory of her childhood, took place on a beach in Okinawa, where her father was stationed with the U.S. Marines. She was about 3 years old, and her parents were swimming in the waves. One large wave took her father down, tearing his hand from her mother’s grip. The wave almost took her mother as well. A few years later, Gayle Chapman told her little girl how she had wanted to die with her husband, but God told her she must live and take care of her child. Her paternal grandfather (her “Papa”), a former Marine Corps commandant, flew to Okinawa to bring his bereaved family home to the United States, where mother and daughter were cared for by Chapman’s grandparents until Gayle could set up her own home; Papa became her de facto father. She spent her summers in Fairfield, Tennessee, staying in the ramshackle ancestral home of her great-grandfather, General Leonard Fielding Chapman Jr. Stories of carefree summer days intertwine with her growing awareness of her ancestors’ participation in the cruelty of slavery and her current family’s lingering residual bigotry—the author wrestles with her conflicting feelings of love for Papa and her great-grandfather and an inherited guilt over a family history that represents everything she stands against. Chapman is a published poet and essayist, a teacher of Shakespeare and creative writing at Yale, and an unabashed progressive—each of these attributes is reflected in her elegantly composed prose. Abundant literary references, philosophical musings, and emotional reflections spool out in lengthy, linguistically complex sentences, always in search of an answer to her overriding question: “How can heaven and hell exist cheek by jowl in a place, in a person, in a nation’s history, and in oneself?”

A beautifully written, socially conscious, and occasionally challenging read that rewards time and patience.