Opening a Well of Secrets.
by Margarite Nathe
The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays. By Fred Hobson. Louisiana State University Press, 217 pages, $24.95.
Your great-grandmother committed suicide, you know,” great-aunt Clara whispered to Fred Hobson almost twenty-five years ago. “She jumped into a well and drowned.” The family had just finished a big Sunday dinner, and Clara, the self-appointed family historian, had found a captive audience in her thirty-five-year-old nephew.
“No, I didn’t know,” he said with polite surprise.
Later, Hobson asked his mother about what Clara had told him. This was the first she had heard of it, his mother said, and wouldn’t her own mother have told her about something like that? They dismissed Clara’s declaration as the imaginings of a woman in her eighties, but Hobson filed it away in his mind.
All this took place at a Sanford, North Carolina get-together for the Gregory side of the family. Hobson didn’t know much about this branch of his family tree, except for a vague impression that it cultivated high-strung relations who were, despite keen intellects, prone to nervous breakdowns. It was more than twenty years before he would search for the truth in Clara’s so-called imaginings.
During a break from his usual research and teaching load, Hobson’s search began, as many do, in the library. He wanted to know if this thing was true — had his great-grandmother, Emily Mullen Gregory, taken her own life? If so, why had no one in the family spoken of it? Why had his mother, Emily’s granddaughter, not known of it? Victorian propriety weighed down many Southern families in the nineteenth century, and even in today’s South, there are some things of which one simply does not speak, if one has good manners.
Hobson searched through countless reels of microfilm, examining census records, church records, alumni records, cemetery records, old newspapers, and anything else the librarians unearthed for him. He uncovered little information about Emily — even the exact date of her death was obscure. She seemed to have disappeared behind the massive social shadow cast by her husband, who was an authoritative and respected lawyer in Greensboro.
Hobson did find that she gave birth to nine children in twenty years. That she was often plagued by “bodily afflictions.” That she was well-liked despite her tendency to become despondent and unhinged. And from a newspaper article about her death in 1881, that she was a “devout Christian,” and that “the entire community was shocked” by her “sudden and untimely death.”
Emily Mullen Gregory, circa 1870, when she would have been between twenty-five and thirty years old. Photo courtesy of Fred Hobson.
Hints — these were all hints of the manner of Emily’s death, but few solid facts were to be found. One day, as he slipped yet another microfilm reel back onto the shelf, Hobson’s eye caught something the librarians had not mentioned: a single reel of a minor newspaper called The North State, which happened to chronicle the exact period during which Emily had died.
“And there I found it,” Hobson says. “In greater detail and more sensational reporting than I ever thought I’d find.”
The North State article described a spectacular scene in which Mrs. Gregory, being wracked with “paroxysms of derangement,” rose silently from her knees and stole out of a family prayer session. Upon noticing her disappearance, her husband rushed from the room to see her perched on the brink of a well in the distance. As he began to run toward her, “sounding the alarm,” she flung herself in and drowned before anyone could rescue her.
While some of the other entries in The Silencing of Emily Mullen discuss various family members, none is as dark as this story of Emily Mullen Gregory.
Much of Hobson’s research had been centered on American and Southern literary and intellectual history. This collection is a social history of the South reflected through his own eyes and family, but speaking to a much broader geography. When he began his search, he’d planned to write an essay about the rumor surrounding his great-grandmother and to include it in this volume.
“It was at that point,” Hobson says, “that it developed for the first time into something more personal than I’d realized it would become.” Up until the North State article, his thoughts were trained on the thrill of the hunt for facts. But this poor woman, he began to realize, was his great-grandmother, the mother of his grandmother. She spent almost her entire adult life pregnant, in confinement, or caring for a newborn — an existence of which she may have grown very weary.
The nineteenth century saw the male medical establishment’s complete ignorance of women’s health, Hobson says. In particular, so-called hysteria, the “female disease.” In 1895, one American physician wrote that it was considered “natural and almost laudable” that middle- and upper-class women should “break down under all conceivable varieties of strain — a winter dissipation, a houseful of servants, a quarrel with a female friend.”
He began to understand why his grandmother, Emily’s daughter, had always seemed so withdrawn. But did she actually know what had happened to her mother when, at the age of five, she saw her disappear into the earth? It was not an event Mr. Gregory wanted to have publicized, and it seemed to have taken only one generation to obliterate it from the family’s awareness.
Even if the community at the time had buzzed with gossip about the Gregory family, and even if Hobson’s grandmother did know the truth of her mother’s death, the secret stopped with her and her siblings — except, evidently, for the person who let slip to great-aunt Clara the facts of Emily’s fall.
Almost thirty years after Emily’s death, another of Hobson’s ancestors, his great-aunt Lelia Tuttle, left her home and family in the South for China. Her story, which is the subject of the next essay in the collection, is much happier than Emily’s. Armed with a master’s degree from Columbia University, she set out in 1909 for China, where she remained as a missionary and teacher until 1941. Lelia was feisty, tough, independent, and determined. She was both a friend and critic of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and later, dean of women at Soochow University.
Lelia was not alone in her vocation. Hundreds of women from the American South went to China when it reluctantly opened its doors to the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. Women found there the independence and fulfillment of professional life that was beyond their reach in the United States. Thousands of the best and brightest women in the country flocked to China and the opportunity for a career in which they could be well-educated, influential, and enjoy the same status as their male counterparts.
As a child, Hobson knew great-aunt Lelia as a woman in her eighties who delivered superb renditions of Joel Chandler Harris’ Brer Fox and Brer Bear, always before moving on to talk about her years in China. Even then it was clear to him that Lelia was an inspiration. “She was known as something kind of special in the family,” he says.
All of the essays in Hobson’s The Silencing of Emily Mullen, even those that have nothing to do with his own family, explain certain things about the past in which many of our aunts, uncles, and grandparents came of age. Incorporating the stories of some of his own family members made history come alive for Hobson. The fruits of his quest for historical facts are laid out in these essays: thoughtful assessments of African American author Mary Mebane, novelist Richard Ford, social critic James McBride Dabbs, and several other prominent Southern figures.
In writing The Silencing of Emily Mullen, Hobson discovered things about his homeland and heritage that he hadn’t expected. “But even when you know the facts, you really don’t know the truth,” he says. “You don’t know why.”
Fred Hobson is Lineberger Professor in the Humanities at Carolina. He is also the editor of the Southern Literary Studies series and co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal.
Margarite Nathe is a writer and editorial assistant at Endeavors magazine.
