Sweet Mystery: a Book of Remembering , and: Frederick Manfred: a Daughter Remembers (review)

Abstract

284Fourth Genre "... no one person is black America, not even if she is my wife." Harrington combines a reporter's eye with a novelist's sense of metaphor and mission in a book every white American ought to read. Nancy Owen Nelson Parent-child relationships are a powerful and often poignant subject of memoir. Here are two of my favorites, in which daughters use memoir to understand the life of a deceased parent, while discovering the impact of that parent in shaping her perceptions of the world. The first involves a search for a mother, only known for a brief nine years; the second explores a father-daughter relationship that evolved over fifty years. Sweet Mystery: a Book of Remembering, by Judith HiUman Paterson. University ofAlabama Press (new edition, paperback), 2001. 296 pages, $16.95. This incredibly moving book began as a research project in which Paterson, a professor at the University ofMaryland Journalism Department, intended to write an "'objective' family story" and ended up with "a long journey through aU the sorrow" of discovering the mental iUness and addictions which had shaped her ancestors, her siblings, and herself. The research involved a look at the Paterson family (her father Duke's), abolitionist educators who came to Alabama to found schools for blacks, and the HiUman family (her mother Emily's), slave owners; Paterson's instinctive journey took her weU beyond the historical context toward the question of how a potent combination of genetic disorders and philosophical differences contributed to her mother's demise in 1946. What I find incredible is Paterson's ability to probe the so-called "forgotten " memory through narration of incidents integrated with an immediacy of her experience as a young child. She is able to recaU, through the process of remembering very early images, that her mother did indeed love her, despite her own tortured journey through alcoholism, drugs, infant death, and the fluctuations of a troubled but passionate marriage. I knew Paterson thirty years ago, prior to this project. I visited her Montgomery, Alabama, home place, and never was there an inkling ofinformation or talk about Duke and Emily, never a word about the troubled family history. Paterson's journey of discovery was an act of courage. Book Reviews285 Frederick Manfred: a Daughter Remembers, by Freya Manfred. Minnesota Historical Society (paperback), 1999. 197 pages, $15.95. Freya Manfred, poet and novelist, recounts her life with her father, Frederick Manfred, whose writing career spanned fifty years; it explored the American West and the lives of those who settled and lived in the Great Plains in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning with his death and burial in September 1994, daughter Manfred helps us to understand her father's creative process as it related to his life as a husband and father. She integrates personal memories with private letters and excerpts from some ofher father's writings. An important theme in this memoir is in the writer's discovery ofher own voice in the presence of such a powerful artist/father. The memoir works because it aUows this artist/daughter to process her complex relationship with her father, and to explore her work in its own context. While Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers is a retrospective about a powerful and tireless writer from the American heartland, it is most importantly a commentary on the life of the artist as father and husband, as weU as a sensitive and sometimes poignant account of the artist/daughter's relationship with her artist/father. ...