Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories by Fred Chappell

[Rob Neufeld]

Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories by Fred Chappell (St. Martin’s hardcover, Nov. 2009, 320 pages, $27.99).

Reality is fine, but imagination is glorious in Chappell’s new book of fiction


Fred Chappell, one of the deans of mountain-born writers, has a home in fantasy—not the world of epic clashes but of native visions. In his new book, “Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories,” he assembles twenty-one accounts of his alternate universe. His residence in that universe as a child had worried folk.

“You see, honey, you’re going to have to take better care,” Harmon Cody, an avuncular handyman, tells the over-imaginative boy in the book’s second story, “Broken Blossoms.” The youngster had been rifling through the house, looking for rare postage stamps, and had hammered his way into a locked trunk.

After exploding an apple tree with one of the cylinders the boy had found in the trunk, Cody remarks, “Happened you hit one of these caps a lick up in your house, you’d have been blown to pieces.”

“From this instant,” the boy confesses, “I date my awkward tumble into the world and here I now remain, alert and unready.” Though, like the boy, Chappell made a choice to be a solid citizen of society, he has the documents to prove his double citizenship in an imaginary realm.

Great citizen

Chappell’s distinguished career has involved becoming a scholar of world literature, teaching at UNC-Greensboro, raising a family with a long-time sweetheart, nurturing the state’s writing community, and finding time to write. His body of work—to date, fifteen volumes of poetry, eleven novels and story collections, and two works of literary criticism—gives him membership in the history of literature.

Chappell connects with a worldwide, centuries-old community of literary other-worlders. Carl Linnaeus, 18th century Swedish botanist, makes an appearance in Chappell’s story, “Linnaeus Forgets.”

Linnaeus, suddenly famous, receives a box from the South Seas containing a plant specimen. He has been under attack for the alleged immorality of his sex-based classification system. Unable to sleep, he visits the room where he’d established the plant, and is enveloped by the now lush organism.

He has a vision, writes long in his journal, and awakens to find the plant reduced to residue and his writing unintelligible. He completely forgets his vision, yet undergoes a change, writing in metaphors, perceiving the orgy of plants, and sleeping well.

If is it

In literary terms, Chappell’s fiction falls within the tradition of allegory, with existentialist nakedness, Twilight Zone darkness, and mountain wit.

In “Alma,” Chappell provides a counterpoint to Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” A pioneer woodsman is visited by a poacher whose “livestock” is women. He helps one escape, and receives an education.

“Gift of Roses” takes a gardener and her assistant to Shady Hill Cemetery (“not one iota of shade,” the assistant notes) in western North Carolina in search of the grave of Davida Rathbone, 1837-1913. “In the old days the custom was to plant upon the grave of a woman deceased her favorite bloom.” Davida’s rose gives the gardener occult knowledge.

“There was a dream,” begins the story, “Mankind Journeys through Forests of Symbols,” “and a big gaudy thing it was, too, and for six hours it had been blocking Highway 51 between Turkey Knob and Ember Forks.”

The final story, “Ancestors,” has Harry Beacham meeting protein-and-pig-blood recreations of his Civil War ancestors, produced by the Department of Reality, whose motto is, “Engineering Humanity for Historic Purpose.” When the first ancestor, Lt. Edward Aldershot of the Army of Northern Virginia, appears at Harry’s door, his wife yoo-hoos, “Harry, honey. Our ancestor is here.”

Two more ancestors come (well, the third one is every man’s kin, a version of Walt Whitman). Harry and other customers engage in a massive ancestor return drive to Raleigh. A policeman tells Harry, “The government has shut down the whole Reality Department.”

“They shut down Reality?” Harry responds. “Why did they do that?”