Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons

Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons Avon Books, 1993 ISBN: 978-0380722709 254 p.p.

“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.” Kaye Gibbons begins her novel with this bold epigraph from Nietzsche. Indeed, the women of Charms for the Easy Life are not only fiercely intelligent but strong-willed, passionately loving, and resilient even in the harshest times. Effortlessly blending American history, romance, and a coming of age story, Gibbons tells the saga of the Birch women through the articulate, matter of fact voice of the youngest, Margaret. Raised by her mother Sophia and her grandmother Charlie Kate in the backwoods of North Carolina, Margaret begins her story in the late 1800’s with her grandmother’s youth.

Charlie Kate was an extraordinary woman even in her youth. Already an accomplished midwife by 20, she soon becomes famed for her skills as a self-taught healer. As Margaret draws on fact, memory, and imagination to piece together her grandmother’s early life, the story takes on a larger than life, mythic quality. She invites us, for example, to imagine how Charlie Kate met her grandfather, who operated the Pasquotank river ferry, with evocative speculation:

As for what he saw in my grandmother, if she looked anything like my mother’s high school graduation photograph, she was dazzling, her green eyes glancing from his to the water to the shore. Between my grandmother, her green eyes and mound of black hair, and the big-cookie moon low over the Pasquotank, it must have been all my grandfather could do to deposit her on the other side of the river. Imagine what he felt when she told him her name was Clarissa Kate but she insisted on being called Charlie Kate. She probably told him that Clarissa was a spineless name.

They soon marry only to have their short lived wedded bliss interrupted by Charlie Kate’s twin sister Camelia’s suicide, the first of a slew of suicides that would soon take over the Birch family tree. Charlie Kate is heartbroken but determined to go on and insists on moving to the neighboring Wake County despite her husband’s protests.

On the way to Wake County, they cut down a lynched man who in his gratitude gives Charlie Kate the titular easy life charm—“the hind foot of a white graveyard rabbit caught at midnight, under the full moon, by a cross-eyed negro woman who had been married seven times.” Whether it works depends on your definition of the “easy life” and is up to the reader to decide. In any case, the Birch women are certainly no strangers to hardship. In Wake County, Charlie Kate’s independent medical practice flourishes while her husband stagnates in a job he hates. The two grow apart until one day Margaret’s grandfather “left the way sad men leave he did not come home from work.”

Charlie Kate, while not unaffected, takes it in remarkable stride. The next morning, she throws out his cold dinner, yelling “To hell with him!” She goes on raising her only daughter Sophia and furthering her career with staunch pride. Together the two of them—soon accompanied by Margaret—weather the vicissitudes of life, from Sophia’s ill-fated marriage with Margaret’s father to Charlie Kate’s growing medical practice to the arrival of new—and better—men in their lives, all against the backdrop of two world wars. Through it all, the three women are held together by Charlie Kate’s practical wisdom and unwavering strength. Charlie Kate possesses an uncanny, perhaps even magical knack for reading people and predicting the future, giving Sophia and Margaret advice that—when followed—sets them on a sure, if not immediate or easy, path towards prosperity and happiness. As Margaret describes it—drawing an apt comparison to Charlie Kate’s well cared for patients—“trusting her to guide me…was like falling backward like her chloroformed women, knowing that not only would I be caught, but I would be caught before I realized I was falling.” Indeed, with Charlie Kate’s help, both Margaret and her mother find their way through heartache and hardship to a life that’s a little bit easier.

Infused with a hearty sense of history, Charms for the Easy Life celebrates the power of women in a time and place that often overlooked their remarkable strength. Though Gibbons vividly brings to life the sights and sounds of the rural South, her story has a mythic quality that transcends its setting. We are reminded that, regardless of our circumstances, determination, resilience, and a bit of luck can go a long way. Whether you know a woman like the legendary Charlie Kate or simply wish you did, Charms for the Easy Life is a one of a kind tale of triumph that is sure to uplift and inspire.

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Kaye Gibbons is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Ellen Foster, A Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams, and Sights Unseen. She has received numerous literary awards and honors, including the Sue Kaufman Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a PEN/Revson award, and the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.