Eden: A Novel

by Olympia Vernon

Overview

A hypnotic, lyrical debut novel about a young black girl in the deep south who comes to confront the realities of sex, race, disease, and death, by a writer of extraordinary emotional depth.

“A profoundly raw and gripping read,” (The Baltimore Sun) Olympia Vernon’s fearless and wildly original debut novel explodes on the first page and sustains a tightrope intensity until the last. Set in Pyke County, Mississippi, Eden is a raw, heartbreaking, and enlightening novel that marks the emergence of a stunning and original talent. Narrated by fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield, Eden opens in the moments after Maddy has impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother’s response to her transgression is to force her to spend weekends nursing her dying Aunt Pip, an outcast who lives on the edge of town.

From then on, Maddy must negotiate her two worlds: at the house where she lives with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother, Faye, and her father, Chevrolet—a one-armed drunk, gambler and womanizer—she is both a reluctant participant in and astute observer of the strange and confounding dynamics of her sometimes violent, sometimes tender family. (Years before, Maddy’s grandmother—her mother’s mother—chopped of Chevrolet’s arm and fed it to the pigs after he and Pip were found together in the back room as Faye entertained friends from the church—and ever since, he has been am emasculated, desperate man—drinking and gambling his wife’s money away, leaving her to clean up his mess time and again.) And then out on Commitment Road, she is caretaker to her Aunt Pip, whose only friend is her eccentric neighbor, Fat. Maddy’s time with Pip and Fat opens her eyes to the exhilaration of speaking your own mind, living your life on your own terms and without apology, and also to the cost extracted by both. She learns that there are strengths that belong to women alone, and also that there is a kind of ravaging vulnerability that is terrifying and inescapable, and uniquely female.

The world Maddy inherits is one of injustice and hypocrisy, one that requires black people work for the whites for little to no pay; that sent her Uncle Sugar to jail for raping a white woman—no questions asked—when Maddy was just a baby; that preaches Christian love and forgiveness even as its actions reflect the very opposite. But Maddy soon learns that there is something that can work to oppose those truths, and that is knowledge; having the will and the ability to look beneath the surface, to question what others take as a given. By the end of the novel, newly acquainted with mortality and her own fierce strength, Maddy comes to bear both the burden and the blessing of that knowledge.

In lush, vivid brushstrokes, Olympia Vernon conjures a world that is both intoxicating and cruel, and illuminates the bittersweet transformation of the young girl who must bear the burden and blessing of its secrets too soon. Eden is a haunting, memorable novel propelled by the poetry and power of a voice that is complex, lyrical, and utterly true.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555847524
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Olympia Vernon grew up in a small town on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, the fourth of seven children. She has a degree in Criminal Justice, and an M.F.A. from Louisiana State University. Vernon has twice been granted the Matt Clark Memorial Scholarship and was nominated for the Robert O. Butler Award in Fiction in 2000. She lives in New Orleans.

Read an Excerpt

Logic

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By Olympia Vernon

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 Olympia Vernon
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8021-1771-6

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Chapter One

David Harris was loading his pistol when the sun began to burn. He paused for a moment, the light coming toward him. My God, he could have run right now and caught it, his hands and body and full self trapped by it. But he knew, down there where words turn to jelly, that he had nowhere to put it. Just then he heard his daughter, Logic, ask Too how to spell heaven. He looked at his wife, Too, how molecular she was. Too was a maid and midwife for the folks in Valsin County, Mississippi. Everything that went into her mouth was broken into tiny pieces-the bones in her face fragile, the empty breasts, as if there was no fat beneath her nipples to push her self-esteem forward. Open your mouth and record the distance between air and lung, and you will notice an invisible line wrapped so tightly around the bones in Too Harris's throat that the transparency of the distance itself will cause you to suffocate. She took the cast-iron skillet off the fire and turned away from the stove, the sound of birds trampling on a large oak tree, and faced her daughter, the child she had named Logic, because she had seen the word on one of the Missis' magazines: a pale woman on the cover, her face upright and crooked, as if someone had dropped her entire body on concrete and cracked it at the jawbone.Finally, she answered Logic's question. "I s'pose you spell something like that by lookin' up," she said. And then, as if confirming the space of thought in her head, she repeated, "Yeah, you spell heaven by lookin' up." Logic's father, David, had loaded the pistol. He laid the gun down on the table beside her. Now he was thinking of the manner in which he entered the world. He could almost remember sound, its first coming, instinctual, a finger going down his throat, forcing him to cry. He felt the finger again, on his palate, as the voice of a man fell down upon his ears and made him cry even louder this time, the sound of a boy losing his strength. He picked up the gun and looked out into the heat: the wooden boards of the house were rotting from the inside. He had built this triangular house with what was left of his hands; he was sort of a mathematician. He had set each board perfectly into the map of the house, except one that lay unevenly on the rooftop; he had found it on the side of the road. A metal loop had been hammered into it, a chain looped through the center. Steel. "Where you headed?" The voice of his wife, Too, caused a gap in his breathing. "Nowhere," he said. With this, he opened the door to the house he had built with his own hands-to prove to himself that he was not completely a wasted mold of clay. He whispered something, his hand up to his mouth for a moment, as if he had been working on something combustible and it exploded in his face. * * *

Logic was in her bedroom lying on her back. She had long since touched her belly and discovered a cloud of butterflies floating around inside. She could feel them again. She began to laugh. She solved almost everything this way, with laughter. She felt a wing fluttering in her ovary. She touched her abdomen and began to follow the rhythm of blood flowing there. Or something else. Her room was the coldest. Even in summer, a breeze rode the space of her intimate bedroom, as she opened her mouth and caught it. She had not completely healed from the accident. Her mother came home from work one day and found her lying in the dust; she had fallen from the oak tree, her head filled with blood. Too thought she had been struck by a metal rod or an animal and washed the redness from her head; when Logic came to, she said she had fallen from the sky. Too gave her an elixir and waited for her to fall asleep. Something was there in the room. She heard it breathing and could almost see the thing she had heard pick up the square-shaped pillow with both hands, stand there above Logic's head, and come down upon it. There was a terrible gasp. You must bear down, kill the girl before she gasps again. In a little while she will be dead, and Too Harris will be in a white woman's window, watching the energy of a moving cloud. What had she done? Then, as if impossible, Too Harris realized that she alone was in the room. And she alone was holding the pillow. She hurried, as if urgency would cause her to forget, and collected a sewing needle, returning to Logic's bedside, where she had set the tools of surgery on an alabaster-white cloth: fishing twine, alcohol, fresh cotton, a leech. Logic was fast asleep when Too picked up the parasite and watched as it sucked the poison out of her child's head. She soaked the cotton with alcohol and pressed down on the cut. Next, the threading of the needle. The fishing twine entered the needle's eye; she lifted the soft flesh of Logic's scalp. The wound began to rise. She had closed it up. A few days later, she noticed that the child who had come from her stomach was no longer balanced in her footsteps. Part of her body seemed to have been metallicized. When she found her, she was in the shape of 45 degrees. Her words were not the same; they did not come from her body in the pattern of stars: every syllable surrounding her attitude, attached like a vein, a molecule. But for her laughter, Logic had become invisible. The butterflies had stopped their fluttering. Logic lifted herself from the bed. She looked around at the life-sized doll in the corner of the room. Of all the things around her-the lime-colored dinosaur with a horizontal bar of pink tape over its mouth; the musical clef note that she had traced from a tombstone; a paring knife, its sharp edge stained with blue ink, violated. But the doll-the doll she loved-the only thing given to her by her father after she had fallen from the sky. She called it Celesta. Her mother was in the next room. The house was built this way: three rooms on one side, the third being the operating room, where she had lain, after being sewn back together, on a long steel table her father had bought from a man in Pyke County. The man was convinced he had seen the feet of Jesus in the center of it and could not keep it because he was a sinner and did not want God in his house: he was plastic. "Logic!" yelled Too. "You best be gettin' to bed now." The doll was in Logic's hands. She looked at the face where she had painted her lips candy-apple red, the dark pupils she had slowly begun to gouge out because they were artificial, the almond-colored skin. "I know." Soon after, she began to undress. She looked at herself in the mirror-her breasts were beginning to swell. Her body was emaciated; she felt she had a pyramid in her bones. The straight, invisible line that connected her nipples, the perfect navel in the center of her stomach, creating the image of a measurement that was equal on all sides-she had inherited the genes of her father the mathematician. She parted the hairs on her head and touched the feeling. Yes, it was the parasite that had left its feeling upon her. She felt it tickling her at times: the blood racing, pounding upward. She could control the feeling when she wanted. By swallowing. There on the edge of her dresser lay the panties and gown that her mother had readied for her. She was thirteen now, but she had not learned the stability of time, how things were to be put in order. She lived in a place where time did not exist; she dreamed, on many occasions, of death and believed it came in threes. This is the memory that lived within her: three spirits into the Ultimate one, the number of days at a time that she'd stopped eating, the pointed invisible lines of the triangle, the alphabets of YOU-those which she added to herself, her vocabulary with a distinction that required no urgency, as it passed through her lungs-a slow rising of the tongue, as if a baby had slept there unmoved. She knelt down, her hands folded, and began to talk to God. Her mother lay on the other side of the wall, her flat body against the sheets. Her room was without light. She turned to ask God something and grew faceless, as if she did not exist at all in this unbehaved environment, as if it were God in the room with her in the early day, watching her hold the pillow: He saw she had suffocated the child, if only in her dreams. For a spell, that season which comes and goes when a woman is restless, fascinated by her own accident, she wanted to crawl into bed with her daughter, ask her to pray for the thing that held the moment in its hands, so it would not come back again. Perhaps she knew that, were it to return, there would be a gasp that would split the belly of a quiet cloud and land high, up there where things go noticed, and come down, like oxygen, upon the earth and crush it. Logic blew out the flame of a small lantern that stood beside her bed. The scent of the kerosene rose in the air, as she imagined herself opening up from the inside, where she believed there was a bed of larvae. Soon she would need an open door, a valve, to release them into the earth again. The image lay bound to the ink of the paring knife-its wings soon to be carved on the surface of her stomach. When her father came home, his feet winding down, stopping near the operating room, she turned over and reminded herself to staple Celesta's lips together by morning. (Continues...)

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Excerpted from Logic by Olympia Vernon Copyright © 2004 by Olympia Vernon. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Vernon's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, 2003's Eden, is a dark and harrowing portrait of catastrophically scarred people in rural Valsin County, Miss. The sad story of Logic Harris, named after a word her mother saw in a magazine and pregnant by 13, will undoubtedly remind many readers of early Toni Morrison, particularly The Bluest Eye. Nearly killed as a child when she fell out of a tree, Logic is now "touched"-in every sense of the word: she "[doesn't] even talk in a straight line," and her father sexually abuses and impregnates her. But somehow, as Logic watches her neighbor's whoring and feels the growing "butterflies in her stomach," she retains an angelic innocence. All but abandoned by a used-up mother, who suffers "the drought of her wilted body" and secretly wishes her daughter dead, and an angry father teetering on the verge of insanity, Logic struggles to navigate the secrets and silences that have poisoned the adult world around her. Although Logic's hallucinogenic, disjointed outlook and language can be utterly incomprehensible at times, Vernon's alchemical imagination transforms passages that make no sense on their own ("a long death breathes nakedly behind the blood where red is turning sharp") into a whole as startlingly original, disconcerting and haunting as a fever dream. Agent, Amy William at Collins and McCormick. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Ironically named, Logic seems anything but. While growing up in rural and desolate Valsin County, Mississippi, Logic Harris, now 13, had a traumatic accident that makes it difficult for her to reason. The dialog of the title character and many of the others, especially the neighbor's son whom Logic calls "the tallest," makes little sense at times. The cast of characters is rich, though most seem eccentric and deeply troubled. One of the themes running throughout involves sexuality, often as it manifests itself in questionable and unhealthy ways. There is George, the neighborhood prostitute, and Logic's mother, Too, entrapped by fantasies and sexual longings. An ex-con working on the Harris's property is tormented by thoughts of The Principle, a man who raped him repeatedly while in prison. But nothing disturbs Logic more than David, her father, who rapes her on what she refers to as the "operating table." Pregnant, she enlists the help of "the tallest." The tallest molests his sister, and Logic too, all while enjoying dressing in his mother's clothing. But when Logic tells him about butterflies stirring in her stomach, he offers to help her release them. Armed with a clothes hanger, some alcohol, and cotton swabs, they attempt to solve the problem. Steeped in imagery, metaphor and allusion, the language is beautiful, poetic even, though largely incomprehensible. Though the novel is often a difficult read, there are a few predictable elements. For example, the gun that David carries is instrumental in his own demise, while Logic is preparing a set of wings that foreshadow her final flight. Readers who enjoy the work of Toni Morrison or Gayl Jones will probably appreciate this title. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students and adults. 2004, Grove, 254p., Ages 17 to adult.
—KaaVonia Hinton

KLIATT

If Vernon (Eden) intended to plop her readers into a world they won't understand-mirroring the experience of 13-year-old protagonist Logic Harris, a disabled girl impregnated by her father, neglected by her mother, and living in a place so remote it's as if time has stopped, Logic is successful, even brilliant. If, on the other hand, Vernon is going for a coherent narrative, she has failed badly. Despite an abundance of evocative images, the novel is laden with enigmatic statements that leave the reader with visual pictures but little clarity. Here, for example, is a conversation between a boy named the tallest and Logic: "Where your mama? asked Logic./ She gone to the doctor./ The doctor? repeated Logic./ Yeah, said the tallest. She got presidents inside her./ Presidents? Yeah, said the tallest, presidents./ Like who? Like Abe Lincolns./ Abe Lincolns?/ They got caught up yonder, said the tallest, pointing to his belly,/ downward. How they got caught up yonder?/ There was elected. The world put 'em in office./ What kind of office?/ The kidney." While much of Logic's dialog borders on gibberish, Vernon's lyrical descriptions capture a rural Mississippi rife with evil, where abuse, pathology, poverty, racism, and violence intertwine. Readers are invited to peer into this bleak, troubled place; the question is whether they'll languish once they arrive or find meaning in the chaos that surrounds them. Recommended for collections focused on sexual abuse and trauma only.-Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Second-novelist Vernon (Eden, 2003) reveals her southern antecedents in Faulkner and Morrison in a desperately sad tale of a retarded, abused young black girl in hopeless Valsin County, Mississippi. Thirteen-year-old Logic Harris fell from a tree and has never since been right in the head-she asks her mother, Too, a local midwife and white woman's maid, how to spell "heaven." Logic's father David Harris, a laconic, repressed man who works in the woodyard, has rejected Too and sexually abuses Logic, who believes that "a cloud of butterflies" floats in her stomach: she may or may not be pregnant. In any event, nobody seems to notice as her belly swells, whether from pregnancy or malnutrition. Across the street live a sick prostitute, George, and her four unschooled children from different fathers; George's visits from "the man made of paper" provide the narrative with some fodder, especially in George's oldest son, called merely "the tallest," who likes to dress in his mother's clothes and is the sole character who seems to understand and care for Logic. Little happens in this slim, richly metaphorical, nearly unreadable narrative, yet it holds the reader by its truly daring if not always successful figurative leaps ("The sun had risen into an unkept alphabet"). Logic speaks in parables, like Jesus, and indeed is compared to an innocent sacrificial lamb; she carries around wire hangers she wants her mother's employer, the Missis, to help her fashion into butterfly wings. As in Vernon's debut, a brutality fed by poverty and ignorance barely simmers under the surface, and acts of violence are likely to erupt at any moment-as with the appearance of an ex-con to delineate the Harris property inbarbed wire, a man who himself is haunted by the homosexual savagery he suffered from in prison. Vernon's vision is relentless, nearly misanthropic, often unintelligible except at a second reading. Altogether, Logic is like an early effort, before the author could hone her vision. Agent: Amy William/Collins and McCormick

Kirkus Reviews