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Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell
In four haunting family stories, Ellen Douglas seeks to track down the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. Progressively searching further and further back in time, each of these four family tales involves collusion and secrets. In "Grant," a randy old uncle dying in the author's house is nursed by a beautiful black woman while his white family watches from a "respectful" distance. Who loves him better? When truth is death, who is braver facing it? In "Julia and Nellie," very close cousins make "a marriage in all but name" back in the days of easy scandal. The nature of the liaison never mentioned, the family waives its Presbyterian morality in the face of family deviance. In "Hampton," her grandmother's servant, who has constructed a world closed to whites, evades the author's tentative efforts at a meeting of minds. And finally, in "On Second Creek," Douglas confronts her obsession with the long-lost--or -buried--facts of the "examination and execution" of slaves who may or may not have plotted an uprising. Having published fiction for four decades, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact. It's a book, she says, "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling." It's about secrets, judgments, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It's about the truth in fiction and the fiction in "truth." Praise for Ellen Douglas: "It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer."--Richard Ford; "Proust wrote in one of his last letters, 'one must never be afraid of going too far, for the truth is beyond.' Ellen Douglas has taken this very much to heart and has sought the truth in a region beyond falsehood; through falsehood, in effect. It's a fascinating performance."--Shelby Foote.
221 pages, Hardcover
First published January 9, 1998
2 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Douglas
37 books17 followersEllen Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest settlements in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Her fiction has won many prizes, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 25, 2020
I read this book because it was referenced in another book I recently read on lynching. The part I was most interested in didn't come until the very end, but I did find the first story really interesting. It was interesting, but often confusing, to walk along with the author as she tried to piece together old family stories. I sometimes lost track of who was who, and there were important bits that she wasn't able to find out that left the stories somewhat unfinished. It was an interesting look into a person's reckoning with sometimes unpleasant family history.
February 21, 2021
I loved every moment in this wonderful book. This Mississippi author speaks lovingly, yet with candor, of memories of families, relationships, and place. Her family’s roots in Natchez made for striking and memorable recollections. Like her, I had never heard of the horrible account of Second Creek.
This book prompted me to remember tales from my childhood as well recall some family secrets. Were I a writer, I too would have to wait for the passing of some to be able to tell the hush-hush stories.
For me, this was the perfect book at the ideal time. I highly recommend it to those who love southern literature. This was a treasure, and I hope to read the rest of Douglas’s work. I especially love that she chose to write under an assumed name so that the characters in her first book wouldn’t recognize themselves.
This book prompted me to remember tales from my childhood as well recall some family secrets. Were I a writer, I too would have to wait for the passing of some to be able to tell the hush-hush stories.
For me, this was the perfect book at the ideal time. I highly recommend it to those who love southern literature. This was a treasure, and I hope to read the rest of Douglas’s work. I especially love that she chose to write under an assumed name so that the characters in her first book wouldn’t recognize themselves.
September 8, 2023
Quite a convoluted lil book.
January 12, 2023
SELECTED FOR RE-READ 2023 - just as lovely the second time around. Determined to find and read her fiction!
Original Review
Before finding this book, I'd never heard of this southern author, who apparently draws heavily from her long family history for her fiction. I chose the book from the biography shelves based on the lovely snippet of prose on the back cover.
Part memoir, part contemplative musings, partly an exploration of southern history and a southern family's history...a dense, lush, marvelous reading experience!
Lovely writing, and beautifully puzzling in its construction. I loved this book so much, I will likely read it again (after finding and reading some of her fiction, perhaps.)
Original Review
Before finding this book, I'd never heard of this southern author, who apparently draws heavily from her long family history for her fiction. I chose the book from the biography shelves based on the lovely snippet of prose on the back cover.
Part memoir, part contemplative musings, partly an exploration of southern history and a southern family's history...a dense, lush, marvelous reading experience!
Lovely writing, and beautifully puzzling in its construction. I loved this book so much, I will likely read it again (after finding and reading some of her fiction, perhaps.)
December 19, 2008
This book of four stories is a history of the south again. She is grappling with the issues America has yet to address about racism. I applaud her writing.
(I actually own the paperback, not the hard cover book)
(I actually own the paperback, not the hard cover book)
May 17, 2020
c 1998. Not a novel, not short stories, based on fact but fictionalized to some extent, hard to put into a category.
I hope to read many more of her previous books.
Born in Natchez, Mississippi, July 12, 1921
Died November 07, 2012
This is a late one, quite short, sharing old old family secrets and efforts to reconstruct past events in her home area [near Natchez Miss], especially a horrifying case of torture and killing of several slaves by a group of prominent slave-owners. The point is that Douglas's own forefathers were involved but almost nothing is known/recorded about the event.
In this book Douglas shares with us her struggles to cope morally with the actions/lives of her ancestors and relatives. One big family secret is that one of her grandfathers committed suicide and Douglas never knew this until she was 50 and heard it from her older sister and brother; she was flabbergasted. It is claimed that the wife was never told of the suicide, and in either case no one in the family ever talked about it. This is an extreme example of a more general way of some of her relatives of keeping the family honor.
"Josephine Haxton took the pseudonym Ellen Douglas in 1962 to protect her family's privacy upon publication of her first novel."
p 175 "It is impossible to make sense out of stories that purport to be true. Something is always missing. To give them form, extract their deepest meaning, one has to turn them into fiction, to find causes, or if, as is usually the case, causes are unfindable, one has to invent them."
I hope to read many more of her previous books.
Born in Natchez, Mississippi, July 12, 1921
Died November 07, 2012
This is a late one, quite short, sharing old old family secrets and efforts to reconstruct past events in her home area [near Natchez Miss], especially a horrifying case of torture and killing of several slaves by a group of prominent slave-owners. The point is that Douglas's own forefathers were involved but almost nothing is known/recorded about the event.
In this book Douglas shares with us her struggles to cope morally with the actions/lives of her ancestors and relatives. One big family secret is that one of her grandfathers committed suicide and Douglas never knew this until she was 50 and heard it from her older sister and brother; she was flabbergasted. It is claimed that the wife was never told of the suicide, and in either case no one in the family ever talked about it. This is an extreme example of a more general way of some of her relatives of keeping the family honor.
"Josephine Haxton took the pseudonym Ellen Douglas in 1962 to protect her family's privacy upon publication of her first novel."
p 175 "It is impossible to make sense out of stories that purport to be true. Something is always missing. To give them form, extract their deepest meaning, one has to turn them into fiction, to find causes, or if, as is usually the case, causes are unfindable, one has to invent them."
August 15, 2022
I had a difficult time with this book. I found it difficult to follow and found myself re-reading passages trying to understand the stories. I enjoyed what i followed, but the author seemed excessively wordy. This is the first book I've ever read from this author. I might need read more of her works to familiarize myself with her style.
August 18, 2022
She is a wonderful writer but this book seemed scattered and dare I say pointless? It wandered around and I found myself rereading parts of it thinking I had missed something.
The editor must’ve been in a rush. The book is a good first draft and definitely creates a sense of place but the actual storytelling seems to be a few drinks in.
The editor must’ve been in a rush. The book is a good first draft and definitely creates a sense of place but the actual storytelling seems to be a few drinks in.
February 23, 2023
Ellen Douglas wrote ‘Truth: Four stories I Am Finally Old Enough To Tell’ as a way of coming to terms with her Southern childhood by telling some of her family’s secrets once she’d outlived anyone who could object. I enjoyed the stories but found them rambling and hard to follow at times. I guess that short fiction just isn’t my preferred genre.
January 1, 2013
This book deserves the worst review I can give it. The title offends me “TRUTH”, ha! It is total fiction. My grandmother was Eliza Martin. She and her family figure prominently in the story entitled “On Second Creek”. Ellen Douglas, real name, Josephine Ayers Haxton’s goal was to depict a racially conflicted south and use my grandmother to try and give her story a veil of truth it did not deserve.
My grandmother was born in Natchez Mississippi in 1896. She died in 1994. She graduated from Smith College, worked at the Protestant Home for Children in Natchez for over 30 years, managing their finances among other things. She was a Christian, a devoted wife, mother and community leader, beloved by her family and friends. Eliza was burdened with a handicap for much of her adult life, she was deaf. In her final years this was very frustrating for her and for her family.
She had real difficulty communicating, especially with strangers which Ms. Douglas/Haxton definitely was. It would have been even harder for Eliza to communicate with Ms. Douglas/Haxton because at the time she claims she visited Eliza, my grandmother was dead. Every one of the quotes attributed to my grandmother in this piece of fiction is false. When family members complained in writing to the publisher we were told that Ms. Douglas/Haxton had issued a disclaimer. How convenient.
Let’s assume for a minute that the date the author says she visited my grandmother was incorrect and Eliza was still alive. Ms. Douglas/Haxton admits in the book that she used a pretense to visit my grandmother. If she had disclosed her true intentions Eliza would never have met with her and we would never have allowed it…if she were alive , which she was not. This was a cruel trick. Ms. Douglas/Haxton pursued several assumptions and used her made up visit with my grandmother to convert them to facts.
We especially take issue with the writer’s portrayal of her relationship with Josephine. Jo began working for my grandmother in 1959 and continued until the day Eliza moved into a nursing home. Jo was a well paid employee. Not only did my grandmother pay Jo well, she helped take care of Jo’s family and she loved her dearly. Everyone in our family loved Jo and I’m pretty sure she would say she felt the same about Eliza and our family. Our relation ship spanned 35 years.
There are too many other good books out there to read. Don’t waste your time on this one.
My grandmother was born in Natchez Mississippi in 1896. She died in 1994. She graduated from Smith College, worked at the Protestant Home for Children in Natchez for over 30 years, managing their finances among other things. She was a Christian, a devoted wife, mother and community leader, beloved by her family and friends. Eliza was burdened with a handicap for much of her adult life, she was deaf. In her final years this was very frustrating for her and for her family.
She had real difficulty communicating, especially with strangers which Ms. Douglas/Haxton definitely was. It would have been even harder for Eliza to communicate with Ms. Douglas/Haxton because at the time she claims she visited Eliza, my grandmother was dead. Every one of the quotes attributed to my grandmother in this piece of fiction is false. When family members complained in writing to the publisher we were told that Ms. Douglas/Haxton had issued a disclaimer. How convenient.
Let’s assume for a minute that the date the author says she visited my grandmother was incorrect and Eliza was still alive. Ms. Douglas/Haxton admits in the book that she used a pretense to visit my grandmother. If she had disclosed her true intentions Eliza would never have met with her and we would never have allowed it…if she were alive , which she was not. This was a cruel trick. Ms. Douglas/Haxton pursued several assumptions and used her made up visit with my grandmother to convert them to facts.
We especially take issue with the writer’s portrayal of her relationship with Josephine. Jo began working for my grandmother in 1959 and continued until the day Eliza moved into a nursing home. Jo was a well paid employee. Not only did my grandmother pay Jo well, she helped take care of Jo’s family and she loved her dearly. Everyone in our family loved Jo and I’m pretty sure she would say she felt the same about Eliza and our family. Our relation ship spanned 35 years.
There are too many other good books out there to read. Don’t waste your time on this one.
April 14, 2013
The concept was interesting; an author goes public with the "truths" behind the novels she's written, now that she's outlived all the family and other members of the community who might object to her revealing the stories she's picked up from them. Unfortunately, her focus on strict truth-telling limits her story-telling, since most of the "truths" she's telling are fragmentary by their very nature--for instance, her grandfather's suicide, a rarely-discussed family secret about which she never did learn the details, which tends to be the case with rarely-discussed family secrets. With so little to go on, it's difficult to find this "truth" compelling.
Perhaps the only place her absolute refusal to fudge the details did work was her final story, "On Second Creek," where her attempts to uncover the history behind the punishment of 30 slaves murdered for plotting an insurrection by a group of men which included her own ancestors is largely fruitless. In that story only, the silence of the historical record, and her inability to uncover the voices of those involved--and particularly the voices of the slaughtered men--resonates. Her framing of her mother's visceral horror at the lynching of a free black man in the 20s against her family's unquestioning admiration of their forebears, some of whom were likely complicit in something even worse, is probably the most pointed and poignant moment in the whole memoir.
Perhaps the only place her absolute refusal to fudge the details did work was her final story, "On Second Creek," where her attempts to uncover the history behind the punishment of 30 slaves murdered for plotting an insurrection by a group of men which included her own ancestors is largely fruitless. In that story only, the silence of the historical record, and her inability to uncover the voices of those involved--and particularly the voices of the slaughtered men--resonates. Her framing of her mother's visceral horror at the lynching of a free black man in the 20s against her family's unquestioning admiration of their forebears, some of whom were likely complicit in something even worse, is probably the most pointed and poignant moment in the whole memoir.
May 30, 2011
"Julia and Nellie", about the author's attempt to imagine the lives of her grandmother and other women of her generation, is diffuse and rambling in structure; the author chose to tell it rather as she pieced her knowledge together, in snatches. Both it and the preceding essay, "Grant", give a sharp sense of the people and the society, in spite of Douglas constantly foregrounding her own uncertainty about these stories -- or maybe because of it? Douglas is concerned to say no more than she knows, and to give small details when she doesn't know larger things; she's trying not to use convention or assumptions to fill in the blanks. That helps her stories not to disappear into generalities.
But this sense of seeing clearly isn't present in "Hampton", because Douglas didn't know the man she's writing about very well, and because his experiences were so distant from hers; she knows the white people in his life, but otherwise, she can only report what he told her, and a few other fragments; it's necessarily distanced.
"On Second Creek" may be the best of the essays. Its main theme is not family stories, but not telling family stories; many things are deliberately shrouded in silence. It's a thought provoking subject. The author talks about her fiction-writer's instinct to fill in details; but memoirs based on history often try to present themselves as without gaps.
But this sense of seeing clearly isn't present in "Hampton", because Douglas didn't know the man she's writing about very well, and because his experiences were so distant from hers; she knows the white people in his life, but otherwise, she can only report what he told her, and a few other fragments; it's necessarily distanced.
"On Second Creek" may be the best of the essays. Its main theme is not family stories, but not telling family stories; many things are deliberately shrouded in silence. It's a thought provoking subject. The author talks about her fiction-writer's instinct to fill in details; but memoirs based on history often try to present themselves as without gaps.
April 9, 2016
The author, Ellen Douglas, described this book as "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring... willful amnesia... the truth in fiction and the fiction in "truth.'"
I love fiction that probes established family history in search of an underlying truth, and how history (family or otherwise), once you get past the "known facts," is in a real sense an invention, whether written by the victors or told by a great-aunt. I am reminded of a quote attributed to Nietzsche: There are no facts, only interpretations.
I love fiction that probes established family history in search of an underlying truth, and how history (family or otherwise), once you get past the "known facts," is in a real sense an invention, whether written by the victors or told by a great-aunt. I am reminded of a quote attributed to Nietzsche: There are no facts, only interpretations.
May 20, 2015
catchy title got me. Novelist telling stories of her Southern ancestors that apparently served as inspiration for her novels. However, her style remains that of a novelist, and the type of novelist who stops me from reading (almost) any novels. Lots of boring, wordy scene-setting in between anything happening.
April 30, 2008
I read two of the four stories. They aren't bad, but they aren't what I was hoping to get. They are more like the standard southern novel stories.
April 17, 2008
Tales of the South: Ellen Douglas digs up her ancestors, her words heavy with the weight of their deeds, yet detached enough to examine them.
December 27, 2009
Every time I started to enjoy this book, she would change subjects. It was very stream of conciousness.
November 29, 2012
a somewhat uneven collection, but very atmospheric and attentive to human character; will read more by this author
February 18, 2013
The stories rambled and there were elements of each that made me understand why she couldn't write these things while older family members were still alive. Not as good as I had hoped.
July 21, 2015
"Natchez isn't a real town, is it?" she said. "Faulkner might have invented it."
January 18, 2016
Somewhat difficult to follow but worth it.
She is such a wonderful writer. I've been in a couple of the old mansions in Natchez she mentions.
She is such a wonderful writer. I've been in a couple of the old mansions in Natchez she mentions.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews