REVIEW: INDIGO FIELD by Marjorie Hudson

Marjorie Hudson knows the “Land Between Two Rivers” intimately, as a writer, farmer, activist, teacher, and member of a small Southern community for three decades. This deep knowledge of people and place suffuses every page of her stunning debut novel, Indigo Field.

In central North Carolina, where broad fields stretch out under the shadow of the ancient Gooley Pines, cultures clash. Randolph Jefferson Lee, retired colonel, despises the genteel retirement community his wife adores, until her sudden death sends him into a tailspin. Miss Reba Jones, an elderly Black woman who lives across the highway, guards the sacred dead even as she puts her faith into action with the invocation, “It’s time to feed the living.” 

A minor incident on the highway puts these two stubborn people on a continued collision course that draws in a young widow trying to run a farm, her Down syndrome son, the colonel’s estranged son, and the angry child of a violent man who can’t say the words he must say.

This novel is like the rocky field itself, “planted but never plowed,” with layer upon layer revealed, a stratigraphy of loss, dispossession, and death. Three centuries of crimes are buried there, and Miss Reba knows them, from the dispossession of the Tuscarora, to the brutalization of Black people, to the encroachment by forces of modernity such as the residential development and an archeological dig. 

Even as she strives for justice, other characters in Indigo Field are on their own quests, seeking a family, a place to put down roots, surcease in the familiar, or the strength to fly away. 

Angels are everywhere in this novel, “angels unaware” in the form of people who offer help even when it hurts to do so, and giant cedar statues of black angels that loom over Miss Reba’s modest house, memorials carved by her father for his dead children. She seeks heavenly retribution for the wrongs of the past, including her niece’s murder—Danielle still speaks to her, but she’s not the only uneasy spirit.

As the story builds, an angel comes flying to the blood-soaked ground of indigo field, on the wings of a hurricane that brings both peril and the possibility of reconciliation.  

Sometimes, the ties that bind are invisible as the mycelial networks that underlie field and forest. Without such support and communication with others, a living world will die. So will a community. Hudson’s tale takes us through grief to joy, turns our mourning into dancing as opposites are drawn together, past and present, old and young, dead and living, Black and native American and white. 

This book is a delight to read for its powerful story, but likewise for its lush, evocative telling. Hudson has capped a lifetime of writing about natural and human communities by enfolding us in this place with magnificent prose that combines an ecologist’s eye and a poet’s heart. 

This is a book you must read, and that you’ll never forget.

Review by Valerie Nieman, author of In the Lonely Backwater

Indigo Field, Marjorie Hudson Regal House Publishing

INDIGO FIELD

Indigo Field brims with multigenerational drama, earthy spirituality, and deeply imagined characters you are unlikely to forget.” —Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Invention of Wings, The Book of Longings, and The Secret Life of Bees

In the rural South, a retired colonel in an upscale retirement community grieves the sudden death of his wife on the tennis court. On the other side of the highway, an elderly Black woman grieves the murder of her niece by a white man. Between them lies an abandoned field where three centuries of crimes are hidden, and only she knows the explosive secrets buried there. When the colonel runs into her car, causing a surprising amount of damage, it sparks a feud that sets loose the spirits in the Field, both benevolent and vengeful. In prose that’s been called “dazzling” and “mesmerizing,” in the animated voices of trees and birds and people, in Southern-voiced storytelling as deeply layered as that of Pat Conroy, Marjorie Hudson lays out the boundaries of a field that contains the soul of the South, and leads us to a day of reckoning.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing