“Radical” Re-Envisionings of Home: The Night Travellers

Abstract

In 1986, after more than thirty years abroad, Elizabeth Spencer returned to the South. She has explained in her memoir and interviews that the move was triggered in large part by her health; as Spencer approached her mid-60s, Montreal’s long winters were taking a measurable toll in the form of recurring bouts of pneumonia that left her physically weakened. As a result, when Louis Rubin, the southern scholar—and friend and admirer of Spencer’s—arranged for a teaching contract at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spencer and her husband, John Rusher, eagerly embraced the opportunity to move to a warmer environment. And, as Spencer notes in Landscapes of the Heart (1998), her decision to relocate to Chapel Hill ultimately was motivated by her recognition of a welcoming spiritual climate as much as it was prompted by more temperate weather. She explains, “After thirty-three years of displacement, the long road had turned a wanderer southward. I rejoiced to see that road was no longer mined and booby-trapped, but broad, smooth, and welcoming” (332). In fact, Spencer chooses to close her memoir with a description of this homecoming rather than to discuss the decade of work that follows it. In this way, the final chapter of Landscapes of the Heart, tellingly entitled “The Road Back,” provides a relatively tidy resolution to her narrative, suggesting not only a return to the South but a true reunion.