The Curing Season
by Leslie Wells
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 044667866X
Publisher: Warner Books
I grew up in southern Virginia, and my grandparents lived on a tobacco farm. My mother grew up on the farm. We spent a lot of time when I was a kid visiting my grandparents, and I was fascinated with the tobacco picking and curing process. Back in the sixties, they still used mules to pull the slides of tobacco from the fields, and all the stringing was still done by hand (even now they only have a very rudimentary machine that sews the tobacco leaves together). Everything was done by hand back then, and was extremely hard work in the boiling hot sun. My grandparents rose at around 4 am, my grandmother would cook lunch (which they called "dinner") - fried chicken, ham, creasie salad, green beans with fatback, biscuits, potato salad -- for about twenty people. Then at around 6 am they'd go out, do the chores such as milking the cow and feeding the mule and gathering the eggs, then go to the field and start working. At noon they came in with 18 or so workers and all had lunch that my grandmother had made, then went back to the fields and worked until dark, around 8 or 9 at night. They'd get up the next day and do the same thing again.
In the summer when the tobacco was curing, it was even harder because someone would have to stay up all night long to keep checking the fires in the curing barns to make sure they didn't go out. Sometimes my mother did this, even when she was a child. She would sleep in an adjacent barn and keep checking the fires all night long, taking turns with my grandfather. My mother's first chores when she got home from school were to wash all the dirty dishes in the sink left over from the noontime meal, then go to the spring and haul water (the spring was half a mile from the house), then chop wood for the stove to cook on. This was in the mid-forties, when my mother was around age eight or nine. Everyone on the farm worked from the time they were children, on upward.
So I heard lots of stories about the hard work and observed a lot of it as a child. It must have really sunk in, because when I started writing The Curing Season, I could just smell the tobacco curing and could see the whole process as if it had happened yesterday. The characters in the novel are entirely fictional, and my protagonist Cora's situation is also entirely fictional, but the setting and tobacco material are from what I remembered as well as from what I've been told by family members.
My favorite authors and books:
In my twenties, my favorite authors were D.H. Lawrence, then James Joyce (Ulysses and Dubliners), then William Faulkner. My favorite Faulkner novels are Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. Then I started reading Proust when I was about 28, and I've read Remembrance of Things Past five times now. I'd just keep reading it and when I finished it, I'd start again. Like Ulysses and Absalom, the more you read Recherche, the more you learn about it, and the more layers are revealed. The characters become like good friends.
Other favorite authors are Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, and Virginia Woolf. I also love Melinda Haynes' Chalktown and Mother of Pearl, Jennifer Lauck's Blackbird, April Sinclair's novels, Jane Smiley's novels.
Leslie Wells, a book editor for major publishing houses for over twenty years, she lives on Long Island, New York.
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Q: What was the genesis for the writing of this story?
LW: I was out jogging one morning and the wind blew in my ears in a way that made me unable to hear for a few moments. As I continued running, I started thinking about what it would be like not to be able to hear, and suddenly the idea of a woman came into my mind. She was someone who couldn't hear because she'd been abused. Cora just literally popped into my head along that run. By the time I got home, I had imagined the basic elements of the story. I started to write that night--I have chronic insomnia, so I'm often up in the wee hours--and the story interested me enough to continue writing. I'd written three novels in my twenties but had thrown them out-- they weren't good at all--so I hadn't written anything in fourteen years when I started The Curing Season. It came as a total surprise to me that I'd want to start writing again.
Q: As someone who lives in New York in the 21st century, how were you able to re-create so vividly and accurately 1948 rural Virginia?
LW: I grew up in southern Virginia, and my mother grew up on a tobacco farm that my grandfather owned. I spent a lot of my childhood on the farm and observed the whole tobacco picking and curing process. It was something I'd always wanted to write about, and in the sixties when I was a child, the process wasn't that different than it was in the late-forties; it was totally unmechanized. A mule pulled the slide, people hand-picked the tobacco and hand-tied it, and so on. All of that really sank into my consciousness as a child, and I enjoyed writing about it as the setting for The Curing Season.
Q: Did you worry that Cora's abuse would be hard for some readers to take?
LW: Actually, when I was writing the novel I never dreamed that it would be published. I'm a book editor, so I know firsthand how hard it is for a first novel to be taken by a publishing house. I really wrote it for myself and was astounded that Warner wanted it. Once I knew that it would be published, I did figure that a lot of readers would find the horrific scenes hard to take, but the book had a life of its own by then.
Q: Do you think the situation for battered women has changed much between Cora's time and now?
LW: I do think that women today have many more options than they did in the late forties, particularly in poor rural areas. There are shelters in most major cities and even in smaller towns now, and hotline numbers. However, the problem of domestic violence is still a huge one in our country, and it crosses all socio-economic lines. Many, many women suffer abuse for years, for fear that their partners will hurt them or their children if they try to leave. That's why it's so important to support our local women's shelters, donating money, clean used clothes (women's and children's), toys, and so on.
Q: Cora's love for Joshua is so strong and seems to be her only lifeline. What do you think it is about the mother/child bond that is so powerful that it gives Cora strength when she's otherwise so beaten down?
LW: I think that once you have a child, you experience love in a way you've never felt before. You feel you'd do anything and everything to save your child from suffering or being hurt. Even though it took Cora a while to muster her courage to leave Aaron (in large part because of her failed attempt to leave him when Joshua was very small), once she realizes he plans to hurt Joshua, she knows she has to go, despite the consequences.
Q: Even after suffering so much abuse and cruelty, Cora still doesn't give up on people and puts her trust in Nita-- someone who she's been told she shouldn't trust because of the color of her skin. Do you think Cora was able to see through the racist attitudes of the time because she too was someone who was disenfranchised and discrimi-nated against because of her disability?
LW: Definitely. In fact, I wanted readers to realize that because people had picked on Cora all her life, this made her very empathetic to the African Americans who were discriminated against in her community. Also, Cora was a much more well-read person than many around her, and I think that made her more enlightened; she'd been exposed to a lot of good ideas through books.
Q: Why do you think Nita and her friends would help Cora, whom ostensibly they should have feared?
LW: Nita gradually got to know Cora at the creek, after her kids and Joshua played together several times. Once Cora began speaking to Nita, their friendship and the trust between them grew--Cora warned Nita about the moccasin about to bite her, and Nita dropped off vegetables for Cora. Then, when Cora came to tell Nita about the men's plans to burn their homes, Nita could vouch for Cora. Once Nita's friends accepted that Cora was telling the truth, they wanted to help her because she'd saved them from a vicious attack.
Q: Cora suffered because she was not the quintessential pretty girl like her sister Sibby. Cora was disabled, and to top it all off, she was book smart--all things that everyone around her took to be negative qualities. While obviously much has changed for women today, essentially do you think that the way women are judged has changed drastically?
LW: I think that many people today still consider looks important, regardless of a person's other strong points; I've seen studies that show that attractive people are perceived as doing better in job interviews, and so on. And there's been a lot about girls being discouraged from competing with boys for grades in school--teachers calling on boys more often than on girls, for instance. So while things on the whole are much better for women than they were in the late-forties--particularly for poor, rural women--we definitely still have a ways to go.
Excerpted from The Curing Season © Copyright 2008 by Leslie Wells. Reprinted with permission by Warner Books. All rights reserved.
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