The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  The night after Judith and I visited the train depot, she left this earthly world. The trip to the depot was hard for her, and she wasn’t ready for another outing so soon after the one with Marcus. I should have kept her home. But she was more determined than usual that day, and it was time to let her begin caring for herself. A stroke delivered her into the Lord’s hands. Deep in her body, unknown to her, she had been following the bloodline of the DeLours, a genealogical link between her and the generations before. She collected on that inheritance in a devastating way.

  I miss her, you see.

  On that trip to the depot, Judith kept asking me if we would stay in the house. I was reluctant to answer. Finally, I told her we would not. She was silent, so I can’t know whether she accepted that. It would not have mattered either way. We are bound for something beyond this house. We will choose what we take with us.

  My wish is for us to make a long trip in the car before we settle down somewhere. I want us to reach farther than we have been allowed in the past. I mentioned this to the preacher in Hickory Grove—Reverend Bell—when we visited him. He is my age, and he was stricken. “Olva, pardon my saying so,” he counseled, “but floating from place to place is not a luxury we can afford. People will wonder why you are traveling and what you are running from. They will not accept you have a right to go wherever you wish. The open road is no place for us.” I placed my hand on his arm but could not erase his fear.

  The other day, Marcus mentioned applying for a position at the new car manufacturing plant in Spartanburg. I want to be supportive, of course, but it is my hope we will leave this area for good. If Marcus takes my advice, he will use the money from the sale of the house and the auction of the things inside it to start his own business. Your father is gifted with the ability to repair broken things—and to repair other wounds. I’ve always known this about him, a gentleness that makes him seem more like a woman than a man. I’m sorry to say I made him feel ashamed of that quality over the years. But I’m not too old to accommodate new ideas. I’ve rid myself of a few things to make room.

  Throughout my life, I wondered why Charlie never tried to come back and get Mama and me, to rescue us, even if it might have endangered him. Or why he didn’t reunite with his only son in Tirzah, Marcus’s grandfather, and make us all one big family. Charlie never mentioned his son to me. I can’t know what created a rift between the two of them. I hope I wasn’t the cause. If Charlie’s son had discovered I was his half sister, I can imagine it might have been difficult to know how to feel about that, what with my being raised by one of the prosperous white families of Bound. It made me angry to think of Charlie abandoning the idea of his son, then abandoning Mama and me, too, when he fled. I wanted him to do something, even though it took me my whole life to set my story straight. And, of course, if we had left with Charlie, if all these imaginings had come to pass, I would never have met you, my dear Amaryllis.

  There is something I have not told you and your father yet. Reverend Bell shared some information in confidence, away from Rosemarie’s ears, when we saw him. He found record of someone he thought might have been Charlie. The man lived on Johns Island, along the South Carolina coast. This man had changed his name, the documents indicated, and while his old surname was unknown, his new name was Charlie Delour.

  Reverend Bell’s records also showed that Charlie Delour had three children on Johns Island. Probably those children had children. That he started a new family—it stings, I must admit. But perhaps he took the long view, building a circuit that we might complete later. When the three of us set out on our road trip, I will steer us first to the coast. Wouldn’t it be something else to find our kin there? Aunts and uncles. Cousins. Brothers. Sisters. To be able to say, of my own accord: Sister, I am coming home, or something very nearly like it. Whoever or whatever we find there, it will be our choice whether we stay or leave. At the very least, I doubt you will object to visiting the ocean. We will have to get a little life vest for Peter Rabbit, now, won’t we? You have experienced far too much for your age, and you carry it quietly. In my mind, in the place where my deepest wishes reside, I see you running along the shore, simply looking like a child.

  That last trip to the depot, Judith and I shared the most extraordinary sunset. The earth was both affirming its vastness and reflecting the sprawling wilderness of our souls. Right in front of us, the clouds broke, and the westerly sun asserted itself. It had been waiting behind the depot and, given the opportunity, reached long arms of light straight through the abandoned building, undeterred by two sets of murky windows, until it assembled that light in golden planks on the ground in front of us. I reached over and took Judith’s hand in mine. We would rest our eyes on that place until we couldn’t any longer. We would watch. We are watching. Before us, a house of light is being built, one that will be gone tomorrow.

  Yours,

  Olva

  Reading Group Guide

  1. How would you describe Judith? What are her virtues? What are her flaws?

  2. Why does Rosemarie’s return compel Judith to begin writing her inventory? In what other ways does Rosemarie disrupt Judith’s life?

  3. How would you characterize Judith and Olva’s relationship? Is it one of equals? How does their relationship change throughout the novel?

  4. In the first chapter, Judith compares the concept of memory to a letter opener made of cut glass: “held to the window, it produced a different color for each of us.” How do Judith’s memories shape the way she tells her family’s story?

  5. Olva has her own take on memory. She says to Judith, “Memory and history are bound up with one another. Where does one end and the other begin?” What do you think Olva means by this? How might the relationship between memory and history be an especially charged one in the South?

  6. Quincy describes siblinghood to Judith in this way: “You and Rosemarie are the mold, and I’m the gelatin that never set.” Judith weighs in, too: “This was the way of siblings, how my existence, my very selfhood, grew partly from what Quincy was not. And from what Rosemarie was not.” How has birth order influenced the experiences of the Kratt children and the choices they’ve made? Do you think your life has been affected by the decisions and actions of your siblings? If you are an only child, do you think you would be a different person if you had had siblings?

  7. This novel teems with objects. Judith records items in her inventory, but other inventories materialize, too, such as the merchandise in Daddy Kratt’s department store, the gifts left for Rosemarie, and the collection of unfamiliar belongings in Olva’s bedroom. What additional inventories can you find in the book? Why does Judith organize life into lists?

  8. Which object in the book do you believe is most significant and why? In your own life, do you have an object that you value above others?

  9. What do you think Judith covets most in her life? Is it a thing?

  10. Daddy Kratt and his associates pursue Charlie in the book’s 1929 timeline. The Bramlett family searches for Marcus in the 1989 timeline. How are these two pursuits related? How do the two men’s circumstances impact their relationships with their families?

  11. This novel explores the power of ownership. Olva says to Judith and Rosemarie, “Do you own your own life? If you have never had to ask that question, you are fortunate indeed.” What do you think she means by this? How might questions about ownership be especially critical to ask in the context of the South’s history and legacy of slavery and racial injustice?

  12. When Judith begins her inventory, what is her purpose? How has that purpose changed by the end of the novel?

  13. Is Daddy Kratt a villain? What about Jolly Bramlett and her son, Rick? What do these characters struggle with?

  14. What do you make of Olva’s decision to sell the Kratt house and most of the heirlooms within it? Why does the possibility of a Kratt heir—Quincy and Dovey’s potential child—not faze h
er?

  15. Has the relationship between Judith and Amaryllis shifted by the end of the book? If so, how, and which objects play a role in this shift?

  16. Why does Rosemarie leave Bound for a second time in her life?

  17. Why does this novel end with a letter from Olva to Amaryllis?

  Further Projects

  1. Judith provides a list of novels containing spinsters like herself. She includes Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Henry James’s The Bostonians, George Gissing’s The Odd Women, and Edith Wharton’s Bunner Sisters. Read one or more of these novels. Is Judith similar to those spinsters? Is her commentary accurate: “It is true some of these fictional heroines have challenging personalities, but defects of character are often an outcome of circumstances, are they not?”

  2. The author reveals in her Q&A that this novel began as a retelling of a story from her family’s history. Is there a story from your family’s history that is intriguing? An heirloom that has a tale to tell? Start with writing a paragraph. Then write another paragraph. Then another. That’s how a book begins!

  A Conversation with the Author

  Where did the idea for The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt come from?

  The book was inspired by a real murder that occurred in my family two generations before me. (You’d think this news would produce a fresh shock for me each time I mention it, but in my family, we discuss the details of the incident so frequently and at such length that they have been rendered ordinary.) Early drafts of the manuscript were my attempt to tell the actual story of my great-uncle fatally shooting his own brother, but eventually, I freed myself from retelling that specific event. Characters shifted; plotlines changed. Yet the heart of the story—a Southern family haunted by a brother’s murder and the chilling allegation that a sibling may be to blame—remained the same.

  The story of the Kratt family is told from the perspective of a first-person narrator, the Southern spinster Judith Kratt. How did you make that decision?

  The voice of Judith is based on my unmarried great-aunt. She was the sister of the two brothers mentioned above—one shot the other—and I chose to adopt her point of view because I was interested in following the path of a character’s mind as she absorbs and recounts a family tragedy. That, and I’ve always been drawn to compellingly flawed narrators, especially in the first person. Judith is our guide through the novel, but we see her limitations, and that gap between her telling of events and what we otherwise sense to be true, mainly through other characters’ reactions, provides a rich interpretive space, not only for witnessing Judith’s growth, but also for examining how memory and perception color a person’s outlook.

  Why did you choose for Judith to narrate the story through an inventory of objects?

  I grew up in a Southern house crowded with family heirlooms. I’m fairly certain the stories about those heirlooms took up twice the space of the actual items. I wanted to tell a story through objects in part because I’m fascinated by how possessions can evoke starkly different memories—and thus meanings—for different people. For families, inheritance can be a thorny subject, to say the least. For Southerners, our willingness to engage with the fraught history of objects in our region—for example, the problem of Confederate monuments—is critical.

  Do you have a favorite character? If so, who and why?

  It’s true that I’m obsessed with Judith’s voice. I’m interested in the moments in which she surprises herself and, even more, in her mistakes and misjudgments. But my heart is with Olva. She checks Judith’s vision of the world when it narrows, and over the years, she has had to provide a tremendous amount of emotional labor for Judith. I often wonder about Olva’s life after the final pages of the novel. As the book ends, she finds herself closer in birthright to the Kratts, but also, to some extent, free of them. What will she do with that new awareness? I’m enthralled by that question.

  Who are your favorite authors and why?

  The novels of George Eliot—Middlemarch, in particular—taught me the value of applying a sympathetic imagination to my characters. Anything written by Virginia Woolf is a master class in the magic of language. As for contemporary writers, Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Strout are literary giants to me. Both authors can coax staggering truths about the human condition from a scrupulously observed insight about a character or the delicate arrangement of images within a sentence. Honestly, the syntax alone of some of their sentences can have me in fits for weeks. I pore over the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, especially how he develops the voices of his first-person narrators. And the poets! William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Rita Dove, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Kimberly O’Connor. My ritual is that I read a poem before I begin writing each day.

  What is your most treasured family heirloom?

  I have a poem clipped from a newspaper that was found in my grandfather’s wallet when he died. Even more remarkable, the poem’s subject is death.

  Acknowledgments

  Like Judith Kratt, I’m a list maker. Here, my list of happy debts is long, as writing a novel is not done in isolation, though it often feels that way. I thank my lucky stars for Kerry D’Agostino, my agent. She’s a joy to work with and is not only a tireless advocate and a discerning editor, but also a kind, thoughtful person. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Shana Drehs, my editor. Her perceptive questions, as well as her enthusiasm and trust, were instrumental in helping this book mature. I’m grateful, too, for Kaitlyn Kennedy, my publicist, for her unflagging efforts in getting the book into readers’ hands.

  Thanks to Dominique Raccah and the whole Sourcebooks team—Lisa Amoroso, Sabrina Baskey, Margaret Coffee, Stephanie Graham, Heather Hall, Kelly Lawler, Lizzie Lewandowski, Danielle McNaughton, Heather Morris, Valerie Pierce, Brittany Vibbert, and Heidi Weiland. Warm gratitude goes to Dawn Bourgeois for the cover photograph. I’m happy our two works of art found each other.

  I hope my great-aunt Jean would be pleased to learn that she inspired the character of Judith Kratt. From both Jean and my mother, I inherited published and unpublished histories of York County, South Carolina. Those texts were central to my research, and they include Jerry L. West’s Sharon: The First Fifty Years 1889–1939; Doris M. Thomas’s Remembering Sharon, 1889–1989: Fact and Fiction (1989); and J. Edward Lee and Jerry L. West’s York and Western York County: The Story of a Southern Eden (2001). In some cases, I moved around or conflated minor historical details for the needs of the story.

  Support from the James Jones First Novel Fellowship kept this project going (thanks in particular to Kaylie Jones, Laurie Loewenstein, Taylor Polites, and Nina Solomon). Rebecca Mahoney blessed the book as an ongoing editor, and our alligator walks in Florida were a lifeline. Without Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, this novel would not be out in the world. I’m especially indebted to a revelatory workshop there with Tiffany Quay Tyson. One more Lighthouser: my friend Kimberly O’Connor, a gifted poet and an unflagging believer in my teaching and work, even back when I didn’t have the courage to call what I was writing a novel (“that long document filled with words”).

  To thrive as a writer, you need your wolf pack. I’m lucky to have found mine. Paulette Fire, Windy Lynn Harris, Rachel Luria, Ainsley McWha, Twila Newey, Roberta Payne, Julie Comins Pickrell, and Natalee Tucker—collectively known as the She-Thugs—make me a better writer and a better human.

  Bill Aarnes and Nancy Whitaker set me on this path. Ann Bortz reminded me, again and again, that everything turns into something else. Tracey Lanham and Heather Lindemann helped me find my voice after a period of dormancy. Victor Luftig refined my thinking in an earlier chapter of my writing life, as did Steve Arata, Alison Booth, Karen Chase, Brian Glavey, Neil Hultgren, and Kate Nash.

  Amy McKeehan is my creative partner. Kim Braxton taught me how to imagine. Ali Sweeney provides a light in the fog, and Maria Gabriela Guevara will
drive through a snowstorm with me for the sake of literature. Margaret Mitchell and Tiffany Putimahtama hold me up with their unwavering friendship. Kim Clark, Heather McRae, Rusty Miller, Susan Peck, Christina White, and the whole Furman crew are there for me no matter what. Zabrina Aleguire speaks my inner language. Donna Heider is a beloved mentor. Dana Bobotis taught me the delights of narrative by writing and illustrating stories for me about my stuffed animals. And Frank and Margaret Bobotis put storytelling in my bones.

  Words won’t do justice for these next two. Jason Heider is my foundation, my champion, my love. Our daughter, Abby, animates the world we walk through. Finally, my first and best review of the book is already in. When Abby was six years old, before publication was in sight, I let her read some of the manuscript. Later, I found this note on my desk:

  Dear Mom, I love you! I like the stories you write about Olva and Rosemarie!

  Love, Abby

  xoxo and a 1000 more

  About the Author

  Andrea Bobotis was born and raised in South Carolina and received her PhD in English literature from the University of Virginia. Her fiction has received awards from the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and her essays on Irish writers have appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies and the Irish University Review. She lives with her family in Denver, Colorado, where she teaches creative writing to youth at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt is her debut novel.

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