Placing Grace and Gracing Place: Lee Smith’s Saving Grace
Lee Smith’s 1995 novel opens with the declaration, “My name is Florida Grace Shepherd, Florida for the state I was born in, Grace for the grace of God.” And that first sentence tells a lot about the rest of the book, which has much to say about place and grace, as mediated through the parents who gave Florida Grace her name.
Gracie’s preacher father is a snake-handler, one of the variety of Pentecostals who take Mark 16:17-20 literally. (I’ve mentioned before that I have this snake phobia, right? But this is the second time I’ve read Saving Grace, if that gives you any idea of how much I like it. It’s worth suffering through all the copperheads and rattlers to follow Gracie on her journey. And perhaps it also helps that Grace, as narrator, always refers to them as serpents and not snakes, drawing her language from the King James Bible).
Gracie’s father, Virgil Shepherd, is a daredevil and a womanizer, but Smith actually lets him be right about a lot of things. Even in the midst of his sin, God uses him as an instrument to heal people; Gracie even witnesses him raising a dead girl to life. Virgil Shepherd’s portrayal is one of the things that most impresses me about Saving Grace: if you compare him to the missionary father in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Shepherd is so much more complex. He’s not just a character created by the author to say “Look how bad religious hypocrites are.” Shepherd is a hypocrite, but he’s also, as he insists, an instrument of God, and he honestly believes in God’s grace, even if he doesn’t quite understand it: the firmness of his somewhat misguided belief leads him to frequent “backsliding.”
Having seen the failure of unquestioning belief in “grace,” Gracie herself marries a man with the opposite theological inclination. “Travis Word,” she writes of her future husband, “was the first preacher I ever ran into that placed works above grace in order of importance. As a person even then searching for hard ground in a world of shifting sands, I liked this. I was real glad to hear it. For privately I had always questioned Daddy’s belief that a person could just go out and do whatsoever they damn well pleased, and then repent and get forgiven for it, again and again. In my own mind, this made God out to be too easy, a pushover. I had never really believed that that was the case. Travis Word’s idea of the true nature of God came closer to my own image of Him as a great rock, eternal and unchanging. Even though I did not believe I was saved at that time, I did believe in Him, and I also felt that if He was worth His salt, He’d have no place prepared in Heaven for the likes of me.”
Gracie, as a resident of the Christ-haunted South, knows the reality of sin, even if she doesn’t know how to find her way between the two men who represent the extreme poles of too-easy grace and too-legalistic works. Travis’s emphasis on works makes him increasingly depressed and judgmental, and Gracie finds herself backsliding into “sinful flesh,” just as her father did. “For there are ways in which it is easier to live with a plaster saint like Daddy than with a real saint like Travis Word,” she says.
It is actually a real plaster saint that eventually leads Gracie home. One night, she hears a baby cry, and the sound leads her to “Uncle Slidell’s Christian Fun Golf,” a putt-putt course with plastic representations of biblical places and persons. She traces the mysterious cry to a statue of Mary and the baby Jesus, and here among the kitsch Gracie suddenly knows that she has to go back to her childhood home in Scrabble Creek, North Carolina, the site of much pain and joy.
While there, Gracie loses all sense of time but feels her mother’s powerful presence in that place. “O come to Jesus honey. It is time now, it is never too late,” she hears her mother say. And suddenly Gracie finds herself handling hot coals from the stove, as she once saw her mother do. “The Spirit comes down on me hard like a blow to the top of my head and runs all over my body like lightning. My fingers and toes are on fire. Oh Lord it is hard to breathe and I am scared Lord, I am so scared but I will let my hands do what they are drawing now to do and it does not hurt, it is a joy in the Lord as she said. It is a joy which spreads all through my body, all through this sinful old body of mine.”
We don’t know what happens to Gracie next, for, like Flannery O’Connor, Lee Smith leaves her protagonist just after the moment of transformation. But we know that, in a powerful way, Gracie has indeed come home, in a supernatural way that is yet natural to her heritage. God values Gracie’s cultural particulars, an echo of the way that God gave eternal value to all human particulars by becoming Incarnate in a particular place and time, 1st-century Galilee. And Smith respects that God may work through seemingly eccentric ways, creating a more sympathetic portrait of charismatic faith than any I’ve ever read.
So here’s my question, as I ponder religion and region. Is Saving Grace a tale that could only be told by a Southerner (Smith openly acknowledges her debt to Flannery O’Connor)? As Gracie reminds us in the opening and closing lines of the novel, her name is “Florida Grace, Florida for the state I was born in, Grace for the grace of God.” Grace and place are intimately connected here.
Add comment April 19th, 2006