Megan H. response to R. Faery's "Ella"

[Anonymous]

#609

Considering Faery’s piece, I’m first intrigued by the pacing of her reveals. In a clearly reflective tone, her question-and-answer guidance leads the reader to streams, or at least trickles, of information. The entire mystery surrounding Ella and the narrative’s structure as a whole are propped up by the objective details Faery gives about her family members’ timelines, southern location, and years of marriages; but, she adds her emotional perceptions of her family members, from Pop to lonely Grandpa Will, in layers that reveal the consequences the past has on the present. In doing so, Faery tries to depict the intersection of family history and personal identity, how the past is inflected by the present, and how absences still speak through the various ways they are filled.

In her third section, Faery continues her contemplative voice, but this section feels re-energized when she shares what is personally at stake for her about Ella’s disappearance: “It is a hole, a gap in my family history, one that can never be filled with facts, so my imagination has been drawn to it all these years.It’s a hole I must try to fill with speculations, with stories. Why she left, where she went, are questions I’ve asked myself again and again about this woman whose genes I carry within me, from whom I have perhaps inherited some traits. After all, I’ve skipped out on husbands too, two of them, though not so abruptly, and not without warning.” As I read this, I’m identifying with her concerns about holes in family history “that can never be filled with facts,” but her rhetorical powers of speculation about her family’s racial history draw me back into her text with another, more mythical veil over Ella’s mystery.

I think the structure and pacing of “Ella” mirror the slow process of understanding one’s family in reality. “Maybe the real story of Ella Seagroves is a combination of two of the stories I’ve spun here—a lover who led her astray and away and who left her when he learned her secret.” It becomes clear that no more answers are forthcoming and factual history stops, but Faery’s own telling of the story becomes its own layer.

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