Jeanie C. Crain is Professor of English at Missouri Western State College.
Whippoorwill Calling Me is an imaginative creation. The narrative contains thirteen themed mini-narratives structured to be complete within themselves; as a whole, however, the narrative explores the life of a people. Characters and events within the narrative are generalized rather than historical, although all have their roots in the author's childhood and a lifestyle she experienced.
Themes within the narrative include the transience of time, the critical and enduring pulsations of blood ties, the intimate connections between a people and their land, the on-going struggle to survive, and the suffering accompanying survival. Against this black backdrop, the characters live briefly propelled by primordial forces bigger than themselves and their world.
Hauntingly, like the elusive whippoorwill, characters within the narrative nestle within the invisible past, fly noiselessly for a short distance, then plunge to the ground and hide. Much of the life they live is a broken-winged act. The song of these people is always plaintive, drifts sharply in the air--it is a song about living, loving, and dying--and in the end, the song dies away in a farewell message, a death cry.
Whippoorwill is loosely plotted: it begins with the death of a mother and ends with her voice speaking through a letter pointlessly resurrected. Like symbolic portraits in a play, mothers live and fade only to reappear in daughters who are themselves "the mother all over again." The author creates a circle of life spinning itself out repetitively in the seasons of time. The backdrop of the narrative is always an enveloping darkness.
Life looked at closely can drive people insane; Whippoorwill Calling Me reveals the brute reality of a life lived close to the earth. It is not, however, without lyric. And after the song dies, its lament lingers poignantly in the evening and early morning hours, hauntingly blending with the going and coming of light.