A Southern Girl
Authors: John Warley
A SOUTHERN GIRL
Pat Conroy, Editor at Large
A SOUTHERN GIRL
A Novel
JOHN WARLEY
Foreword by Therese Anne Fowler
The University of South Carolina Press
Publication is made possible in part by the generous support of the University of South Carolina Press Friends Fund
For our daughter,
MaryBeth Warley Lockwood
IN MEMORIAM
“The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts, and is desired.”
Shakespeare,
Anthony and Cleopatra,
Act V, Scene 2
Barbara Nelson Warley
February 5, 1949–February 21, 2014
© 2014 John Warley
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Warley, John.
A southern girl : a novel / John Warley.
pages cm.—(Story River Books)
ISBN
978-1-61117-391-8 (hardbound : alk. paper)—
ISBN
978-1-61117-392-5 (ebook)
1. Adoption—Fiction. 2. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3623.
A
8624
S
68 2014
813'.6—
DC
23
2013032346
CONTENTS
Foreword
Therese Anne Fowler
FOREWORD
John Warley and I first met at the South Carolina Book Festival a few years back. As we got acquainted over drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the authors’ reception, I could easily see that he was an intelligent and thoughtful person. Soon after, I read one of his novels and saw that he was an excellent writer, too. But when he told me he was working on a new book about an adopted Korean girl told through the perspectives of not only the adoptive parents but also the girl’s birth mother and the female Korean adoption agent, I worried that he’d bitten off more than he could—or maybe should—chew.
When a white writer tells the story of non-white characters, folks sometimes accuse the writer of cultural appropriation—as in, what business does this person have in telling those characters’ stories? Similarly, there is skepticism in some quarters about how well even the most observant and well-intentioned man can write about women’s experiences. These are reasonable concerns. Even though the story it tells is fictional, a good novel has to be authentic. It has to
feel
true. If it doesn’t, the author—male or female of whatever ethnicity—has done a disservice to the book’s characters, and even worse, to its readers.
A Southern Girl
aims to be more than simply a good novel, however. As John explained to me, its story is an exploration of personal experience as accomplished through fiction. In 1978, John and his wife Barbara, already the parents of two healthy boys, decided (not without some conflict between them) to adopt a daughter from another part of the world—in this case, Asia, a region that many Americans of the time associated with
communism, war, and brutality. In June of 1979, they brought home a tiny infant Korean girl and named her MaryBeth.
So all right, I thought. John knows something of what he writes. That’s a start.
John gives his character Coleman Carter much of his own background, making him scion of a “South of Broad” Charleston family with roots nearly as deep as the most resilient of the city’s grand old magnolia and oak and cypress trees. Now, certainly, any decision to adopt is fraught with risks. What can the new parents really know about the child’s background, health, and mental capacity? How well, or how poorly, might the child integrate into the immediate family? What about the extended family? What about the community? All of these issues matter, but some prove to be more acute than others. Traditional Southerners to their core, Coleman, his parents, and the society they all keep could be the undoing of every good Coleman and Elizabeth hope to accomplish in giving this abandoned infant her first real home. Like John did, Coleman struggles to reconcile two powerful forces: his wife’s admirable desire and determination to adopt a child from Korea, and his parents’ not-entirely-unreasonable objections to any adoption at all, and particularly to this one.
Coleman is not, of course, the only one with worries, and here is where
A Southern Girl
really shines. We get his wife Elizabeth’s earnest and poignant account of the journey. We see Jong Sim, the distraught but determined birth mother, as she does what most of us would deem impossible. We hear from Hana, the dedicated woman whose job it is to oversee the care and—in the best cases—adoptions of the orphaned or abandoned children in her ward.
As I began reading
A Southern Girl
, I was quickly caught up in the story, to the point of forgetting what I knew about the author, or even that I knew him at all. Instead, I was pulled into these characters’ complex lives. With Elizabeth and Jong Sim and Hana and Coleman, I struggled with the practical versus the profound. I considered the problems and the benefits of birthright, tradition, opportunity, exclusion. I thought about loss and renewal and what constitutes family. I contemplated the questions of what we owe the people we care for and what we owe ourselves. I wondered
how—or whether—Allie, the Korean born Southern girl at the center of it all, would come through her experience all right.
We are affected and shaped by many forces in our lives, and among those forces is the power of story. Here in your hands is one that I hope will move you as it has done me.
Therese Anne Fowler
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a novel is a famously insular endeavor, yet any novelist who is circumspect will appreciate the debt he or she owes to those who nurtured, encouraged, and even criticized, if the criticism made for a stronger book. When the work has a prepublication life of twenty years, as this one did, the debts are particularly numerous.
I must begin, as all good novels begin, with inspiration. In June 1979, Northwest Orient brought us our daughter from Seoul, Korea. Mary-Beth’s arrival enriched our family beyond measure.
A Southern Girl
is not MB’s story, but to deny that she was the inspiration for this book would be foolish. Equally foolish would be my failure to express my thanks to her mother, my wife, Barbara, whose courage, determination, and fore-sight brought MB to us. And to her “other mother,” whose name we have learned but whom we never expect to meet, thank you for your sacrifice in putting MB’s future first.
In 1993 I moved to Mexico to write this book. Shortly thereafter, a courier delivered a large box filled with some of the best fiction I’ve ever read because it is some of the best ever written. Pat Conroy, my friend, Citadel classmate, baseball teammate, and now editor, had personally selected them at Cliff Graubart’s Old New York Bookshop in Atlanta. Pat knew what I needed in Mexico, and my debt to him is long and deep.
Therese Anne Fowler’s acceptance of an invitation to pen a foreword to this book thrilled me. She is as nice as she is talented, as anyone familiar with
Z-A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
will attest.