I invented Rhoda Manning on a beautiful fall day in New Orleans. That morning I set out to write a story with a description at the beginning. I was new to fiction writing at the time and if I read something I liked I would immediately try to write something similar. I think that I had just been shown a description of a tree in a book by John Steinbeck. The description ended with the words “it was everything a tree should be.” That took my breath away and made me want to describe something that fully, with that finality. A vision came to me of the pasture beside my grandmother’s house. In good years it would be a pasture. In bad years it would be pressed into service as a cotton field. I saw the pasture in all its beauty and my cousins and my brother in the center of it building a broad jump pit. The famous Broad Jump Pit to which I was going to be denied access. The Broad Jump Pit was famous in my family long before I wrote about it.
As I began to describe the pit I realized I was seeing it from the perspective of the roof of the chicken house, an octagonal-shaped structure that was one of my favorite hideouts on the plantation. “Think how it looked from my lonely exile atop the chicken house,” I wrote. That was the first time I wrote in Rhoda Manning’s voice and as soon as I typed the line I knew the little girl as I know myself. By noon I had finished a draft of the story, which is called “Revenge,” and which is the second or third completed short story I ever wrote in my life. I had the story and I had the central character but she did not yet have a name. She was almost Shelby, from “Summer, an Elegy,” but not quite. I had darkened the persona in Shelby, to accommodate the death that shadows that story.
There are no shadows in Rhoda. Rhoda is passion, energy, light. If germs get inside her, her blood boils up and devours them. If she loses a pearl ring, it’s proof there is no God. If it’s necessary to drop an atomic bomb to save Western Civilization, she’s ready. I had the character by the end of that morning’s work but I did not have a name.
I went out to run in Audubon Park. The most self-assured woman in New Orleans was running her four miles. This was a woman who had declared, at the height of the running craze, that it was obsessive to run more than four miles a day. I began to run along beside her. “I wrote a funny story this morning,” I said. “May I name a little, fictional girl for you?”
“What’s she like?” the real Rhoda asked.
“She’s powerful and she wins.”
“All right. Go ahead. You may.”
Now, fifteen years later, I have written many stories about Rhoda. Some of them are blatantly autobiographical and some are made up. Many are true to the real essence of the Rhoda I created on that fall morning. Others miss the mark. If I was in a bad mood or out of sorts with myself, I would savage Rhoda. Of course I only know all this in retrospect. Or think I know it. No writer truly understands the relationship between reality and storytelling. No real storyteller gives a damn about it except in retrospect or in those rare generous moments when they think what they know can be explained.
The one thing I do know is that something wonderful happens to me when I am writing about Rhoda, especially Rhoda as a child. Because she is a mirror of myself I am able to participate in the story as I write it. I radiate with her curiosity and intelligence, her divine cynicism. I am eight and ten and twelve years old. Those memory banks are evoked most powerfully when I am writing about the child Rhoda alone with one of her obsessions. She is pinning butterflies to cardboard for one of her scientific experiments, let us say. I smell her hands, know her horror and fascination. Science demands sacrifice. Rhoda and I will pay the price. We write the names below the specimens. The cold wind of karma blows over us. We shake it off. We go on with our work.
So is Rhoda me? I don’t know. She starts off being me and she ends up being my creation. Unlike me she can have varying numbers of brothers of varying ages. She can live in different places at different ages and, of course, she could have any man she wanted if she really wanted one. She has never had a sister but she has always wanted an identical twin and perhaps I will give her one. She was identical twins in the womb, let us say, and one was resorbed by the mother’s body because of a lack of calcium in the diet. Rhoda goes back in a time machine and changes her mother’s diet and the twins are born in perfect health. Twin Rhoda is born first, and then twin Treena Aurora, who will stick by her older sister every day of her life and be her trusted lieutenant. When it is time to study biochemistry and become Nobel laureates in science, they will share the prize.
In the meantime, we will have to be satisfied with the Rhoda I have created, in all her cosmic loneliness and hope. Here she is then, all her guises under one cover. She would probably like to think of herself being read about on an airplane above the deserts of the west, or alone in a bedroom with a plate of cookies within reach, or to some poor old lady on a sickbed, on a fall day underneath a crimson tree, or a golden one or an orange one.
Ellen Gilchrist
February 20, 1995