HOW WATERWOMAN CAME TO BE

Lenore Hart grew up in the "old" Florida, a place of unpaved back roads, miles of orange groves, alligators in the backyard at night. But by the time she entered college, Disney World had moved in across the lake from her parents' house. From there she watched rural, small-town Florida disappear beneath tract houses and theme parks. To preserve some small part of it, she began to write about that past in poems and short stories. For three years she was a National Endowment for the Arts writer-in-residence in the lake- and grove-studded central Florida.

Years later, she married and moved to the remote, rural Eastern Shore, a narrow peninsula tenuously lashed to Virginia by an eighteen-mile bridge-tunnel. It felt like coming home to her childhood, a farming and fishing community with narrow, shell-paved lanes, fields and woods full of deer, waterfowl wading the marshes or flying over crooked creeks and long stretches of green forest.

Along with the move came gradual dissatisfaction with her writing. Though she'd published in a number of magazines and journals, and even been featured on a PBS documentary, she wanted to create something more ambitious. She missed, too, having a community of writers to draw on for support. With this in mind she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts/Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, across the Chesapeake Bay from her home. There she studied and taught with award-winning fiction writer Janet Peery ( Alligator Dance, The River Beyond the World), and novelist Sheri Reynolds, author of Bitterroot Landing, A Gracious Plenty, and the best-selling Oprah selection The Rapture of Canaan.

Ironically, as Hart made the sixty-five mile drive down the shore and over the bridge-tunnel to Norfolk each week, she noticed some of the things that had drawn her to the Shore were already becoming history. The woods were being cut down, giving way slowly but inexorably to convenience stores and housing developments. One day a Big K-Mart moved in. Then stop lights began to proliferate. The farmers and watermen were leaving, locals losing old family homes to rising property taxes.

On these drives Hart slowly conceived of a story. She wanted to write about sisters, about what happens when duty to family comes up against personal desires -- and to capture the timeless quality of a place that changes little over the decades. Creating the plot and characters in her head was one thing; finding time to write between exams and reading lists and the obligations of work and family was another.

Then she read about the International Three Day Novel-Writing Contest, sponsored annually by Anvil Press in Canada. Entries must be written over a long weekend, specifically, the Labor Day holiday. So at her husband's suggestion, she spent that weekend at a friend's house, writing for fourteen hours a day, her meals brought in on a tray, uninterrupted for a short time by teaching or making dinner or phone calls or her seven-year-pld daughter's requests to play with Barbies. The result was a ninety-five-page novella she called WATERWOMAN.

All the contest awards went to Canadian writers, but Peery and Reynolds read the story and were taken with it.

Waterwoman's protagonist, Annie Revels, is happy in her island home with her two parents who, after the deaths of earlier babies, had nearly given up on having children. The only thing to unsettle young Annie's quiet life is the birth of her younger sister, Rebecca. Their world is the staunch Methodist barrier-island society of the early 1900s, a closed community which takes care of its own. Over the years Annie grows into a tall, gawky young woman, a tomboy who wants to pursue the commercial fishing life and be a waterman like her father.

Annie's well-meaning parents punish her when she acts like a tomboy -- they want her to have a safe, secure place in the only world they know, to fit in like her younger, prettier sister. Then, when she's nineteen, her father dies at sea. Suddenly, by necessity, Annie must become the provider for her family. The exhausted young woman quickly discovers her father made the waterman's trade look much easier than it actually is. She's either broiling in the sun or freezing in the wind, out on the water all day, only to come home to a testy, bored teenage sister and an elderly mother whose mind has so deteriorated that she too must be cared for like a child.

Into this volatile mix comes Nathan Combs, World War I veteran turned hunting guide, the first man ever to be more interested in Annie than her younger sister. And Annie soon will learn the pain of deciding between duty to family and her own desire.

Hart rewrote the novella several times, until it doubled in length. She interviewed retired Shore watermen to glean thedetails of their time-honored craft, and consulted with local historians to recreate the slow, quiet Eastern Shore of the early 1900s. She used the finished manuscript for her MFA thesis. And then, at Reynolds' suggestion, she sent it off to Putnam. The offer that quickly came back seemed to Hart the culmination of more than just having written a book. She felt as if she'd been able to save a bit of the past itself from developers and asphalt and bulldozers and run-off pollution; to preserve one bit of the past in an elemental story of love and struggle, betrayal and redemption, timeless and sure as a skipjack skimming the bright, shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

Selection from Waterwoman CHAPTER ONE

    We always had our differences, my sister and I, but I never meant to hurt her.  I surely never wished her dead.  Though sometimes, late at night, when I'm sitting here by her bedside, I wonder.  Because in my twenty years of living I believe I&'ve received more than one omen of where love, hate, and rivalry has finally taken us, now that we're both grown women.  
    Perhaps it was that one fall day in 1906, when Rebecca was three and I was seven.  Dad had roused us early, in the yellow-gray light before dawn.  He'd clumsily bundled us up as we yawned and complained, stuffed cold biscuits in our hands, and put us aboard his work boat, an old bar cat with a green sail.
    "Your Mam's sickly today," he told us.  "Needs her rest. So you squits have to come along with me, God help us."
    I'd never before in my life heard him use a curse word or take the Lord's name in vain, but I was too thrilled to be shocked.  "Oh, yes," I shouted. "Yes, please, Dad."
    Rebecca only squealed and hopped around.  I was sure she was too young to grasp the rare privilege of finally being allowed what I'd thought then all little girls dreamed of: to ride along on Dad's work, to sit in the stern wearing a cap like a real waterman.         
    But we hadn't gotten far, only to the channel between our island and the next, when I turned to see my sister's red coat, her wool leggings, her patent shoes disappearing over the side.  She dropped without a sound.  The vanishing clothes were so unexpected a sight, a bewitched moment passed before I recalled Rebecca was inside them.  And that she couldn't swim a lick.
    I looked quick to my father, to see what he'd do about it.  He was fiddling with the sail, his back to us, and hadn't seen.  For yet another moment I couldn't speak; couldn't even recall Rebecca's name, or my own.  All I could think to do was scream.  Dad dropped his line and turned to look.  "What, Annie?"  he said.  Sharp-edged worry creased his forehead.
    "Becca" was all I could get out.  So I pointed over the water behind us.  
    Back in our wake a flailing arm, a last billow of bright red material. That was all.    
    He came about sharp and in a moment we were at the spot where she'd vanished.  He rushed to one side of the boat, then the other, looking down.  I leaned over the stern, and saw her there below.  About a foot down, her face turned up to the sky, eyes open.  She hung suspended in the water, trailing a string of bubbles like oversized pearls, hair a dark cloud around her face, as graceful as one of the water sprites in my fairy book.  Beyond her lay the dull moon-rubble of an old oyster bed.  To me it looked as if Rebecca were rising to the surface.  Coming to me, not falling away.  A mermaid about to be born.
    My father shoved me out of the way, pushed the tiller over to head us into the wind, and jumped in.  He came up with my sister clutched in one arm, and hauled himself into the boat with the other.  Laid her on the thwarts and turned her head, and did things to help her cough up water.  At last he sat her up and wrapped her shivering body in his oilskin jacket.
    Then he spanked me.
    I understood why.  It would have done no good to say I hadn't seen it happen; that the first I'd known of it was the sight of her legs disappearing suddenly over the side, any more than it would have helped to lie and claim I hadn't seen a thing.  At seven, with Mam sick all the time, I had long since understood that my sister was my responsibility.
    I endured the punishment without crying.  Anyway, Dad generally had a lighter hand than Mam.  Then he made me sit beside my sister.
   "You're not to let go of her, maid.  Not ever.  She's not got the sense to look after herself yet."
    I wouldn't look at him, but I nodded.
    "You swear it, now?"
    "Yes, Dad."
    He seemed satisfied then, and went back to the tiller.  Rebecca leaned into me and stopped sobbing long enough to glance up, her dark lashes clumped and spiky with tears and salt water.   
    "All wet, Annie," she said, plucking at her sodden clothes.  She shivered again.
    I waited until my father turned away to hoist the sail before I risked giving her a light pinch.  I frowned down at her, then made a big point of looking away.   
    Dad came about directly and headed home again.  He squinted into the risen sun, and muttered something like, "Mend blasted nets on such a God-given day"
    Rebecca pressed closer and took my hand.  When I felt hers curl like a small cold starfish around mine, I relented and hugged her tight against me, astonished at how easily she'd almost been lost.  But I still felt aggrieved.  Her weight seemed to settle on my shoulders like dropped anchor chain.  How long would it be before she had any good sense?  It seemed hard that, until that day, I was supposed to look out for her . . . .

"Sensuous . . . wrenching, and vivid . . . Hart's flavorful dialect, her knowledge of working the water, and her understanding of the complexity of relationships -- particularly the ones between sisters -- are masterful."
                                                                     
                                                                                -- Sheri Reynolds, author of The Rapture of Canaan

"Hart's writing has a hypnotic quality . . . [she] captures the intensity of their lives and manages to render the hardscrabble existence appealing and noble, while never once glossing over the physical drudgery."
                                                                                       
                                                                                                -- Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

"A lyrical tale of devotion, duty, and love . . . The writing in Waterwoman is as pure as the waters of the pre-industrial Chesapeake.  [Hart's] descriptions are utterly convincing and beautifully sensual . . . a remarkable debut."

                                                                                            -- The Baltimore Sun
 

"In Annie Revels, Lenore Hart has given us a heroine both full of and divided by the lived life of her watery world.  A novel as much about the contrariness of self-knowledge as it is about the faults and fissures of family, Waterwoman is, page by page, a reminder that the heart never fits its wanting."

                                                                                                           -- Lee K. Abbott, author of Strangers in Paradise and Wet Places at Noon 

"Growing up on an island off the coast of Virginia during and just after World War I, Annie Revels longs to work on the water like her father. Occasionally he will allow her to help him search for crabs and oysters, but he tells her that it is a man's work and that her destiny lies elsewhere. But when he dies in an accident, it falls to Annie to care for her delicate mother and younger sister, Rebecca. Annie takes up her father's work, and soon she meets Nathan Combs out on the water. The two become lovers, and for the first time in her life, Annie desires something beyond her work on the sea. She decides to bring Nathan home to her family, though she is reluctant to introduce him to Rebecca, of whom she has always been envious. But the meeting goes well, and Nathan becomes a regular visitor at the Revels house, until Rebecca shares shocking news with Annie that destroys her happiness. A gripping story with an admirable, complex heroine."

                                --- Booklist.  Kristine Huntley, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

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WATERWOMAN

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