"The Watery Part of the World" by Michael Parker, Algonquin, 272 pages, $23.95
What does the disappearance of Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr, in 1812 have to do with the last surviving inhabitants of a deserted island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1970?
Plenty, as it turns out. In Michael Parker’s absorbing new novel, “The Watery Part of the World,” the two elderly Whaley sisters, born and raised on Yaupon Island, are Theodosia’s direct descendants.
Their African-American caretaker is the great-great-great-grandson of the faithful freed slave who was at Theodosia’s side when she died -- not at sea, as has always been believed, but after living her life on an island, leaving behind several children.
It’s late December 1812 when pirates board the schooner carrying Theodosia, wife of the governor of South Carolina, home to Albany, N.Y. The sole survivor of the brutal attack is Theo, as she is called. The superstitious pirate captain casts her ashore after she feigns insanity.
“The Watery Part of the World” is the story of Theo’s slow metamorphosis from a sophisticated, educated child of privilege into a rugged island matriarch. It opens with scenes of her wandering the island half-starved, dreaming of rescue by her famous father, terrified the pirate captain will discover her deception, and encountering a mysterious hermit who would later become the father of her children.
But the novel also is Parker’s re-creation of the lives of the last three residents of the fictional Yaupon Island, their long sustained relationships as fragile as any island ecology.
Juxtaposing the two narratives, Parker braids the lore, legend and facts of Theo’s life together with a sharply contrasting portrait of descendants Theodosia and Maggie Whaley and fisherman-handyman Woodrow Thornton. As we get to know these characters -- holdouts determined to stay put but tormented by the need to change -- their truths slowly emerge from protective camouflage.
Parallels and counterpoints in the two sets of lives offer clues to how life on Yaupon has come to be so confining. Like his ancestor, Woodrow feels a deep attachment to the Whaley sisters despite a tragedy that should have severed his ties years ago, allowing him to leave as his wife, now dead, wanted.
In a reversal of Theo’s transformation from highly-educated vice president’s daughter to a woman who taught her children the opposite of every refinement she’d learned, her great-great-great-granddaughters struggle to find moral and mental sustenance in the same, now impossibly narrow environment.
Woodrow is the sisters’ only contact with the outside world other than the annual visit from two researchers who record and update Yaupon’s oral history. The arrival of the "Tape Recorders,” as Woodrow dubs them, offers relief from the traditional entertainment: an evening reading of “grocery and dime store circulars” and the occasional letter.
But beneath the surface, as dangerous as the island’s hidden quicksand, are the real stories the Tape Recorders never hear.
Theodosia (called Whaley), for instance, has not always told the truth about everything that’s happened on Yaupon, hiding behind “the family trees, the accent, the odd sayings, the recipes for making candles and soap, how to cook loon and the correct way to string a net between dunes to trap morning robins.” Whaley would never mention her alcoholic father or how her little brother drowned when she and Maggie were supposed to be watching him.
Woodrow, who lets the researchers believe he’s never left the island, has a whole other life -- including the unspoken guilt he feels over his wife’s premature death. To their questions about racism on Yaupon, he remains silent; yet internally he bristles over his segregated home in Colored Town, while the almost familial role he plays with the Whaleys is obvious in his ambivalent term for them: “his two white sisters.”
Perhaps the most affecting unspoken story is that of Maggie, whose love affair at 40 with a fisherman half her age, at first as romantic as any summer fling, forces a decision that life on Yaupon hasn’t equipped her to make: How to survive when her comfort zone is the watery part of her world keeping her safe -- but isolated.
The dilemmas of Parker’s characters made me think often of a line from a Mary Oliver poem: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In each character’s excuses, rationales and fears that made up their reasons for staying on the island there’s a hint of a bad relationship we can’t leave. A decision that keeps us stuck someplace. An old history we can’t break out of. A retreat that becomes a prison.
In the end, “The Watery Part of the World” offers a glimpse of what it means to bring the two halves of our story together -- the part we tell each other and the part we don’t. It might be the only way to cast off from that safe but isolated island known as our self.
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