Reply To: TRWR: What role do secrets play in the novel?
Both Angie and Brody kept secrets, I believe, for the same reason that most people keep secrets: for fear of not being accepted and loved if others knew those secrets.
Angie is “flamboyant in expressing her Southern roots,” especially in the food served in The Wagon Wheel Cafe where she works with her mother-in-law. Most people think Jewel is a better and more interesting place since she arrived. Angie journals, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes more. Her journals are a testament to what Felix Klein said about his own life and what Angie believes is characteristic of most people: “they are broken and they are blessed.” Her journals contain her real name Jolie Rae LeBlanc and how her father’s third wife made sure that she could read and write; Mama Farrah taught her manners and how to speak to disguise her bayou upbringing. She protected Jolie Rae from assault from her brothers and when she was dying, she sent Jolie Rae away to where she had come from, an upscale house of prostitution. It was there that Jolie Rae met Christian Madison who only saw something good and beautiful in her. It is Brody’s sister-in-law Garnet who found Angie’s secrets when Angie’s diaries were mistakenly placed in a box of book donations. Garnet did not show the journals to Brody, but tells Angie that all she wants is for Angie to tell Brody.
“Human beings are wired to remember. Struggle as we may to stuff the past out of sight and out of mind, nature has devised triggers that bring back even the most unwelcome memory.” That is what happens to Brody and how some of his secrets are revealed. An eshaku bow, a gesture of casual greeting from Kyoko awakened “old angers, old hate, that ripped open old, deeply painful wounds from his time in an undocumented Japanese POW camp in Burma. Since Quinn’s chewed up body was pulled from the Alabaster, the nightmares from the war returned: “The burning men, the Asian girl whose smile had betrayed him and the ghost of the man he’d murdered.”
When Angie tells Brody of her past, his comment to her is one that he hasn’t taken to heart for himself. “We do what we have to, all of us. We survive.” To avoid capture by a Japanese patrol, Brody smothered McMillan who was delirious from gangrene and dying. When the Japanese began killing those in the prison camp, Brody managed to escape. Because of those events, he has considered himself and murderer and a coward. But he reveals these secrets and the destruction of evidence to Angie, also confirming to her his affair with Garnet.
Their honesty with each other provides a basis for their relationship and healing for both.
