By Ruth Ann Ruiz
The Post Newspaper Features Editor
You don’t get a chance to wade slowly into “Oleander City.” You are swept, blown, sometimes pushed into it and you don’t have much time to catch your breath as you delve into the book.
“I’m terrified of boring my readers so I write with intensity, there is usually something dangerous about to happen every ten pages,” shared author, Matt Bondurant.
On a Texas tour to promote his latest book, Bondurant’s first stop was in Galveston at the Rosenberg Library. It is only fitting that he would give Galvestonians a first peak at his work, titled Oleander City.
Guests at the library had come to hear him speak and have him autograph their copy of his novel, which opens in the depths of horror of the hurricane of 1900 that ravaged Galveston. The Great Storm of 1900, as it is still known, remains as the most destructive natural disaster to strike the United States.
Each year as hurricane season opens, those of us who live in the Texas Gulf Coast harbor a place in our mind of tension and dread that it could happen again.
The first line in Oleander City is, “The sisters of the Incarnate Word decided to tie the girls together with a length of clothesline.”
Thoughts rage as the novel grips your mind thrusting you into the hurricane. No, sisters don’t do that! Stop! as you’re wanting to go back in time because we know their fate. We know All of the girls from the orphanage were lost to the Great Storm of 1900.
We know they all perished, we know none of the girls from the orphanage survived. But what if? What if one miraculously made it through? What did she see? What did she experience? What if we are allowed to view the hurricane and its aftermath through her eyes?
This is exactly the “what if” that Bondurant needed to nudge his creative mind forward in developing his fourth novel.
“I spent years researching the storm and my nonfiction characters Jack Johnson and his boxing match with Joe Choynski. I knew Clara Barton’s role in the aftermath of the hurricane but I just couldn’t get it going. Then I saw a photo of the boxing champions with a little girl and a dog sitting in front of them and she made the novel work for me,” said Bondurant.
“I liked the idea of the little girl being wise and scrappy. I wanted her to be unique from other children, so she had to start out as an orphan and then be orphaned again,” explained Bondurant of his fictional character, Hester.
Parts of the novel are events and names as Bondurant found in public records of the storm. But, six-year-old Hester and Diana, who serves as assistant to Clara Barton, are fictional. The dog becomes a leading character and is fictional as well.
The novel goes into the harrowing months of onerous reality which all who survived the storm were thrust into.
The city leaders brought in boxer, Joe Choynski to duke it out with Galveston’s rising star, Jack Johnson, as a fund raiser for the city. The twist of fate for both boxers after the match was an immediate arrest by the Texas Rangers. It was real, it happened and Bondurant describes the events with his talent for vivid engaging details.
Bondurant takes the reader deep inside the minds of his characters who are brutal and brutalized. Hester struggles to hold onto a shred of human kindness as she reasons the best way to survive is to be kind to others.
Diana and the other Red Cross team members also feast in human kindness which is their role in society. Yet under the weight of the destruction and human indifference to suffering, Diana is ready to walk away. Joe the boxer takes a trip down memory lane as he questions the cruelty of his profession.
The destructive power of nature merged with the barbarous human behavior as described in the novel create vivid images for the reader. Bondurant struck a balance between fiction and nonfiction to develop a fast-paced, immersive experience in a reality that was filled with both natural injustice and human-created injustice.
Bondurant is a father with children ages 5, 11 and 13. While pounding his keyboard with the gritty details in his novel, he would find his own brighter human side when his daughter interrupted him to play with her and her stuffed animals.
He has been married for 16 years. He and his wife, who is from Austin met in London. Because of her love of Galveston, he too became fascinated with the history, geography and culture of a barrier island that never quits.
Currently, Bondurant is a professor of literature at The University of Mississippi.
