Time to Reconcile: the Odyssey of a Southern Baptist.

By Grace Bryan Holmes. Southern Voices from the Past: Women's Letters, Diaries, and Writings. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2000. Pp. xii, 307. $27.95, ISBN 0-8203-2217-2.)

Grace Bryan Holmes's memoir begins on a day when, at age six, she crept behind a pomegranate bush in her family's Georgia backyard to watch the children at play in the schoolyard next door. Her mother--proud, overbearing Lila Bryan--would not let her daughter attend this "sorry" school with the other children, and Grace, resentful and lonely, could find comfort only in the plaintive songs of the family's black laundress, Aunt Lou. She turned to her family's part-time servants for "solace and companionship" and, as she explained to a therapist thirty years later, "loved and identified with these gentle women." However, she "dared not speak about this love to any white"; hence, her "love became a burden" (p. 201). It also became a charge when, at age twelve, she promised herself at Aunt Lou's deathbed to "help Aunt Lou's children" once she was grown (p. 80).

Holmes's girlhood longing for escape and her empathy with black women sets the emotional tone for the story of personal liberation and societal change her memoir recounts. Born in 1919, Holmes imbibed the lessons of segregation and racial etiquette along with the water that both her overburdened mother and household workers such as Aunt Lou routinely drew from an outdoor well--a vivid reminder of how rustic the small-town South of the 1920s was. Confined to her mother's world of house and yard while her father toured the state to promote the Baptist Young People's Union, Holmes also learned to think of herself only in relational terms: first as Mother's Little Girl; then, while attending a Baptist college her father had visited, as Gainer Bryan's Daughter; and finally, after her marriage to an up-and-coming Baptist minister, as Tom Holmes's Wife. Time to Reconcile traces Holmes's struggle to come into her own while maintaining these relationships, a task that her mother's smothering personality made particularly difficult.

Holmes's efforts to define her own identity paralleled those of other women of her generation. She tried writing but found singing and playing the piano even better because "with music in my head, housework lost its drudgery. I became a liberated woman fifteen years before I ever heard of Betty Friedan" (p. 160). Her liberation story was also distinctly southern, both in the prominent part that evangelical Christianity played in shaping her developing sense of self and in the extent to which she could never he truly free until the structures of segregation--akin to the house and fenced-in yard holding both her and Aunt Lou--began to fall. After turning to a pastoral counselor to help her with depression, Holmes found identity and purpose not only as a preacher's wife but also in working with black children. As the events of the early civil rights movement unfolded around her, she made a first tentative foray into black Atlanta to visit a Women's Missionary Society nursery school. Then, with her husband's help, she started a vacation Bible school in partnership with a black church.

By June 1966 Holmes was teaching remedial reading in Macon's first integrated public school while her husband had become pastor of Tattnall Square, the exclusive church on the Mercer University campus. The climax of her small rebellion against southern mores came that summer and fall when the Tattnall Square congregation voted to fire Tom Holmes and two associate ministers for refusing to prevent two black high school students from attending a Sunday service. A story that made national television at the time, Holmes's firing is a startling reminder of how slowly change came to the South even after the edifice of segregation began to crack. Tom Holmes's own book about the incident, Ashes for Breakfast (Valley Forge, Pa., 1969), was "hidden under counters in Baptist bookstores across the South" (p. 285).

Despite this moment in the spotlight, personal reconciliation dominates Grace Holmes's memoir. In the late 1960s Holmes looked up Aunt Lou's daughter and another elderly former servant and formed relationships with them that were warm and sympathetic, if not unmarked by differences of education and class. She also learned to get along with her mother, whose death in September 1978 concludes the narrative. Centered on themes of personal liberation and racial healing, Time to Reconcile is a moving account of a white southern daughter's fight to break free from the confines of race, gender, time, and place to become simply herself, simply Grace.

JENNIFER RITTERHOUSE
Utah State University