Refuge

Using a story from her own family as a jumping off point, journalist and columnist Dot Jackson published her novel Refuge in 2006. The novel, which took Jackson almost twenty years to write, and which went on to win the 2007 Weatherford Prize, leans on the author’s deep knowledge of the flora and fauna, the geography and culture, and the speech patterns and humor of the Appalachian communities in the North Carolina mountains. Set in the early twentieth century, the novel follows the sudden decision of a young woman to reject the genteel environment of city life to seek out the rustic community where she spent her childhood. Cultivating a mood influenced by the Southern Gothic, Jackson uses highly sense-inflected descriptions to demonstrate why the seemingly rough and harsh mountain code of living would appeal to someone looking for a meaningful connection.

The novel opens with a prologue that gives us a hint about the way our protagonist’s adventure ends up. We meet Mary Seneca Steele – known as Mary Sen – as an old woman. Looking back on her life, she considers the way that she ended up in the town of Caney Fork on Hogback Mountain. As she putters around the house, she watches her half-domesticated hawk, whose appearance brings her comfort, and who brings food like rabbits and birds to her cabin. Considering everything that she has gone through, Mary Sen tells us, “I did a dreadful thing. I came here desperate, and I thought my heart would break for the love of what I found. And then I would not rest until I destroyed it. And you want to hear the worst? I would do it again. Oh yes, oh yes, I would do it. God forgive my soul, but I don't think I could help it.”

The novel then skips back through time to Mary Sen’s early adulthood. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, in the aristocratic society that her mother has cultivated ever since Mary Sen was a little girl. Her life has been filled with wealthy privilege – classical music and tours of Europe – all the way through to her marriage to Hubert (Foots) Pettigrew Lamb, a foolish and weak-willed egotist with whom Mary has two children, Pet and Hugh. Not only is the marriage increasingly abusive, but now the family is facing financial ruin because Foots is an incompetent spendthrift – and because of the Great Depression.



One night, in the spring of 1929, Mary Sen goes to bed while considering what to wear for the suicide she is planning for the morning. Through her open window, she hears a street performer singing the old folk song “Shady Grove” – a song that reminds her of the fiddle tunes she heard from her father growing up. Inspired, Mary gathers $33 and some clothes, and together she and her children pile into the brand new Auburn Phaeton that Foots has just bought with a large chunk of her inheritance. Before leaving, Mary gives a third of all her money to Aunt Mit and Uncle Camp, the dignified African-American servants that live with the family.

Although Mary Sen has no idea how to drive, she is going to drive northwest until she finds the tiny place called Caney Valley, a community she vaguely knows from her father’s stories about growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He loved it there, but left never to return, driven by the description of this wilderness by Mary’s mother as a place where “there is nothing...for anyone who has ambition and intelligence…a land of savages.” Mary’s plan is to find this long-ago home and make it her own refuge.

The first hurdle is learning to make the car go, which she initially can only do in reverse. Then, during the long and confusing drive, Mary and the children survive a dangerous flash flood and the wreck of their car, before finally arriving at The Birches, a now abandoned house that used to belong to Mary Sen’s father.



The escape then turns from exhilarating to daunting. Mary has to learn everything: how to build a fire in the fireplace, how to garden in order to can fruits and vegetables, and how to cook when she and her kids have no money. These physical challenges are also accompanied by emotional ones: Mary doesn’t know much about her family history, and the complex and interwoven relationships of her relatives carry secrets that could be dangerous.

Despite the difficulties, Mary Sen and the children feel deeply at home in this new place. Partly this is because of the sudden freedom, clean mountain air, and the ending of a toxic family structure. This is also the result of Mary falling in love for the first time. She meets Ben Aaron Steele, a second or third cousin (the family tree is so convoluted that it’s hard to know), and their connection is undeniable. However, the relationship isn’t only doomed because they are related. Ben is already married to Sophia, a despicable woman who hates the mountain lifestyle, desiring only to return to the sophisticated Boston environment she left behind. Not only that, but he and Sophia have a daughter, Celestine, whose traumatic birth and near-suffocation has left with her with a lifelong intellectual disability. Sophia uses Celestine as a tool of emotional manipulation, casting herself as a martyr, but Ben treats his daughter with real affection and joy.

Eventually, the precarious love affair between Ben and Mary Sen turns tragic, as Ben dies. Mary describes her life disintegrating after this happens, but then, because of the way Appalachia fuels her sense of place and home, her existence “reassembles” itself into lifelong contentment.