The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You by Fred ChappellBrooke Horvath
Chappell, Fred. Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You. Picador USA, 1996. 228 pp. $21.00.
A framed series of linked stories in the manner of Winesburg, Ohio, Fred Chappell’s newest book returns to the world of I Am One of You Forever and Brighten the Corner Where You Are to recount the lives of strong-willed, courageously capable, often unconventional women of the North Carolina Appalachians. Treating love and death, backwoods mysteries and otherworldly visitations, personal idiosyncracy and the traditional values that nourish both individuals and communities, the twelve stories gathered in Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You are those told to young Jess Kirkman by his mother, Cora, and his maternal grandmother Annie Barbara Sorrells. They are the stories Jess recalls as he and his father, Joe Robert, wait through a long night while down the hall Jess’s grandmother lays dying.
Several stories concern their teller, one a comic account of how Cora won Joe Robert’s attention and affection, another an empathetic portrait of a folklorist come to gather songs and sayings. In “The Wind Woman,” a dreamlike parable, Cora takes Jess beyond Forgetful Mountain and past Worrisome Creek to visit the Wind Woman that Jess might learn how to become “a poet writing true things.”
Other stories conjure other women. “The Madwoman” raises Aunt Chancy, driven mad by passion and its violent end, while “The Helpinest Woman” memorializes Angela Newcome, so filled with Christian charity no one can stand her. “The Figuring Woman” and “The Shining Woman” feature Aunt Sherlie Howes, “hands down the smartest woman there was,” who solves the mystery behind an elopement and discovers how to placate a ghost.
Shot through with comedy and pathos, tall tales and lyric beauty, flavorsome speech and sustaining truths, Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You evokes a world Jess’s father knows is dying with Grandmother Sorrells, among the last of the generation of women whose loss is, as Annie herself declares, “a destruction to us all, for they were good and faithful company and the generations that have come after don’t seem to me to have their hardiness or savor.”
Like his visiting folklorist, Chappell’s motive here is perhaps to collect what might otherwise be lost. Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You is, at any rate, such a record, and much more. It is also all one needs to understand why Lee Smith, surveying the Southern literary scene, has called Chappell “the one truly great writer we have among us.” [Brooke Horvath]