The Truth According to Us

Barrows’s novel centers on Layla’s endeavors to chronicle the history of Macedonia, West Virginia, and the challenges she encounters. As such, it is a narrative not only about history but also about historiography—about the process of writing history and its implications. The Federal Writers’ Project was groundbreaking in publishing the first “official” histories of many small towns and socially marginalized areas of the United States. At a historical moment when the wounds of the Civil War were not fully healed, it published eyewitness narratives by formerly enslaved people. At a time when the fear of communism was rife, it was frequently supportive of trade unions and the rights of workers. In short, the FWP often presented history from the perspective of the marginalized and historically voiceless. This constituted a more or less explicit act of rebellion against canonical history as defined by the political right. Rather than presenting “history” in a straightforward manner, the FWP repeatedly asked its readers “whose story” it actually was.

As the novel’s title suggests, historical “truth” depends on the teller, who may be swayed by any number of external social and political forces. Gender dynamics and hierarchies may inform, orient, or limit the scope of historical narratives. When Layla first arrives in Macedonia, Parker Davies attempts to strong-arm her into writing a history of Macedonia—a story informed by the values and priorities of the dominant social patriarchy of the town, its “first families” (103). Layla, who has become involved in the project as a consequence of vigorously resisting her own powerful father’s demands, obstinately rejects this paradigm and prefers to adopt Miss Betts and Jottie as her mentors, seeking to further a historiographical model that will “spurn the dull and to amuse the witty, to advance the Romeyns and to trounce the Parker Davieses, and to announce that she, Layla Beck, had perceived all they had been blind to” (185). While this is hardly a description of objective historiography, Layla’s vision nevertheless owns its subjectivity and foregrounds her, an outsider, as the only person capable of fully understanding the history of the town.

As Layla grows as a historian, she becomes increasingly interested in showcasing the viewpoints of her female mentors, Jottie and Miss Betts. However, having ostensibly broken away from the dominant, patriarchal narrative, Layla finds that the question of historiographical authority is still far from resolved. There is an irreconcilable clash, for example, in the versions provided by Jottie and Miss Betts of the story of Reverend Goodacre, with Jottie’s version tending toward crowd-pleasing, sensationalist gossip and Miss Betts’s seeking to placate the majority in order not to cause offence.

The competing narratives surrounding the fire at the American Everlasting factory and the death of Vause Hamilton illustrate how the possession of “truth” is a form of power and how no one version of a story will ever be entirely satisfactory to all who hear it. Felix’s account of the fateful night tyrannizes Jottie’s adult life and stands at odds with her tender memories of Vause until Willa uncovers the “truth,” much to Sol’s delight. However, Jottie finds that Sol’s “truth” is also a form of control and that her own memories and viewpoint continue to be marginalized:

She stared in amazement at Sol’s face, reading the story she found there. It wasn’t a story about Vause; it was about Sol. It was about how he had been right all along. All these years, he had been fighting to win this particular piece of property from Felix. For eighteen years, Felix’s version of the tale, unpopular though it was, had been the official one, the agreed-upon reality, and Sol’s version had been wrong. It had been the hole in Sol’s life, and now it was filled: he was now the rightful owner of the truth about Vause Hamilton’s death (416).

The narrative perspective subtly shifts from Jottie to Sol himself, suggesting that while the “hole” in Sol’s life has been filled in a way that Jottie’s has not, her own memories, which remain largely unwritten and often unarticulated to others, still tell an alternative story. Thus, Jottie experiences the usurpation of the long-accepted tale by another one as an ungrounding rather than the recovery of objective truth. Layla expresses a parallel insight when she writes to her father that “history is the autobiography of the historian” (459), suggesting that any given account of the past will inevitably tell more about its writer than it does about the past itself. Nevertheless, history is enormously important, and the lessons of the past should not be ignored. When Layla agrees to marry Emmett, she does so on the condition that he recount all his memories of his past because Emmett’s past is what “made” him. The present can only be understood through the past, even though the past can never be truly understood. Historiography is an imperfect practice, but it remains the best way to understand identity.

At the end of the novel, 12-year-old Willa presents what is perhaps the most nuanced vision of history. She suggests that when trying to understand their past, the only choice people really have is whether they are going to allow themselves to slip into divisive bitterness and hatred:

Rightness is nothing. You can’t live on it. You might as well eat ashes […] This is all we can do; it’s all we’re allowed. We can’t go back. The only thing time leaves for us to decide […] is whether or not we’re going to hate each other (481).

Unlike Sol, who celebrates the broad acceptance of his story of the fire as a victory, Willa sees “rightness” as only one part of what it means to negotiate interpersonal relationships. The past is infinitely complex and can be approached from multiple viewpoints, but stagnating into the divisive logic of hatred is dehumanizing and shallow. History is an ever-changing dynamic. To stop interrogating and genuinely feeling for the past is to stop being human.