As my third and final selection to commemorate September 11th, I have chosen “The Amythest Heart” by Penelope J. Stokes. Set in the deep south, it focuses on the lives of men and women who lived through the Civil War and the things they did to improve the world around them, and how that legacy passed on down through the generations.
Today is Miss Amethyst Noble’s ninety-third birthday, and she has baked a coconut layer cake to celebrate. Donning a lavender dress and her amethyst broach, she goes downstairs to meet her family: sullen and unstable Conrad, his flighty wife Mimsy, and her great-granddaughter Amethyst, called Little Am for clarification. Little Am is dressed in black and looks like a Gothic ghoul, mourning before her time at the age of seventeen.
Conrad’s business is floundering and he’s about to lose everything he has. He has looked at it from all angles and can’t see another way out – he has to convince his mother to sell Noble House. He’s already seen a real estate agent and signed sale papers in his mother’s name. All he has to do now is get her to agree to it.
After forcing himself to eat a piece of the birthday cake, he heads right into it, telling Miss Amethyst that she’s too old to live on her own anymore, and that she should move into a retirement community. He does his best to sell her on the idea, but she’s not buying any of it. She’s far too active to condemn herself to such a boring lifestyle, and she tells him no. And just out of curiosity, she asks how much the sale of the house will bring.
Conrad has had the contents of the house evaluated and he knows there’s nearly a million dollars available, but he’s not going to share that information with his mother. His plan is to leave her enough to pay for her keep in the retirement community, and then use the rest to bail himself out of trouble. He gives her a vague answer, and is fooled when she pretends to think it over.
Not ten minutes later, she sends him and his wife to get the real estate agent to talk things over, and she proceeds to lock herself and Little Am inside the security gate. Climbing a chair to reach the top shelf, she pulls down a rifle and barricades herself within the house, Little Am quickly becoming a willing accomplice, who suddenly sees her great-grandmother in a “cool” new light.
Conrad returns to find his mother and granddaughter holed up inside the house, and he’s looking down a rifle barrel. This isn’t going at all how he planned, but the police tell him that since Little Am says she’s there of her own accord, they can do nothing. Conrad has to wait until Monday to talk to the judge and have his mother declared incompetent, leaving Amethyst and Little Am alone for the entire weekend.
Amethyst uses this time to tell Little Am why the house means so much to her, using flashbacks to show the reader how life was back then. We meet Amethyst’s grandfather, a doctor during the Civil War who fought for the rights of the slaves and patched the wounded soldiers back together. Then we come down through time to hear Amethyst’s own love story, and we begin to love the house as much as Amethyst does. By the end of the book, Little Am knows what she must do, and she testifies in court that her great-grandmother is completely sane, and she proposes a solution to the problem that will set Amethyst’s heart at rest and force Conrad to face up to the situation he created.
A beautiful account of Civil War life and the events afterward, this novel is my favorite by author Penelope J. Stokes.
(This book was published by W Publishing in 2000)