Polly Holliday of TV's Home Improvement won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, "aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously." Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that "effused" as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.

Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip and got it into publishers' hands.

But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.

Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.

The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period.

One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.--Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
A plea for racial tolerance is the subtext of Gibbons's estimable new novel, her first foray into historical fiction. Like her previous books (Ellen Foster, 1997, etc.), it is set in the South, but this one takes place during the Civil War era. Now 70 and near death, Emma Garnet Tate begins her account by recalling her youth as a bookish, observant 12-year-old in 1842, living on a Virginia plantation in a highly dysfunctional family dominated by her foulmouthed father, a veritable monster of parental tyranny and racial prejudice. Samuel Tate abuses his wife and six children but he also studies the classics and buys paintings by old masters. Emma's long-suffering mother, of genteel background and gentle ways, is angelic and forgiving; her five siblings' lives are ruined by her father's cruelty; and all are discreetly cared for by Clarice, the clever, formidable black woman who is the only person Samuel Tate respects. (Clarice knows Samuel's humble origins and the dark secret that haunts him, which readers learn only at the end of the book.) Gibbons authentically reproduces the vocabulary and customs of the time: Emma's father says "nigger" while more refined people say Negroes. "Nobody said the word slave. It was servant," Emma observes. At 17, Emma marries one of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon, and spends the war years laboring beside him in a Raleigh hospital. Through graphic scenes of the maimed and dying, Gibbons conveys the horror and futility of battle, expressing her heroine's abolitionist sympathies as Emma tends mangled bodies and damaged souls. By the middle of the book, however, Emma's narration and the portrayal of Clarice as a wise and forbearing earthmother lack emotional resonance. Emma, in fact, is far more interesting as a rebellious child than as a stoic grown woman. One finishes the novel admiring Emma and Clarice but missing the compelling narrative voice that might have made their story truly moving. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-In 1900, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell tells her life story, beginning when she was 12 in antebellum Virginia. Her father, who used brutality and fear to intimidate family, slaves, and servants, killed a slave in a fit of anger. The plantation household was managed by Clarice, a free black woman of courage and loyalty. Emma Garnet's younger sister Maureen was both dutiful and eager to learn the graces that attracted a suitable husband. Independent of spirit, disdainful of housewifely skills, intelligent and opinionated, Emma Garnet determined to escape from Seven Oaks. Details of her reminiscences are sketchy at times, but she met and married Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon and everything her father was not. Her mother unselfishly urged her daughter to take Clarice with her to help them get settled in Raleigh, where Quincy planned to set up his medical practice. Clarice never returned, but devoted herself to the Lowells and their three daughters. Emma Garnet tells her story with unflinching honesty, revealing a complex character who changed from a self-absorbed and indulged child to a loving wife and mother. She eventually opened her home to wounded Confederate soldiers and found new purpose and meaning in her life by helping others. YAs will find Emma Garnet, Maureen, Clarice, and Quincy to be fascinating and endearing characters whose flaws as well as strengths are revealed as the story unfolds. The author's picture of life in the Civil War South is vivid and unsentimental, and her characters are drawn with clarity and sympathy.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
An elderly lady sits in her parlor, contemplating the events that shaped her life. Born in the 1830s, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is the eldest daughter of a poor but aristocratic Southern belle and a rich, opinionated, abusive father. The Tate household is held together by Clarisse, a free black woman, who knew Mr. Tate "when." Tate attempts to control and dominate his wife and children with brute force and harsh words. However, Emma's mother and older brother conspire to nurture Emma's native curiosity and love of learning, until fate brings a Northerner, Quincey Lowell, fresh out of medical school, to Emma's doorstep. At age 17, she marries him and takes Clarisse with her. A new household; three children with a liberal, generous, loving husband; the Civil War; death; and good deeds and bad all pass through her thoughts in a death bed recollection/confession of a life abundantly lived. Gibbons (A Virtuous Woman) relates a touching, evocative story with crystal clarity and brilliant realism. Sally Darling gives a masterful reading. Highly recommended.AJoanna M. Burkhardt., Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Ed. Lib., Providence Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Washington Post Book World, Susan Dodd
Kaye Gibbons is too savvy, too contemporary, and too good a storyteller ... to content herself with a happily-ever-after life. Instead, what her diverting tale suggests is how a life lived in love and service might carry a woman close to wisdom, and that a happily-ever-after death could turn out to be more than just a fairy tale.


From AudioFile
On the occasion of one of her last afternoons, Emma Tate remembers the dark days of her childhood on Seven Oaks Plantation. The Civil War looms. Her wrathful father manipulates his family and plantation with greed and brutality. Marriage to Doctor Quincy Lowell from Massachusetts liberates Emma from the role of the Southern belle. She becomes her husband's partner in the struggle against the war's destruction of bodies and minds. Sally Darling delivers complicated sentences with grace and meaning. Her softly inflected reading conveys age and gentility, anger and love. With Darling, the listener follows this strong woman filled with wistful regret through the ages of her life, as seen in the mirror of her memory. L.R.S. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Gibbons, author most recently of Sights Unseen (1995), has evolved a distinctive narrative style based on the poignant eloquence and acuity of young female narrators struggling to transcend the moral and spiritual failings of their troubled families. Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, her newest creation, fits the mold but with a subtle twist; she's telling her tale at the end of her long and tumultuous life, a life derailed, as so many were, by the Civil War. Like Jane Smiley in her latest novel, Gibbons has gone back to that still-smoldering conflict and imagined it from a wholly personal and feminine perspective, concerned not with politics but with blood and suffering. Two opposing characters embody her dismay over ignorance, brutality, racism, selfishness, and hate versus her belief in virtue, compassion, generosity, knowledge, and love: Emma Garnet's father, an evil, slave-owning tyrant; and Clarice, his black housekeeper, who, in spite of being at the lowest echelon of southern society, is the true leader of their Virginia estate. It is Clarice who teaches Emma Garnet how to be a decent human being, lessons that lead to her controversial but loving marriage to a distinguished and altruistic Northerner, Dr. Quincy Lowell. The Lowells would have lived an easy life had there been no war, but they are drawn inexorably into the horror. Quincy and Clarice literally work themselves to death caring for the wounded, while Emma Garnet, who becomes as adept at surgery as Quincy, survives to mourn the dead. Gibbons is unsparing in her depiction of the gruesome reality of the carnage, and unflinching in her effort to convey the madness of that time and the havoc it wreaked on people's souls. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Gibbons's first outing after anointment by Oprah is a Civil War tale that's historically researched to a fault but psychologically the stuff of melodrama. On what may be the last day of her life, Emma Garnet Lowell, ne Tate, sets out to tell all, from childhood in tidewater Virginia (where she was born in 1830) through marriage, childbirth, the war itself, widowhood, and old age. Everything about the telling in setting and in people is writ large. Of characters who are bad, central and most horrendous by far is Emma's father, Samuel Tate, a crude, tyrannical, pro-slavery plantation owner who's raised himself from nothing, kills one of his own slaves, collects Titians, and prizes his Latin studies. Least bad is Emma's mother Alice, saint and central martyr to this ruffian and gout-plagued husband and father who curses Emma's unborn children when she marries Dr. Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, and moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, taking with her the faithful, kind, stalwart, true household servant Clarice Washington. In Raleigh will be born the couple's three perfect daughters, and there the war will rage, taking an always-greater toll as the years grind on, supplies grow meager, and both Quincy and Emma work beyond endurance in the horrors of the military hospital. History throughout is summoned up in the tiniest of details``her frock, deep green velvet with red grosgrain running like Christmas garlands around her skirt''and though Emma's voice is intended to be of its period, it unfortunately tends also toward the wearying (``Without my brother, I would not have known to use books as a haven, a place to go when pain has invaded my citadel''). A book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure for history-snoopers (hospital scenes among the best) but finding no new ground for the saga of the South. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



"An occasion for even more accolades."


USA Today
"A fascinating story...Kaye Gibbons goes back to the days of the Civil War to depict the life of another extraordinary woman...A reader woman couldn't ask for better company than Emma."


Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Brilliant...Gibbons does a masterful job."


San Antonio Express-News
"Haunting...a rare jewel...Kaye Gibbons has gone from being a wonderful, fascinating novelist to a national treasure."


Portland Oregonian
"A novel that will have been worth the wait for Gibbon's fans or anyone else with a passionate interest in the Civil War."


Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain
"Horace said that our stories should aim to instruct and delight...Kaye Gibbons has achieved both on every page."


San Francisco Chronicle
"A master storyteller...Margaret Mitchell's blunderbuss epic...can't hold a sweet-potato candle to these vivid pages."


Book Description
Sprawling in its scope but heartbreakingly exact in its depiction of a family torn apart, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is a magnificent novel in the great Southern tradition. In the year 1900--on the afternoon she suspects might be the last of her long, eventful life--Emma Garnet Tate Lowell sets down on paper what came before, determined to make an honest account of it. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grew up determined to escape the domination of her bullying, self-made father, Samuel P. Tate, and ultimately seceded from his control to marry Quincy Lowell, a surgeon and member of the distinguished Boston family. But then came the Civil War. Working alongside Quincy, assisting him in the treatment of wounded soldiers, she witnessed scenes that would be engraved forever in her memory. And, before beginning the long journey of her own reconstruction, she must face the shame of her relationship to her "servants" and learn the terrible secret that shaped her father's life.


About the Author

Kaye Gibbons is the author of four previous novels: Ellen Foster, A Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams, and Charms for the Easy Life. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and five children.


Excerpted from On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon by Kaye Gibbons. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Chapter OneI did not mean to kill the nigger! Did not mean to kill him!This my father shouted out loud on slaughter day of 1842. I heard him from the kitchen, where I was shaping sausage into little rounds, a pleasant job for a girl of no domestic training. I ran to the kitchen door at his bellowing and wondered at his raging, bloody presence, but I did not go to him. His arms were uplifted as though he were prophet to the clutch of Negroes who stood about him, a hand still holding a blade. I recall, fifty-eight years thence, my extreme horror of recognition that the man standing underneath the spready sycamore had probably done wrong, that he had probably murdered with vile intent, and that all my night-fears of atrocities incited by the Turner rebellion would come true now--for vengeance, my family and I would be slit ear to ear in our sleep. That was the class of talk we heard those days, all I overheard through closed parlor doors. Even among the children of the James a rumor abounded, repeated as hard fact, of a Negro who had murdered a farmer and then dipped the man's wife and children in his blood. I was of an impressionable nature, and my heart quailed within me each time I heard the tale told. The servants will rise, and they will cut our throats, and they will laugh and drink red whiskey and go about with our bloomers on their heads. Weighing the two, my surety that my father had indeed meant to kill whoever had ailed him and the prospect of Negroes murdering us all in the moonlight, I had more faith in the Negroes, more trust in their inherent and collective sense of right. Even then, at twelve, I knew that my father was a liar. Although he had served two terms in the legislature and was known all over Virginia to be an honest, upright, hearty, and earnest Episcopalian, I knew he had a dark secret. Children see into the recesses of the soul. They are rarely fooled, seldom duped save at rummy and shell games, so it was not extraordinary for me to stand in that doorway, while my father demanded of God and a brace of Negroes that they acknowledge his innocence, to see that he was lying to all, for I knew him. I was not now struck down in sudden disillusionment of a beloved parent, for I had heard him delivering my mother his fury in the nights. Like the servants, we, his children, were beneath him, and so we were left oftentimes standing with his lies in our hands like baffling presents, not knowing what we were to do with this collection of things, his words, whether they should be used or displayed or hidden like a broken toy in a corner of the nursery armoire. I did not mean to kill the nigger! Was I to trick the words apart the way a patient mother will sit and tease the knot out of a tangled necklace? Were they to be left for when I was older, the way so much of my life then was lived, in a knowingly, deliberately superficial fashion, until I could nurse the time and free peace of mind to revisit and decipher what was happening to me and around me? I heard Clarice, the chief cook and housekeeper, behind me moaning, heard as if in half-sleep, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my goodness," but I could not arouse any response, any spoken word. I felt heavy in my body, and over and again in my head, one idea whirled a dervish--I do not know what to make of this now, because I am too young. I am too young for this. I did not believe I would ever forgive my father for making me withstand more than I could bear. Always, in a moment of import, such as the day memory has now furnished me, Father seemed to speak the utter and ardent truth because he was so very loud and so commanding in his bearing and demeanor. His style was bullish, though he never seemed desperate that he be believed. On that awful day, and at every other time when his method or intent might be questioned, he struck a tone of extreme willfulness, steady and wrathful, without any urgent pleading or begging to be understood, to be followed into whatever mendacious reckoning he might construct. And that is what he was doing as Clarice and I watched him. He was constructing, building a notion of thorough blamelessness that whoever had witnessed the killing or might hear of it later would let him own as a certain verity. No, he did not mean to kill the Negro. Perhaps, even, the Negro asked to be killed, by his insolence or indolence or impudence, the three faults that Father trusted to be at the heart of the reason why the race was inferior and not included in the tenet that all men are created equal and seen as such by the eyes of God. But still, he found it necessary to say again and again to the people who ganged about him underneath the spready sycamore--I did not mean to kill the nigger! When he was tired of hearing himself say it, tired of waiting for what did not come--the Negroes to say, "Of course you did not"--he told them all to go to Hell and then jabbed the knife into the tree and strode toward the kitchen. He had on hogkilling clothes, wool and muslin with a skin over-jacket, and they were bloody with the gore of man or pig--l could not tell where one stain started and the next began. He came blowing in hard through the door, like a tempest raging into an open window.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up more and more aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Bookish and sensitive, young Emma Garnet sets herself against her bumptious, self-made father, Samuel P. Tate, at an early age. In the company of her mother and adored brother Whately, Emma Garnet manages to survive with her heart and mind intact. As she tells her story in 1900, she is still prey to her childhood, to the memories of a life that was made bearable in the main by the indomitable family servant Clarice. Emma Garnet secedes from the control of her domineering father to marry Quincy Lowell, a member of the distinguished Boston family. Living in Raleigh on the eve of the Civil War, she and Quincy, with Clarice's constant help, create the ideal happy home. When war destroys the rhythm of their days, Emma Garnet works alongside Quincy, an accomplished surgeon. Assisting him in the treatment of wounded soldiers, she comes to see the war as "a conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies." After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take her exhausted husband home to Boston, where she begins the long journey of her own reconstruction.

SYNOPSIS

Kaye Gibbons's sixth novel, her first since the dual selection of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman for Oprah's Book ClubT, is the story of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, a level-eyed Southern lady who comes of age in the years leading up to the Civil War. On the occasion of her 70th birthday, Emma decides the time has come to make a clean breast of the tumultuous events of her long life. "Having survived my father and the war, I am capable of anything," she observes. Born to privilege on the James River plantation of Seven Oaks, Emma grows up increasingly aware that her family's fortunes are inextricably linked to slavery -- an awareness that begins when she witnesses the senseless murder of a slave by her brutal, dominating father. She flees Seven Oaks to marry surgeon Quincy Lowell, scion of the Boston Lowells, and the couple settles in Raleigh. During the war, she works beside her husband treating wounded Confederate soldiers and gradually comes to see the grand cause as a "conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies." After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take the exhausted Quincy home to Boston, where she begins the journey of her own reconstruction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles Frazier

Horace said that our stories should aim to instruct and delight...Kaye Gibbons has achieved both on every page.

San Francisco Chronicle

A master storyteller...Margaret Mitchell's blunderbuss epic...can't hold a sweet-potato candle to these vivid pages.

Portland Oregonian

A novel that will have been worth the wait for Gibbon's fans or anyone else with a passionate interest in the Civil War.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An occasion for even more accolades.

San Antonio Express-News