And Later Hurricanes
May Claim More Pawn
by June Pulliam
Williams, Theresa. The Secret of Hurricanes. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2002. 209 p.
The Secret of Hurricanes is a modern gothic novel much like Alice Sebolds The Lovely Bones. In both, ordinary people have their lives completely distorted by unspeakableyet everydayhorrors. In The Lovely Bones, a family is torn apart and rebuilt when their 12 year old daughter is murdered. In The Secret of Hurricanes, a dysfunctional family and sexual abuse are the forces that blight the protagonists adolescence.
Williams modern day Southern gothic uses hurricanes as the novels central metaphor for the tortured existence of Pearl, her protagonist: Hurricanes are conceived in the doldrums. Which, as in life, is a place marked by frequent squalls and periodic calm. This is pretty much the story of Pearls life, which begins with her earliest recollections of a childhood family trip to the Grand Canyon where her father suspends her by the ankle above the gorge.
With the exception of this one family trip, Pearls life has been spent in the coastal town of Waterville, North Carolina, a picturesque but bland backwater whose inhabitants live lives of quiet desperation occasionally relieved by local scandals. Now, single at the age of forty-five, Pearl finds herself pregnant, and the town gossips are desperate to know who the father is. In between these two events is Pearls dysfunctional parents: her emotionally distant drill sergeant father unwilling to even spend time with his family, let alone give his growing daughter the affection she needs, and her spiritless mother, who cleans endless grime and cooks meals, offerings of love that no one ever eats. As Pearl grows to adolescence, she tries to find sustenance in the arms of other men, be they Marines from the local base, or the father of her best friend, the closest person to a father figure she herself has had in her life, but a man who knows how to pay attention to growing girls since he has already warped his three daughters with inappropriate affection. By the time shes sixteen, her life was like the darkened stage at the end of Hamlet or Macbeth. All littered with corpses and treachery.
While incest, suicide and dysfunctional families are clichİs of southern gothic novels, this is no typical work in the genre that focuses on the lurid details of its characters sufferings. Instead, Williams characters arent so much tragic victims whove endured unthinkable tortures as they are everyday individuals trying to weather the storms meted out to them. Pearl isnt bitter about her distant father and ineffective mother, or about how this family structure made her see physical punishment as a sign that someone cared enough to correct her, rather than as abuse. Nor is her life consumed with hatred for her best friends father who became her lover at sixteen. Instead, she is more philosophical about these events. She can look back on them and understand their causes and know that in a sense she was powerless to stop them from happening in much the same way that a meteorologist understands what causes a hurricane but cannot stop it from coming ashore.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing about this novel is that the reader cant see the events as localized, and thus, easily contained. Williams characters are recognizable as our friends, our neighbors, and perhaps even ourselves. Inland folks dont much fear hurricanes. Think, Im safe from the long arm of the storm, muses Pearl. But this was the danger in Hurricane Floyd, which traveled extremely far inland, leaving the unbelieving stranded on rooftops waiting for deliverance.
Pearl cannot be easily dismissed as stereotypical poor white trash whose sufferings are ostensibly the logical outcome of her class and its stubborn refusal to grasp the material promise of the American dream and embrace middle class standards of decorum. She is not unintelligent, and is disturbingly aware of how she participated in her own victimization. At the age of sixteen, she seduces Floyd, her best friends father, out of a sense of self preservation. At this point, Pearls mother has died of cancer, and her father, who hadnt bothered returning to the family home since his wifes death, has committed suicide. Thus her relationship with this man, himself the rapist of his three daughters, satisfies both her need for protection and for a father/lover figure sought by girls her age. But just when Pearl thinks shes negotiated some sort of safe haven, Floyds crimes against his children are revealed.
Despite being shipped off to the Hollingsworth Home for Troubled Girls until shes 18, Pearl decides to rebuild her life as best as she can. She teaches herself to weave, an activity once used as therapy for victims of post traumatic stress syndrome during World War II, and reads the newspaper religiously, following stories of bizarre personal tragedy to confirm her personal theory:
All lives, not just her own, are like hurricanes.