Sweeping Up Glass (32 page)

Sweeping Up Glass

A Novel

Carolyn Wall

A Reader’s Guide

I
was teaching a group of writing students in my living room, and the subject for the evening was “following the heart.” I used baseball as the metaphor. “When the mind sets up chatter,” I said, “the heart can’t remember its name, let alone watch the ball.”

At the time, I’d sold several hundred articles, short stories, columns, and reviews, and as a wife and mother of four, I had become more subservient to the Texaco bill and the electric company than any elusive chamber of the heart.

But that night, I swept my class out the door and, still revved from the emotion of my own lecture, I went to the computer and fingered the keys. Out fell a scene from
Sweeping Up Glass
, the one in which Olivia has just told Percy that the baby is his. He shoves her out of his car, and she lies on the side of the road, the broken blue sequins of her dress making her think the stars have fallen. With the baby ready to make its exit, Olivia, stunned with gin, listens to the wolves calling down the night and waits for Ida to come out and fetch her. I had no idea where that scene came from.

Still, I knew how to be a stubborn child, so I backed up and let Olivia boil over. I knew what it was like to adore a father,
and experience hellfire with a ma’am, so much of this book is culled from my life. The first character to be spun from thin air was Love Alice. Her name, and its reason for being, burst in my head like a kernel of corn popping.

Love Alice was the first chirping robin of spring, and she had this
gift
, could look in another’s eyes and know his Truths. Only in subtle ways could Love Alice tell us how she saw herself. Afterward, I briefly considered writing a book from her viewpoint, but she was too profound, too accepting, and I’d never be able to sustain her for that long. Love Alice was the perfect friend.

Junk was enormous fun to write, and at the end of each scene, I had trouble leaving him. He became Love Alice’s soul mate, Olivia’s rock, and a baptizer and pillar of the community. Because I wanted this book to also be about “overcoming,” it seemed only right that he, too, had been badly hurt.

In my stories, I love to harbor, then expose, secrets. Not all of them, when let loose, bloom as deliciously as my hotelier and trumpet player. I fashioned him from sweet fantasy—comfortably handsome, close to his God, and sexy to the core. Every woman should experience one Wing Harris.

Although my face is that peachy color we folks call white, I live in a mostly black community. I love its fluid movement, the hum of its language. I was not at all surprised when Olivia prayed to God to change the color of her skin. I began her story upon conception: her refusal to leave her mother’s womb, how Ida could not recognize her birth and was trucked off to an asylum. Here’s a true story that I almost included in this book. Maybe it’ll show up in a later one.

When I was born, we lived over a grocery store in Toronto. My father built crates in an alley for Canada Box, and sold meat pies from the basket of his bicycle. With my mother gone off to a small private hospital for shock treatments, we moved into rooms at the top of Gramma’s house.

On Sunday evenings, Dad dismantled my crib, roped it to the top of the car, and threw all the baby things in back. Then he laid me on the seat beside him and drove around Toronto, looking for an aunt and uncle to take me. In a relative’s house, he’d set up my crib and kiss me good-bye.

To help support us, and to pay the doctor and hospital bills, he worked three nights a week building radios and record players for RCA Victor. He visited my mother in the hospital and took a Wednesday-night electronics class in the back room of a Chinese restaurant.

After work on Fridays, he’d come to me, dismantle my crib, tie it to the car, toss in my stuff, and drive us home. The next Sunday night, we began again.

My poor aunts must have grown terribly weary of me, sometimes calling Dad to “come and get this kid.”

“No matter,” he once told me. “When Gramma saw you coming, she’d open her arms wide.”

Thus were born Olivia and Will’m. Writing love for grandchildren was a given, and I’m sure I’m not finished. Because I did not want to bore the reader, I wrote what I hope are unique relationships between characters. Some-thing basic happens when two people are in a room together, even if they have not yet met. As each character’s face, name,
and trouble
spilled from my fingers, I knew the possibilities were endless.

If there ever is a sequel to
Sweeping Up Glass
, Olivia will feel
deeper ties to earth, sky, and water. And, had there been an epilogue to the epilogue, surely Will’m’s connections to his mother and grandmother would have impacted the ways in which he raised his own children.

From the beginning, Olivia ached to show readers that when a thing seems to be solidly black and white,
maybe it isn’t
. And that moment by moment, she chose her actions and who she wanted to be. I opted for this title because, in the face of tragedy, Olivia reached for her dustpan.

As for picking Kentucky—why does any place speak to us? I wanted to set my people down in a community that was close and passionate and persecuted, and somewhere along the way I’d fallen in love with Kentucky’s mountains and their stories. In the saddest places, I saw dignity. And somewhere—I can’t remember the exact spot—I heard music.

My children and their offspring are far more to me than just my blood and bone. The real Ida gave me her creativity and stubbornness. She passed on two months after
Sweeping Up Glass
was sold, never knowing it existed. In its pages, I don’t think she’d have recognized herself. Still, she worked crossword puzzles in the newspaper
with a pen
until six weeks before she died. Not much got past her.

My father was a fine speaker. Guests would say “Put on the kettle, Frank, and tell us a story.”

Making up tales—for which I was spanked as a child—is now the axis on which my world turns. May that happen to us all.

Know this:
Sweeping Up Glass
is fifty percent truth, and fifty percent based on fact. The other fifty percent (which speaks of my math skills) is flat made-up.

1. The wolves provide a connection to the mountain, and therefore to Olivia’s past. What in nature connects you to where you live?

2. How do you think you would react if you discovered a massive, life-changing secret?

3. Olivia discovers that her hometown is a hotbed of racist hatred. Have you ever discovered something awful about the place that you grew up? How did you react?

4. Are the people who kept Olivia’s secret from her truly her friends? Do you believe they genuinely had her best interests at heart?

5. The last paragraph of the book finds Olivia contemplating that “in Aurora, there’s still division between coloreds and whites. I’m equally to blame.” Do you think that Olivia is partly to blame for this division? How or why not? Do you agree with Olivia’s assessment that “It’s not that I pretended—I just didn’t see”?

6. How much do you think Wing knew about the Cott’ners? If you believe that he knew about the lynchings, do you think that makes him as culpable as those who carried them out?

7. Was Olivia right to prevent Pauline from taking Will’m with her back to California? Was Will’m safer going back to the uncertainty of Hollywood with his mother, or staying on the mountain with Olivia?

8.
Sweeping Up Glass
examines segregation enforced by society, but also voluntary segregation from society. Can you see parallels to today in how people can segregate themselves either as individuals or as a community? What goals can hope to be achieved through such self-segregation?

9. Do you believe that there is redemption for Tate? Does keeping the books and leading Olivia to them redeem him for his actions?

10. For letting Olivia grow up believing what she did, is Tate as much an antagonist to Olivia as Alton Phelps?

11. Do you think Ida knows what she does? Do you see her as being in control of her actions? Can you see a parallel in your own life of someone who appears to be out of control, but may know exactly what she is doing?

12. The characters of Will’m and Tate are viewed as being universally “good,” whereas the Phelps brothers are viewed as being universally “evil.” Do you think it is that clear-cut in the story? In real life, are people ever one or the other?

As artist-in-residence for the Oklahoma Arts Council, Carolyn Wall has taught creative writing to more than 4,000 children in her home state of Oklahoma. She operates a national prison-writing program, and authored the only literary book written on the Oklahoma City bombing. Her awards include two Crème-de-la-Crème awards from the Oklahoma Writers Federation Inc. and one from the Kansas State Writers.
Sweeping Up Glass
is her first novel; she is at work on her second,
The Coffin Maker
.

Sweeping Up Glass
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, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008, 2009 by Carolyn D. Wall
Reading group guide copyright © 2009 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delta, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D
ELTA
is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
R
EADER’S
C
IRCLE
& D
ESIGN
is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Title page art from an original photograph by Kinsey Christen.
Wall, Carolyn D.
Sweeping up glass / Carolyn Wall.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33850-5
1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Grandparent and child—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Depressions—Fiction. 5. Mountain life—Kentucky—Fiction. 6. Hunters—Fiction. 7. Kentucky—Rural conditions—Fiction. 8. Kentucky—Race relations—Fiction. 9. Domestic fiction. 10. Psychological fiction.
I. Title.
PS3623.A35963S84 2009
813′.6—dc22             2008048080

www.randomhousereaderscircle.com

v3.0