Nine Women (21 page)
Authors: Shirley Ann Grau
Here was the end of the familiar journey, here was where they always paddled to the side and scrambled away home. But now she had no paddle. And the current was swifter than she ever remembered. No stopping. The raft moved lightly, steadily, floating like a leaf, turning gently, seeming to know its way.
She had never been here, where the water was wide and the sun sparkled on tiny surface waves. She had never dared come this far before and she was astonished at how easy it was, how smooth and how silent.
The raft began to spin in circles, the sun and the clouds flickered across the sky. On both sides was the cream color of hospital walls, and there was nothing to see on them, only rising emptiness.
Then, as she knew she must, she saw the tunnel ahead. Just as she had seen it from the banks of childhood. She looked at it wonderingly, unsurprised. It waited. The raft sailed directly into it, into the dark.
Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.
Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.
Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly
The New Mexico Review
. Soon another was printed in
The New Yorker
. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection,
The Black Prince
, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.
That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel,
The Hard Blue Sky
(1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.
The House on
Coliseum Street
(1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel,
Keepers of the House
(1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.
Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history.
The Condor Passes
(1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families.
Roadwalkers
(1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.
In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.
Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.
A 1955 announcement for
The Black Prince
featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.
Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.
Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”
Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.
Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Little, Brown and Company for permission to reprint an excerpt from
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright 1929 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyright renewed 1957 by Mary L. Hampson.
copyright © by 1985 by Shirley Ann Grau
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-4722-8
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
