<< Back 11/20/02 Wolfe’s angel may have landed in Bryson City By George Ellison In the late 1940s, research by the highly respected Asheville librarian and Thomas Wolfe scholar Myra Champion seemed to establish that among the many candidates spread throughout Western North Carolina, a stone angel situated in Hendersonville’s Oakdale Cemetery was the one Wolfe had in mind when he wrote Look Homeward Angel (1929). Most Wolfe admirers and scholars have through the years accepted that verdict. But Mrs. Champion didn’t know when she was canvassing Western North Carolina’s graveyards for angels nearly half a century ago about a haunting weather-darkened, fly-specked stone effigy in the old cemetery overlooking downtown Bryson City. Brought here from Asheville after the turn of the century by the author’s father, this Swain County angel corresponds more fully to the few details known about the novelist’s angel than the Henderson County candidate. Wolfe’s father, W.O. Wolfe (1851-1922), operated a monument shop on Pack Square in Asheville from the mid-1890s until 1916. He did engraving and some rough stone carving, even attempting his own stone angels, but never to anyone’s satisfaction. The fine angels he marketed were sculpted in Italy from white marble extracted from the famous Carrara quarries. These arrived in Asheville via rail after being shipped in the holds of ships as ballast to New York and Philadelphia. Over the years, Mr. Wolfe generally had several angels at a time on display in front of his shop priced in the $400 to $1,000 range. From the time Wolfe (1900-1938) was born until he left for Chapel Hill to attend the University of North Carolina in 1915, he had ample opportunity to view and contemplate a variety of these brooding figures. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that one appears in the short story “An Angel on the Porch,” published in 1929 in Scribner’s Magazine: “For six years it had stood on the porch weathering in all the wind and rain. But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one pthistic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.” (Shortly thereafter in this story the additional detail is added that the angel “leered vacantly down.” The magazine story description was incorporated into the novel Look Homeward Angel when it was published in the fall of 1929. Ever since, people have quite naturally wondered about the exact identity and location of Wolfe’s angel. His mother, Julia Westall Wolfe (1861-1946), recalled when querried by Hayden North, author of The Marble Man, Thomas Wolfe’s Mother (1947) that “some wealthy man from a nearby town bought it for his daughter.” This leaves us with the following “definite” (if meager) points concerning the literary angel: it was made of marble from Carrara, Italy, and is poised upon the ball of one foot, looking downward; one hand is upraised in benediction while the other holds a stone lily; and a wealthy man in a nearby town bought it to mark his young daughter’s grave site. Also, remember that Wolfe curiously described the angel’s foot as being “pthistic,” which means a tubercular “wasting away of the lungs.” After looking at many angels throughout Western North Carolina, Myra Champion declared, in a widely circulated newspaper story published late in 1949, that the Hendersonville candidate was the most likely angel. It marks the grave of Mrs. Margaret Bates Johnson (1832-1903). But, alas, Mrs. Johnson was 72 years old at the time of her death, both her father and husband were dead, and the transaction involving the angel’s purchase was negotiated by her children. (The tombstone is inscribed “Our Mother.”) Further, that angel is carrying a shock of wheat. The only other known Wolfe angel in the area that fully fits the details in the novel is in Bryson City. Before her death in 1988, Mrs. Champion acknowledged in a telephone conversation with this writer that she had not known at the time of her investigation about a Wolfe angel in Bryson City, although she had traveled “on a hot tip” to the nearby Whittier cemetery to look at one “that wasn’t even close.” The Bryson City angel marks the grave of Fannie Everett Clancy (1884-1904), a young daughter of Epp Everett, one of the town’s most influential and wealthy residents. Bryson City resident Fannie Leatherwood, who was intimate with the Everett family, told me before she passed away in 1987 that Mr. Everett was severely grieved by Fannie’s death from tuberculosis shortly after her marriage to one Ernest Clancy. This angel is carrying a stone lily. “Mr. Everett purchased the angel from Mr. Wolfe in Asheville awhile after her burial and had the foundation laid before Mr. Wolfe brought it over by train about 1907,” recalled Mrs. Leatherwood in a 1986 interview with this writer at her residence. Also present were her daughter, Mary Nell Leatherwood, and her former daughter-in-law Meredith Bacon. “It was sometimes the custom then not to erect monuments until after some time had passed,” she recalled. “I do remember what a great occasion it was and that much of the town turned out to see Mr. Wolfe supervise the transportation of the angel in a wagon up the hill from the depot to the cemetery. A year or so later, the tip of one of the angel’s fingers was shot off by some mischievous boys who were sorely punished and it has suffered no damage since, except that it probably needs a good scrubbing.” Other anecdotal evidence from various sources confirms that W.O. Wolfe brought the angel here on the train but add no new detail except that he had little to say other than to severely curse the briars that had grown up along the hillside road leading up to the cemetery. I first wrote about the Bryson City angel in an article that appeared in the “Smoky Mountain Neighbors”supplement to the Asheville Citizen-Times back in the late 1980s. That article sparked a bit of angel activity that I now think of as the “Angel Wars.” The Bryson City Women’s Club hired a marble cleaning firm in Murphy to come over and refurbish their local angel. A photography exhibit by Helga Wilde Bessent, entitled “Thomas Wolfe’s Angels, was put on display at the Pack Place Exhibit Hall. Dot Jackson, my dear friend and indomitable journalist par excellence, wrote beautifully about the angels on several occasions. Thomas Wolfe scholar Ted Mitchell and I were interviewed by television journalist Maggie Lauterer for a short feature that appeared on WLOS. For the interview, Ms. Lauterer gave me 30 seconds to describe the differences between the two angels, and then saw fit to edit out those most of those brief details when the feature was aired. Mitchell wrote a good article titled “Thomas Wolfe’s Angels” for The Thomas Wolfe Review (Spring, 1994). But haven’t you noticed that some things never change? Most everyone still gives pride of place to the Hendersonville angel. Where are we? It seems most probable that Thomas Wolfe had a composite picture of the looming angels in mind when he put pen to paper rather than just one. After all, many stone angels had passed across his father’s porch during those formative years; nevertheless, the lovely effigy overlooking Bryson City clearly has to be a prime candidate. One look at her outlined against the looming mountains and you see clearly why the young novelist was haunted by his father’s angels. Come and see for yourself. George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com