Foodie Lit
Catherine Grow. The Evolution of Hallie Jo Everheart
The death of a parent is difficult at any age; for children, it is often an event that shapes their lives, especially without supportive family and community. Such begins the 9th year of Hallie Jo Everheart when her mother dies of cancer. Her father is shattered and her older brothers bully rather than nurture their young sister. Their poverty only exasperates the difficult family situation. Trying to take care of her father while barely being able to braid her own hair, sinks Hallie Jo into despair.
Hallie Jo feels odd, on the margins, not your typical kid. At the bottom of her depression, her father brings her along on an errand, afraid to leave her alone with her brothers. She encounters a man that her peers call the bogeyman, a frightening legend in her town. And it is a turning point in her life. Instead of a wicked person, Jared Tyler Morrison turns out to be the star that lights her dark hours. Offering her a pad of paper and drawing pencil, he tells her, “Making art can save you...It can—it will—take you out of yourself and away from the problems you are facing.” (p.15)
Along with Mr. M., Hallie Jo slowly develops friendships with adults who nurture and comfort her and lead to her growth emotionally, socially and artistically. These individuals take the place of her family who were neglectful and often hurtful and her lack of friends. And her art becomes, as Mr. M. had predicted, a passion that stabilizes her life’s trajectory.
Although raised in California, much of Catherine’s writing is set in the Ozark Mountains, where she lived for ten years. She described how she felt about the region to me: "I loved it. Though we never were completely self-sufficient, I learned a great deal about basic survival and gained confidence and strength from this knowledge. And I picked up the customs and way of talking/thinking as if I had been born to it. I fit in. I got in touch with a deep part of me—a strong, capable part of me I didn’t even know existed. All of this knowledge and confidence and competence worked its way into the very fiber of my being. I’ve never forgotten my time living in the Ozarks or the people who befriended me and taught me how to live….”
Catherine added that she wanted to counter the stereotypical image of ignorant hillbillies, violent, on drugs or alcohol, reminding me in a way of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, populating her story with strong, resilient and caring neighbors, the type to take in a young girl, scarred and nearly broken herself.
How people survive adversity and triumph despite the meanness of their lives moves our emotions. Without sentimentality, Catherine has given us that inspiration. She shared, “At a time when our media, our popular culture, and our literature seem to dwell so heavily on the negative aspects of human nature, I wanted the novel to focus—in an uplifting but down-to-earth and non-sentimentalized way—on the triumph of kindness and generosity over mean-spiritedness and the selfish pursuit of self-interest. I’d intended the stories to be sort of an antidote to the pervasive ‘gloom and doom’ with which we were being bombarded with daily.”
Catherine deftly creates her characters, realistic in their goodness and their heartlessness. She told me, “I live the lives I write about.” Hallie Jo is a life worth reading about, an inspiration for our new year.