William Humphrey (1)Critiques

When I was asked to review No Resting Place I was pretty excited. Like me, Mr. Humphrey's ancestors went through the Trail of Tears and with the story being passed down from generation to generation Mr. Humphrey was able to put pen to paper and tell the story that has been lost in our American history.

From the beginning I could tell that this book was going to be a challenge. The author has a very unique writing style and one that I am not accustomed to reading. I'll be honest, I almost gave up on this book but I wanted so bad to see what my ancestors saw and feel what they felt that I pressed on and I'm so glad that I did.

It is a hard story to read and another sad note in American history. Much like the holocaust, Native Americans were forced off their land by the "white man" and moved first to concentration camps and then west. Depending on the compassion of the officer that came knocking on your door, some families were able to take some of their belongings with them while others left with only the clothes on their back. I cannot even begin to imagine what that trek must've been like.

If you are into Native American history or history in general I highly recommend it! While painful to hear, it's a story everyone should know.

Found this book years ago in a stack of books on sale when it was a year old. Was really surprised how good a book and compelling it was.

may be good but don't remember at all from college

William Humprhey's best known novel was HOME FROM THE HILL, a book and a film that made a lasting impression on me fifty years ago. I saw the film first, with its sterling cast of Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, and the two Georges: Hamilton and Peppard, as young Theron Hunnicutt and his bastard half-brother Rafe, respectively. The film was so damn good I went right out and bought the paperback edition of the book. I was probably only 18 or 19 at the time, but it established a pattern that stayed with me, and I learned something. If the movie was that good, the book is probably better.

I read a couple of other Humphrey books, but HOME FROM THE HILL was always his best in my estimation. So I thought it would be interesting to read his memoir, even if I'd waited 35 years after its publication. FARTHER OFF FROM HEAVEN was something of a disappointment in that it only dealt with Humphrey's life up until age 13, which was the year his father - a fighting, drinking hell-raising shade-tree mechanic - was killed in a gruesome auto accident. The bulk of the narrative is mostly about that lost father, and all that Humphrey had been able to rmember and find out about him. Young Billy Humphrey claims he buried his childhood on the day his father was buried. Soon after he and his mother moved from his childhood home of Clarksville, and he didn't return for over thirty years. Besides being a family history of the Humphreys, FARTHER OFF FROM HEAVEN is also a respectful paean to the town of Clarksville as it was back in the 1920s and 1930s. It fact the book seemed more about Humphrey's parents and the town and the Red River region than it was about the author himself. The details about the Big Sulphur Bottom swamp, that figured so prominently in HOME FROM THE HILL, were interesting. I guess I just would have liked more about the man himself, and certainly SOMEthing about the rest of his life after the age of thirteen. Humphrey (who died in 1997) was, after all, over fifty when he published this autobiography in 1977.

Ironically, one my favorite books to come out of that region of Texas, William A. Owens' THIS STUBBORN SOIL, was highly praised by Humphrey himself, who called it "one of the best of all memoirs of childhood." And it was. Perhaps Humphrey's own life just wasn't quite as interesting. The Owens book I recommend highly; the Humphrey one, not so much.½

thought it was a informative book, but ended up a confusing fictional book,

There is no doubt about it. The Texas Renshaws were a dominating family, one willing to run over any outsider who dared stand in the way of whatever they wanted. And their definition of “outsider” was anyone not born into, or married into, the Renshaw family. If one Renshaw could not get the job done, the rest of them saw nothing wrong with ganging up to use whatever brute force was necessary to get them what they wanted.

Whether or not any Renshaw involved in a dispute was right or wrong never mattered much to the rest of the family. Either way, the Renshaws, none of them strangers to violence, were certain to show up to defend their family member or, if it was too late for that, to avenge him. That was a given, something that the rest of their East Texas community accepted as a fact of life, and something that the six Renshaw boys took for granted. Considering the nature of the Renshaw sons, it was a brave man who courted any of the four Renshaw daughters but all but one of them managed to marry.

But the family’s chief strength, a clannishness learned at the knee of the strong widow who headed the family, would ultimately reveal just how weak its members really were when that widow, Edwina Renshaw, suffered a sudden heart attack and took to what was expected to be her death bed. Responding as they always did in times of family crisis, the Renshaw children returned to the family place with all of their own children and spouses in tow to await their mother’s death. Throw in a few older relatives who felt the need to be there and a bunch of screaming toddlers who only wanted to go home and there is little wonder that a family as volatile as the Renshaws would crumble under the pressure of all that togetherness.

The Renshaw family was not easily embarrassed but the way that their mother’s favorite child, youngest of the bunch, had completely abandoned the Renshaws was something they tried desperately to hide from their neighbors. Determined that Edwina would live long enough to reconcile with her youngest son, the Renshaw boys tried to keep her alive the only way that they knew how, through brute force and will. The craziness resulting from their tactics is at the heart of William Humphrey’s story, one involving kidnapping, interracial “romance,” dogs slaughtered in the middle of the night, a daughter who seems as likely to accidentally kill Edwina as to nurse her back to health, and misadventure in New York City.

All in all, this is quite a story and it proves that Proud Flesh is still only flesh after all is said and done. Or, as William Humprhey put it, “Over the lacerations they inflicted upon each other, tissue formed like proud flesh over festering wounds.” The Renshaws, in the end, were just another family bent on self-destruction, and they made a fine job of it.

Rated at: 4.0