Lillian Secrest Buie, North Carolina English Teacher of the Year 1979, offers intimate portraits of Southern life, with contributing memories from a host of friends, relatives and former students.
Introduction: A Southerner Looks At Southern Life and Literature
This piece is for anyone who loves Southern literature, or who has studied it, or wants to see how literature mirrors life, and life mirrors literature.
Chapter I: A Mischievous Country Girl, Who Loved Sam the Ram
In this chapter, Lil describes her early years in the small town of Monroe, NC., with farm animals as pets within town limits. You'll learn about the ways neighborhood children entertained themselves in the 1920s, illustrative stories about changes in public education since 1920 from a very personal perspective, bonds built by lifelong friendships, how a young girl caught a love of literature and how children (in days before television and computers) depended on individual imagination and creativity to entertain themselves and each other.
Chapter II: Product of A Stormy Marriage of Opposites
Lil offers literary character sketches of her parents -- funny, poignant and revealing stories that inspire the reader to contemplate their own parental influences.
Chapter III: Talking to the Dead
Lil reflects on the long deceased relatives and friends who influenced her, and how she feels their spirits remain with her even though their bodies are gone.
Chapter IV: 'Honey, What You Need Is A Hubby or a Hobby’
Excerpts from Lil's high school and college diaries in the 1930s, illustrating how adolescence has changed (and not), as well as the barriers she faced as a young woman, an exceptional student and scholar at Duke University who was not taken as seriously as she would have been if she were a man. She was steered into teaching, motherhood and homemaking as the main outlets open to her.
Chapter V: A River Runs Through It
In letters, scrapbooks and journal entries, Lil describes how she fell in love with the "literary colony" of Riverton -- along the Lumber River -- and Wagram, NC in the early 1940s.
Chapter VI: Bride, Babies and the Bomb
Lil describes her whirlwind courtship to John M. Buie of Wagram, their six-week engagement, marriage in the early days of World War II, followed by the birth of two daughters.
Chapter VII: Magic Mother, Witch Hazel
Lil describes her contentment as a young mother, enjoying time at the beach, destroyed by the horror of Hurricane Hazel which swept her beach home away.
Chapter VIII: Soul Sacrifice
In poignant letters, journal entries, recollections of family members and friends, Lil's experience as the mother of a severely retarded son are revealed, the emotional and practical struggles she faced, and the family's effort to find meaning in the life of a child who had to be institutionalized.
Chapter IX: Teacher of Our Town
Students' recall Lil's strong guiding influence on them as a high school English and Social Studies teacher in the towns of Maxton and Wagram in the 1950s and 1960s.
Chapter X: Idles, Idylls, Idols
Nieces, nephews, students and children describe idyllic summers in Wagram under Lil's tutelage -- whiling away many idle hours depending on their own imaginations in the same ways that Lil was inspired to do by her mother in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as memories of summer travels abroad to England meeting "idols" such as the Queen of England.
Chapter XI: Preacher of Our Town
Lil was not just a teacher of English. She sought to stimulate and shape students' spiritual development by discussing theological issues, sharing her own faith and doubt, and traveling to the Holy Land, all of which she laid out in this chapter.
Chapter XII: Hearts of Darkness
Lil's role in the struggle for racial integration | Quelling Riots at Scotland High School |'Evaluate Yourself as a Racist' | 'An Unforgettable Experience of Betrayal' | In the Long Run, Hearts of Darkness Were Not Victorious | Old Racial Barriers Finally Fall
Chapter XIII: North Carolina’s English Teacher of the Year
Lil's Approach: Writing Should be Fun! Teaching by 'Contagion' |Days in the Life of a Teacher | Students Recall What Mrs. Buie Was Like as a Teacher | Every Teacher Must Be Part Actor | A Group Poem: The People of SHS, Yes! | Room 246: What Tales It Could Tell | NC English Teacher of the Year
Chapter XIV: When Your Mother Becomes Your Child
In journal entries, Lil poignantly describes caring for her mother at home, her mother's last days of lucidity before death at the age of 90, ironically foreshadowing Lil's own death 26 years later.
Chapter XV: And the Saints Go Marching On: Vignettes of Life in Wagram and Tributes to Dear Friends
Bess Nicholson | Edwin Womble | L.W. "Dusty" Odom |Venetta Brown | Odessa Memory | Wrae Ward Smith
Chapter XVI: Falling Columns and Fading Daffodils
In this thinly-disguised autobiographical short story, written in the third person, Lil combined the strange, the eccentric, the funny and the poignant, merging the decline of the Old South with her husband's failing health and his cousin Alderman McLean's declining antiques business.
Chapter XVII: John Buie: Diamond in the Gruff
In journal entries and a eulogy, Lil offers a character sketch of her husband John. Jim Buie and Ann Buie Loomis, in separate essays, both funny and sad, describe their father's death and how the family coped with and came to terms with it.
Chapter XVIII: Wise Woman
Aphorisms from Lillian Secrest Buie -- pithy quotes collected by her children and students.
Chapter XIX: Let Me Love and Live Again
Lil describes her final years, adventures and struggle against depression in old age, and desire to "love and live again" through the words, ideas, children and grandchildren she leaves behind.
Chapter XX: Happy Final Days. Glimpses of the Beyond?
Lil's granddaughter, Eve Vance Fleishman, describes the personal concert she gave her grandmother that gave her the peace to let go. Funeral Director Beacham McDougald writes of Lil's memorial service as a model of family-oriented personal expression. "After the death of a loved one, we tend to be in a thin place psychologically where we can better perceive the spiritual world," Jim Buie writes in "Glimpses of the Beyond," describing Scotland County, with its links to Celtic spirituality, as a particularly "thin place." Mary Wayne Watson quotes from Maya Angelou's poem, "When Great Souls Die."
To order this book from the publisher for $26, plus $3.06 by USPS Media Mail, click.
Recent Comments