I’ve just read Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of a Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator by Homer Hickam, which I recommend. The author insists it’s a biographical novel about his parents, Homer Sr. and Elsie, who made a car trip in 1935 from their home in Coalwood, West Virginia, to Orlando, Florida, to find a suitable wild habitat for Albert, the alligator Elsie’s former Floridian beau Buddy Ebsen had given them as a wedding present. It reads like a picaresque novel in which Elsie and Homer unwittingly fall from one adventure into another, which expose them to all the prominent aspects of southern American life at the time (although not necessarily just Southern or just of that time): a shanty-town of people dispossessed by the Great Depression, union organizers who’re trying to improve the working conditions of the workers at a local sock factory, bank robbery, commercial fishing, smuggling, the coast guard, professional baseball, movie-making, murderers, railroad construction in the Keys, and a hurricane. They also meet John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Buddy Ebsen on their travels.
I’m not sure how much of it is true. Buddy Ebsen was a real dancer/actor, and Elsie Lavender, later Hickam, did make a trip to Florida at the time he lived there, staying with her rich, at least by her standards, uncle. Everything else may well be fiction. The author says his mother had pictures of her pet fox and pet squirrel, but none of her pet alligator whom she loved like a son. There are pictures of a small artificial pond near the house in Coalwood where they used to live, but I think there’s a strong possibility that Elsie’s father built the pool for his grandsons rather than an alligator. There is also a bunch of photographs of Elsie in Florida, but always alone or with her uncle, not a single one with her husband or with Buddy Ebsen, either in 1928 or in 1935, despite the fact that the author claims his parents had a camera with them on their trip. All of this makes me highly suspicious that this is a historical novel which masquerades as a biographical novel. The author himself writes: "Carrying Albert Home is a family epic, which means it's a blend of fact and fiction, evolved from stories told by my parents, both of whom were West Virginians and knew how to make their tales tall as the hills that surrounded them on all sides." Perhaps, the author’s parents made up stories about Albert the alligator to entertain their kids when they were little, and long after the author grew up, he re-dressed these stories for an adult audience, fleshing them out with historical episodes, meetings with famous writers of the time who were connected to the place or the era, and introducing tension and psychological complexity to his parents’ relationship.
The latter is a somewhat surprising element of the novel, considering that the author wrote it about his own parents, or at least pretended to. According to the novel, Elsie didn’t get over Buddy who was very charming and with whom she always had fun in her carefree days in Florida, and her husband was forever trying to win her affection, to no avail, even when he risks his life to save her alligator. It is only when the couple make it to a movie-making set, and Elsie sees that other women there find her husband attractive that she changes her plan to ditch him as soon as he gets her to Florida. I suppose the author didn’t realize that he’d made his mother appear very shallow and self-centered, for everybody the couple meets in the novel is enraptured with her and says how special she is, because she’s very good-looking and likes to try new things. But as a reader, I didn’t find it sufficient to warm up to her. However, despite disliking one of the two main characters, I enjoyed the book as a whole for its wide panorama of the southern American life in 1935, for its fast-paced plot, and for Albert – an alligator who made happy yeah-yeah-yeah sounds when pleased and flopped on the ground for belly rubs, while wearing a toothy grin.
