Against the Ruins
by
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Lyra’s Prologue
2004
I GREW UP between a cemetery and a madhouse. I played in ancestral Civil War ruins. Our family car was a yellow Checker taxicab, my best friend’s mother a prostitute. A neighbor believed she’d trapped her husband’s soul in a green glass bottle, and our house sat atop a potter’s field. My childhood was leafy oak trees, craziness, and ghosts.
This was the South Carolina I knew. That upstart state, rabble-rousing bunch, swept-yard poor and Cadillac-rich all hot and sticky together and plumb overrun with crimson flowers, slow afternoon syllables hanging in the soft scented air like fluttering wing-weary butterflies. Cape jasmine, gardenia, magnolia, mimosa—even the words droop heavy with scent. So much color and so much sunlight so tormented by the old gray memory. This is the tattoo on my psyche, cut deep, lasting beyond death.
My family’s past is like the place we come from, a mirrored hall of memory, mythology, mirage. Dizzying images appear and recede, combine and separate. The real picture is as wavy as old glass. Which began that December when I was six, when afterwards everyone acted as though none of it had happened. A penchant for sorcery travels true in our veins. But I know what happened, a few bits and pieces anyway, even if I don’t know what—in the long run—these fragments mean.
I can’t see the scar, but I know it’s there.
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About the Book
On a December day in 1957, schoolteacher Louise Copeland and her six-year-old daughter, Lyra, come home to discover that Louise’s gentle war-hero husband has suddenly become psychotic and has slashed his wrist with a razor blade.
From that moment on, everything Louise has believed in unravels. In their inner-city Southern neighborhood, situated between a cemetery and a madhouse, a place of leafy oak trees and ghosts, three other people become involved in Louise’s crisis: Rosa, the scandalous divorcee who entertains men for a living; Uta, the mysterious elderly lady who casts spells; and Max, the clairvoyant gravedigger.
In 2004, as Louise is dying, her daughter returns home, and she and her mother confront how the family was torn asunder in 1957. Louise finally reveals the long-held secret that haunted the family for the next fifty years.
This poignant novel is a gripping drama of madness and prejudice in which a mother leaves her daughter, ultimately, with hope.
Praise for Linda Lightsey Rice
“Against the Ruins contains such gorgeous writing that it nearly takes your breath away, with a sense of humor and a fine appreciation of the ridiculous even amid great agony.”
—Natalie Goldberg
“Rice has a fiery, incandescent talent.”
—Pat Conroy
About the Author
Linda Lightsey Rice is the author of Southern Exposure, a Doubleday novel lauded as “Faulknerian” and nominated for the PEN Hemingway Award. She has taught creative writing in several colleges and universities, and has been awarded artistic fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Wurlitzer Foundation, and Hawthornden Castle Retreat for Writers in Scotland. A South Carolina native, she currently lives in Minneapolis.