Tar Heel P ROFILE
By Arthur J. Pais
A Man With A Story To Tell
In a very short time, Durham native Clyde Edgerton has
become one of the country’s most prolific writers.
Clyde Edgerton
For many years Clyde Edgerton
has been visiting the old Edger¬
ton family graveyard outside
Durham, to tend the graves —
and to recall the stories and utterances
I of his mother and aunts. One day he be-
gan to take his daughter Catherine to
the graveyard.
"About five years ago. when I was in
the middle of sharing a family story, she
said. ‘Will you just stop telling me these
stories?’"
Edgerton. one of the most highly
praised novelists to emerge in the past
decade, says he did not realize lie was
overburdening his 5-year-old daughter.
The -18-vcar-old Durham native real¬
ized that Catherine needed to discover
those stories on her own, but he knew
there was no way he would be able to
exorcise them from his own imagina¬
tion. Many of the stories he had written:
several of them had even gently direct¬
ed him into weaving them into his nov¬
els. including Walking Across Egypt.
"I grew up listening to wonderful sto-
ries and utterances. “ says Edgerton. who
had the benefit of 23 aunts and uncles.
“Most of the men didn't tell stories,
but the women did. On Sunday after¬
noons the men would sit around and say
three words every hour about the weath¬
er. and the women would be in the
kitchen going 90 miles an hour telling
great stories. And there were utterances
that were intriguing."
His mother, a homemaker, was a great
storyteller; his father, an insurance sales¬
man. had a sharp ear for her stories but
wasn't much of a storyteller himself.
Edgerton did not grow up expecting
to be a novelist. As a student at the Uni¬
versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
in the 1960s, he wrote a few unfinished
short stories and a few poems but was
more interested in flying, and spent five
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years in the U.S. Air Force. 1 1c served in
Vietnam in tin- forward air control inhe¬
sions and received a Distinguished Fly¬
ing Cross. By early 1971, however, his
perspective on the war had changed, so
he took an honorable discharge and ac¬
cepted a job teaching English at South¬
ern High back in Durham.
A year later, lie went back to his alma
mater UNC to pursue a master's degree
in English. While there, he married
Susan Kelchin. a writer, cditoi and
teacher, with whom he shared an inter¬
est in teaching and blucgrass music.
The couple expected a quiet, con¬
ventional existenc e in Chapel I fill. Edger¬
ton earned his IMi.l). in English from
UNC in 1977. It seemed his future was
made for the- academic field. But a soft
Spot in the- kitchen floor — and
renowned novelist Eudora YVelty —
changed their lives considerably, filling
them with creative zeal and bringing
them much more money than a tenured
teaching position at an Ivy I -vague school.
On a Christmas Eve in 1977, Edgerton
saw a soft spot on his kitchen floor,
entered the crawl space under his house
and found an old well. In a few hours,
he was dipping into his own bubbling
imagination, and writing a short story
about a Ikiv named Meredith
who breaks through a
kitchen floor and drops into
the well beneath.
I le was polishing the story
when he heard the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Welty read
one of her stories on public
television. As he watched her
read “Why I live at the P.O.,"
Edgerton was mesmerized by
the story of an absurd quar¬
rel in a small-town family
that ends when one of the
older children stomps off to
live in the back room of a
post of fice.
His mother used to often
recall what a young girl who
had visited her long ago had
said. That story is found
itiWalking Across Egypt. The
good-hearted Mattie Rigsbee
invites an impoverished dog-
catcher for lunch.
The dogcau her: "Well . . .
I got to. ah ... I got to be out
of that way. Maybe I could.
What you going to have?" “What am I
going to have?' *1 don't like butter, is
your meat lean?'" "What?" “It's a saving.
*•
There are many utterances and little
stories from his past that have flown into
Edgerton '$ books.
"There is another interesting storv,
but this one I haven't used in any book,"
Edgerton says. "There was a young man.
a distant relative, who was mentally
retarded, lie also had a lisp. He was
given a cer lain amount of chores and he
liked doing them. But he would pretend
he didn't like them. He loved clearing
the snow, but he would look out of the
window and sav. 'Ijed (dread) my job.'"
The expression "I jed mv job" cropped
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