American Ghosts
by David Plante
Summary
David Plante was born and brought up in a French-speaking Catholic parish in Providence, Rhode Island, that was like an isolated fortress in Yankee New England. This invisible country with its history of long lost French North America was made more present to him than the visible country he lived in. The ghosts of the parish haunted David Plante long after he left home. Finally, he came to terms with his ancestry--a stunning spiritual and physical journey that brings him back to Providence, to Canada, to France, and finally to a new understanding of God.
Excerpt
On our way to and from parochial school, my younger brother and I walked through a wooded lot between our house and our nearest neighbor. In the spring the thin branches of the trees were leafed in bright green and in the autumn in bight red, and through these branches appeared a big granite boulder that I always paused to look at, until I imagined, from a time long, long past when there were no houses and everywhere was forest, an Indian standing on that boulder and looking back at me. All I knew of my ancestry was that the first to have come to the continent of North America from France would have often seen Indians in the woods.
A summer night, when the window of my bedroom was wide open and the shadows of trees were cast on the screen, I, in bed with my younger brother, Lenard, who slept deeply, remained wide awake, staring at that window. The fresh nighttime air seething through the screen smelled of wild roses that grew between our narrow yard and the small lot of woods, and also some other smell, perhaps skunk cabbage or skunk, which I thought of as bete puante. Moonlight fell on the trees out there, and I was terrified that, among the rusted automobile fenders and tires dumped in those woods, the ghost of the Indian was hiding and would come up to my window and look in. My terror became so great that I beat my fists against the headboard until my knuckles were bloody.
I woke Lenard, who lay still and silent. My mother, followed by my father, came rushing into the room, which was dim in the moonlight through the window. My mother grasped my wrists to stop me from hitting the headboard, then she pulled me out of bed and to the window, where she made me look out into the moonlit woods, repeated over and over, gently, “There’s nothing there, nothing, nothing.” For me everything was out there, and this everything would at any moment make itself present to me as a face in the darkness. My mother said to my father, who was standing back, “Tell him nothing is out there,” but my father, from whom I expected no more or no less, said nothing. Upset for me, my mother insisted, “Tell him.”
Instead my father said, “I’ll sleep with the boy.”
I wanted my mother, her soft body loosely contained by her white, wrinkled nightgown, in bed with me, to reassure me that there was in fact nothing to frighten me in the outside woods, that there was nothing in all the outside world to frighten me. And I wanted, too, my father, wearing the tee shirt and boxer shorts he wore during the day, to be in bed with me, as if his presence allowed me a deeper reassurance than any my mother could have given me: that however terrifying it was, the possibility of that face appearing in the darkness released in me the greatest sense of everything that was most important to me.
Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. http://www.beacon.org
Reviews
"Not so much a memoir as a beautiful diary of the making of a writer… hauntingly resurrects the ghosts residing in his life"--Publishers Weekly
“[A] radiant, deeply moving portrayal of identity and loss, the pull of the past on the present, and living astride different worlds”–Booklist
“If you want to read something honest and deep and beautiful, this is the book for you”
Author's Biography
David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels and the nonfiction Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review, and has been nominated for a national Book Award. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York and London.