Full Circle

The dozen short stories in Betsey Barber Hampton's collection FULL CIRCLE offer a fresh new voice in southern fiction. Hampton, who has just begun to write in her eighties, brings her charming perspective to coming of age in North Carolina in the mid 1900's. She also explores the last days of slavery and the complex racial tensions then and now, all with an innocence and humor unique to her personal experience. Hampton draws unforgettable, often feisty characters from memory and family history, with an emphasis on the importance of generational continuity. Sarah Sherwell struggles with a family murder kept secret through the years. Old ladies Neat and Ness allow a Jewel Tea salesman into their isolated lives. Young John Smith aids and abets Thomas Henry, a runaway slave, while shy school teacher Helen is jilted at the railway station. A star-struck teenager moons over Billy the Kid, while George and Lucy find romance in a retirement home after discovering the secret of George's Uncle Sam and his relationship with Thomas Wolf. Hampton time travels back to old Europe, where aristocratic Diana finds solace from her abusive husband by having an affair with Sully, a neighbor's gardener. In her seventies, Myra finds worth in her dismal life through the revelations in her grandmother's diary, while in Full Circle, Berta Lee, an elderly white woman, reconnects with her dearest childhood friend, a black man, James E., who gives her a reason to live. All in all, Hampton's stories leave the reader satiated with her feast of riches, yet hungry for more.