Word: pasquotank
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...born to write as well as Kaye Gibbons, so graceful and spirited are her fictional histories of North Carolina women. In her fourth novel, Charms for the Easy Life, Gibbons presents Charlie Kate Birch, a midwife and self-proclaimed doctor who meets her ferryman husband as she crosses the Pasquotank River to deliver babies, nurse the sick and lay out the dead. Her granddaughter Margaret, narrator of the book, imagines, "Between my grandmother, her green eyes . . . and the big-cookie moon low over the Pasquotank, it must have been all my grandfather could do to deposit her on the other...
...pass through now and then. But they're mostly sketchy figures in suits and uniforms, the sorely afflicted or, like the ferryman, no-accounts who come to stud and go off to do something else. In 1910 the Birches move from Pasquotank to Raleigh, where matriarch Charlie Kate raises her daughter and granddaughter, practices medicine and becomes a Wake County legend: "Remember when she got Tessa Jerrod's arm out of the wringer? . . . Buttercup Spivey's dropped kidneys rose. Malcolm Taylor stopped wanting to scratch his missing leg. Everybody saw the miracles all around...
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