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Christy The Novel
By
Catherine Marshall
Christy - A story of
faith beyond measure, and courage beyond belief.
At nineteen, Christy Huddleston left home to teach school at a
backwoods mission in the Great Smoky Mountains. A sheltered city
girl, she was not prepared for the harsh realities that awaited
her as a teacher in the poverty-stricken community of Cutter Gap.
But once there, she came to know and care for the wild mountain
people, with their fierce pride, dark superstitions. . .and their
yearning for beauty and truth. Through faith and hard work - and
with the guiding influence and wisdom of an incredible woman (Miss
Alice Henderson) - Christy struggled to win the respect of these
proud people and make a real difference in their lives. But in
these primitive surroundings, Christy's faith would be severely
tested by the unique strengths and needs of two remarkable men
- and challenged by a heart torn between desire. . .and love.
Christy's desperate fight to bring love and hope to the people
of Cutter Gap would prove to be an experience that would change
her forever.
Taken from Reader's Digest Condensed Books
Autumn 1967 Selections
Volume 4
The Story was born in
1958 when Catherine Marshall suggested that her parents revisit
the Tennessee mountain community where they had met in 1909. Her
mother, young Leonara Whitaker, from Hendersonville, North Carolina,
had been a teacher in a one-room mission school; her father, the
Reverend John Wood, was the Presbyterian minister. Mrs. Marshall
went with them on several nostalgic returns, talked with her mother's
former pupils, listened to outpourings of memories, and read copies
of The Soul Winner, published by the American Inland Mission.
In one issuer Leonora wrote: "I sometimes shudder when I look into
the faces of my students, and note their intelligence, and realize
the responsibility that rests upon me as their teacher. . . "
Although already familiar
with Appalachian ways -- she was born in Johnson City, Tennessee,
and spent some years in New Creek Valley, West Virginia -- Mrs.
Marshall next plunged into intensive background research in the
Library of Congress, studying Appalachian geography, folklore, ballads,
tall tales, clothes and speech. She put the book aside in 1959,
the year she married Leonard LeSourd, executive editor of Guideposts
magazine, acquiring two sons and a daughter, in addition to her
own son, the Reverend Peter John Marshall. FAmily responsibilities
then kept her busy, and she also took time out to write two non-fiction
books. In 1965 she began intensive writing on her novel.
Although Christy
is firmly based on her mother's experiences, Mrs. Marshall says
the fictional story quickly took over. But any of the most surprising
episodes are true -- among others, the seven-mile walk in the snow
with the postman and the piano hauled over the mountains. But the
typhoid epidemic is fictional and cost the author much time and
trouble finding someone who could describe in vivid detail this
fast-vanishing disease. The onion poultice remedy cam from a retired
nurse, and Christy's delirium from the memories of a Tennessee doctor's
daughter who had had typhoid as a child. There was no murder near
the mission when Leonara taught there, but Mrs. Marshall studied
many old Tennessee murder trail transcripts to make her discussion
of feuding authentic.
Since John Wood's death,
Leonora Whitaker Wood, now seventy-four, has wintered with daughter
near Palm Beach, Florida. Mrs. Marshall says, "Mother has followed
the writing of the book with delight; it has been the fulfilment
of a dream for her too."
The same sure faith
which has illuminated all of Mrs. Marshall's books runs through
Christy like a bright thread. "Faith is a challenge," she
says. "It was faith that took my mother into the mountains on a
wild adventure. It is my inheritance from her and from my father.
I couldn't have done anything I have done without it."
From the Prologue
Christy by Catherine Marshall
"It was at that moment,
standing there in the O'Teale cabin thinking of Alice Henderson,
that I got my first clear glimpse of the book I had always wanted
to write about the mountains, my mountains. For these were the hills
of home; I had been born among mountains like these. All my life,
the wind-swept heights had fascinated me--and challenged me--and
steadied me.
"As if reading my thoughts,
mother said shyly, 'The story aches to be told, Catherine. The secrets
of the human spirit that Alice Henderson knew, the wisdom she shared
is needed by so many today. And the mountains people--my friends--Fairlight
and Opal, Jeb Spencer and Aunt Polly Teague, Ruby Mae and Little
Burl, my schoolchildren--I want people to know them as they really
were. But, Catherine, I'm not the one to put it on paper. You know,
sometimes the dreams of the parents must be fulfilled in their children.'
"And suddenly, I understod
how the story should be written--through mother's eyes, as I had
seen it all along. Only--from the beginning, my imagination had
taken hold of the true incidents and begun shaping them so that
now, after many years, I myself scarcely knew where truth stopped
and fiction began. Therefore, though so much of the story really
happened, I would set it down in the form of fiction.
"I knew how it would
be. Through many a winter's evening before an open fire, through
leisurely meals at the round table in the big kitchen at Evergreen
Farm, mother would reminisce while I would take notes. I would question
her and probe for details: 'Now, Mother, pretend that Aunt Polly
Teague is standing before us now. Tell me what she looked like.
David, I need to understand him better. Tell me, why did David act
that way?'
"As much as she could
tell me, I would write. Oh, not the whole story. One book could
never hold it all. I would tell the story of the first year only.
Eleven months in a young woman's life. But what months...what a
lifetime she had lived in them! How could I even get the events
of eleven months onto paper? Already I could see that though I tried
to capture truth, truth could never be wholly contained in words.
All of us know it: At the same moment that the mouth is speaking
one thing, the heart is saying another; or events are carrying us
in one direction when all the while the real life of the spirit
is marching in another.
"And so past all those
true experiences that mother would relate to me, I would walk softly
into the realm of what might have been. The rest would be my imagined
story..."
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