Family Lore
Back, my mother’s father’s grandmother Amanda Baker (my great-great grandmother)
Front, my mother’s father’s father, Jesse Baker, and his wife, Emily Norris Baker, with their son John (my great-grandfather Jesse, great-grandmother Emily, and great-uncle John) circa 1900 or 1901
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Greetings, Intrepid Travelers of Both Time and Space,
I hope you and yours are staying safe and well as we stumble into the second month of this already eventful new year. I’m anxiously awaiting the big reveal of the cover of my forthcoming novel, Searching For Jimmy Page. I can’t wait to check out what my esteemed editor, Joe Taylor, and his brilliant crew of artists at Livingston Press have created. As soon as I do, I’ll be sure to pop open the bubbly, crank Led Zeppelin’s “Four Sticks” (you’ll have to read the novel to find out why that song!), then share the cover with you, so stay tuned. And please join my mailing list on the Contact page to receive alerts of future blog postings and other news.
In the meantime, here’s a little behind-the-scenes peek into the making of this book:
The seed that would become Searching For Jimmy Page was first sown during the final months of my mother’s battle with metastatic breast cancer in 2003, and reaped, in a very different form, as my Goddard College MFA creative thesis two-and-a-half years later. After graduation, the project lay dormant until my husband Bill’s death in 2014, when grief once again sent me scrambling to art for solace. I revisited some of the scenes from the original story, reimagined the narrative, reinvented old characters and invented new ones, painstakingly crafting what would become the story I was always meant to tell, the one that is the culmination of a life steeped in the music, myth, and magic of Led Zeppelin, a fascination that began over thirty-five years ago, with a fortuitous viewing of the band’s concert film, The Song Remains the Same, on MTV with my mother and older brother Steve, who was a huge fan of the band.
From the beginning, family, namely my mother’s side, has played an integral role in my passion for Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page, and in the evolution of my novel, our family lore looming large in its pages, even after countless revisions and reincarnations.
One character who remains the same, from initial musings to rough drafts to final edits, is eponymously named after and inspired by my maternal great-grandfather, Jesse Baker, who died in 1946, long before I was born. I know him only as an enigmatic family legend, this man my grandmother (his daughter-in-law) Lottie Baker told me took a mail order course on faith healing because he believed he could cure his wife, my great-grandmother Emily, of breast cancer. The story goes — well, I’ll let Grandma tell you, just as she told me one frigid February afternoon in 1994, the two of us and my mother huddled together around the old gas heat stove in her living room near Aurora, NC, the spirit of my great-grandfather and his long-suffering love lingering in the old white clapboard house’s brittle bones:
My maternal grandparents, Rufus and Lottie Baker, with (left to right) my mother, Frances; and her brothers, Herman and Ed, circa 1939 or 1940, near Aurora, NC
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That story, and others of my great-grandfather Jesse’s attempts to heal friends and neighbors of various ailments and even raise a recently-drowned boy from the dead at the request of the boy’s grieving father, has stayed with me and crept into my own stories, especially Searching For Jimmy Page. In the novel, the character Jesse is eighteen-year-old protagonist Luna’s great-grandfather, a self-proclaimed faith healer and diviner who claims spirits commune with him at the Witching Hour every night in his shack deep in the pines of eastern North Carolina. While Searching For Jimmy Page opens with Luna and her grandmother witnessing Jesse’s death following his final, cryptic words that trigger Luna’s suppressed memories of her mother’s suicide when Luna was nine and her mother’s obsession with Jimmy Page, Jesse’s presence, like my great-grandfather’s, is palpable throughout the novel.
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From Searching For Jimmy Page:
I wrenched away from her and stared at my great-grandfather, the withered shell that remained, searching for some part of him that still looked vital—the outline of his body beneath the quilt, legs splayed as if the cat he used to own were nestled between them, his arm dangling over the side of the bed. Grandma tucked it underneath the quilt her mother had made, tattered and yellowed with age, the same quilt that had covered her while she lay dying over half a century before, cancer ravaging her breast, flies swarming the window screens, attracted by the fetor of rotting flesh, all because her husband had believed he could heal her with ritual and prayer. I harbor a picture of that night in my mind’s eye — my great-grandmother’s bewildered stare, her mouth a perfect O — a last word half spoken, an oracle undelivered. Now he was dead, his jaw unhinged, spittle on his grizzled chin, his only child by his side — the daughter whom he only recognized after she’d tell him her name, the name he’d given her seventy years ago.
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Far right, my great-grandfather Jesse Baker as an old man, circa early 1940s
Jesse Baker’s grave on left; Emily Baker’s grave on right
White Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Edward, NC
Jesse Baker’s grave
Emily Baker’s grave
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From my family — both literal and literary — to yours, happy February. I wish you all good health and weird relatives. May you live your life so boldly and eccentrically that you become fodder for your own family lore. Until the next blog posting, please visit the Contact page and join my mailing list to receive the latest news on Searching For Jimmy Page, including the cover reveal, and to volunteer to write a review on your blog, website, Goodreads page in the future.
Rock on, y’all!
Christy
