Author Gin Phillips guest posts about The Well And The Mine

Gin Phillips, author of The Well and the Mine, has written the following author post for our blog. Read on for the full post about how the author's family history helped shape her moving debut novel about hope and hardship. There is also a Reading Group guide included after the post. 

"My grandmother was one of four siblings, and I grew up listening to their childhood stories. I heard the most embellishing from my grandmother and her sister, Clara—when they were together, a story became a dialogue. There was the time the two of them made ice cream during the Depression but Clara accidentally put cough medicine in it instead of vanilla. (Sugar was precious, so they ate the ice cream anyway.) There was the weekend when my grandmother wore a dress that shrunk in the rain, and the trip to the city when Clara counted trolley cars for an hour before she realized there was only one trolley car going around in a circle.

Actually, most of my great-aunt’s stories wound up with her looking like a bit of an idiot. She didn’t mind.

So I heard all those stories and stored them away. I never intended to use them in a novel. I liked the stories for their own sake. When I was still in high school, I started tape recording conversations with my grandmother, just any remembrances she might share as we drank a glass of tea before it was time for her soap opera to start. I wanted to be sure we had those stories safe and tucked away where we wouldn’t lose them.

Many years later, I started thinking about the possibilities for a story set in an early 1900s mining community. I’d read several nonfiction books that touched on the mining strikes and struggles in the northeastern United States, and I thought of the brutality and danger of everyday life in the mines…and how the moments of beauty or joy in the midst of all that ugliness would be all the more striking. I thought of how that constant threat of death or disaster—from mining or hunger or poverty or illness—might sharpen your perspective. I thought of how black men and white men worked side by side, and how that companionship inevitably shifted racial attitudes, even in the otherwise-segregated South. 

Eventually I found myself thinking of a little girl sitting on the back porch of her house, staring out at the night. I knew she would see something come out of the darkness, but I didn’t know what. Or who. As the story of the Well and the Mine began to rise to the surface, I found that even as I invented the plot itself, as I tried to see the mysterious Well Woman more clearly and figure out why she would drop a baby down the well, I didn’t have to strain too hard to see the Moore family. Virgie has my grandmother’s sense of propriety. Tess has my great-aunt’s sense of fun. Leta has my great-grandmother’s sense of pragmatism, and Albert has my great-grandfather’s belief in clear-cut right and wrong. 
 

Although the Moores are not my family, they are built with bits and pieces of their real-life counterparts, fleshed out and fictionalized, but with a core that I recognize. I know the bonds between Virgie and Tess—I see them even now between my 94-year-old grandmother and her 87-year-old sister. Some of the same family stories I grew up hearing find their way into the Moores tale. The sights and smells and sounds of life in Carbon Hill—the red dust in the air, the smell of coffee in the morning, the slick sticky feel of floor cleaner—are details I couldn’t have found in a library. I found them in memory.

Those memories, I like to think, aren’t just my grandmother’s or her brothers’ and sisters’ anymore. They are mine. They are the Moores. And they are the reader’s."  - Gin Phillips
 

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READING GROUP GUIDE

 In 1931, the United States has been plunged into the Great Depression for two years, but poverty and privation are already old acquaintances to residents of Carbon Hill, Alabama. Most local families have had too many mouths to feed for as long as they can remember, but when an unknown woman drops a baby into the Moore family well—with only nine-year-old Tess as a witness—the town is stopped in its tracks by the crime.
The Moores are better off than most. Along with most of the Carbon Hill men, Albert Moore labors in the mines, but he also owns and works a small patch of farmland which allows him to feed his wife, Leta, and his children, Virgie, Tess, and Jack, during the lean times. The family is also known and respected for being quick to help out with a bit of food or a loan—even as the requests become increasingly frequent—which makes the choice of their well even more puzzling.
 No one believes Tess, at first, until a baby blanket pulled up in the bucket confirms her story. In no time, the town’s gossip-mongers descend upon their household. Unfortunately, the local police are more interested in harassing the town’s black population than finding the Caucasian baby’s mother. Tess becomes plagued by nightmares and feels certain that the dead infant boy is reaching out and asking her to “figure out who he was. Find who threw him in and give him some peace” (p. 50).
Albert and Leta are too busy keeping the house and farm together to soothe Tess’s fanciful imagination, so her fourteen-year-old sister, Virgie, comes up with a plan to track down the Well Woman—as she comes to be called. The two make a list of all the women they know who delivered babies in the last six months and begin insinuating themselves into their suspects’ lives. Their investigation doesn’t yield an immediate answer but it opens the sisters’ eyes to the complications of life beyond their own small household.
Gin Philips’ award-winning debut novel transports readers to a bygone time and place and introduces a cast of characters that comes vividly alive in all their humor, grace, and humanity. Reminiscent of the writings of Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, with the emotional resonance of Sue Monk Kidd and Fannie Flagg, The Well and the Mine is rooted in the very best of southern writing but claims a territory all its own.

Gin Phillips lives in Birmingham, Alabama; The Well and the Mine is her first novel.

SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Virgie recollects, “Papa said it was an abomination what that woman did. That God would judge her” (p. 25). However, she refrains from judging and imagines the circumstances that might have driven the Well Woman to the deed. Where does Virgie’s compassion stem from?
2. Why doesn’t Sheriff Taylor inform the Moores that the baby was already dead as soon as he receives the inquest results?
3. If the woman and the baby had been black, do you feel that the investigation would have proceeded differently?
4. When Virgie and Tess check on Lola Lowe’s new baby, Lola immediately knows why they are there, and their schoolmate Ellen is clearly embarrassed to have them see her home. Did their attempts to solve the mystery do more harm than good? How pure were their motives?
5. After the stock market crash, Jesse Bridgeman, the banker, kills himself. Why do you think a person who—even after losing most of his money—still had more than most of the townspeople would commit suicide?
6. “Beans and onion. Squash and tomato. It was the different tastes together, the ones that it didn’t make no sense at all to stick on the same form, that your tongue really remembered” (p. 146). Are there any other examples in the novel when Phillips uses food as a metaphor? What do these metaphors tell us about the world she creates?
7. Would Tess and Jack have learned the lesson their father hoped to impart by taking them to pick cotton if they hadn’t encountered and become friends with the Talbert children?
8. Why doesn’t Albert sue the brick company after their truck driver hits Jack? Such a decision would be unfathomable today. What do you think has changed about our society? Is the change for better or worse?
9. What do you think about Judah’s explanation of why he won’t have dinner at the Moores? Would you, like Albert, have capitulated? How did Jack’s accident affect Albert’s position?
10. Jonah and Albert feel they can never be real friends because of their race. Have you ever had to disavow or stifle a friendship because of external social pressures?
11. Albert chooses to protect his family over fully expressing his friendship for Jonah. Do you think he made the right choice? What other choices do the characters in the book make that can be read as both good and bad?
12. Did Virgie and Tess do the right thing in keeping the Well Woman’s identity a secret? How might their lives have turned out differently if she hadn’t chosen their well?

-Reading guide courtesy of Penguin Group (USA)

Posted 02/03/2010 15:02:34 by Emily Rowland with 0 comments.