Home Across the Road

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In 1861, Roseberry was the plantation home of two families named Redd: the white Redds, who owned it, and the black Redds, who worked it. In 1971, Roseberry stands empty, a wisteria vine growing through the dining room window, and China Redd, who worked in the house for half a century, is nearing death. But first she has a story to tell. If she has nothing else from forty-seven years of work in a house in which nothing was her own, China has this story.

"Employing simple prose that possesses a rhythmic, repetitive, almost biblical cadence, Peacock retells and revises these multigenerational stories in a fascinating palimpsest."
-- The New York Times Book Review

Reader's Guide

1. What role do the family stories serve for both Redd families? Whose stories are closer to the truth -- and why?

2. When Earnest and Julia move to another city, why doesn't China go with them? Couldn't she find a job and a home closer to her family? What keeps her at the old home?

3. Why is it so hard for China to let go of Earnest? What does he represent to her?

4. When black laborers are assigned to cut back the wisteria growing along Roseberry, a legend emerges that the wisteria has simply stopped growing. What does this say about the regard of the white Redds for the black Redds' work around the plantation?

5. What is the significance of the Roseberry estate to China? Why does she stay on after the rest of her family has left?

6. What finally makes Coyle distance himself from Jenny Wolfe? What is he trying to keep himself from experiencing?

7. China was a major figure in Coyle's life. What prevented him from treating China better than his parents had?

8. Why didn't Lydia or Coyle tell China or Abolene about Martin Luther King's assassination? What do you think they were afraid of?

9. What does Home Across the Road say about ownership -- of possessions, of land, and of people? What makes the characters in this story feel attached to the land? To the possessions at Roseberry? How does this motivate their behavior throughout the years?

10. Why do you think China is ready to die once Abolene's daughter is born? Why is that the turning point for China?

11. What keeps China from telling her story, since it's been nagging at her for so long? It's a story few people know. Why doesn't she write it down or talk to a reporter about it?

12. Why is Coyle so eager to get rid of all of those possessions at the end of the story?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A native of Wilmington, Delaware, Nancy Peacock was raised in Alabama and the Research Triangle in North Carolina. She has worked a variety of jobs, including milker on a dairy farm, costumer, carpenter, assistant drum maker, mucker at a stable -- all to support her writing. Peacock's short stories have appeared in St. Andrews Review, Sojourner, and the O. Henry Festival Stories. Her first novel, Life Without Water, was cited as a New York Times Book Review 1996 Notable Book. Peacock currently resides in Pittsboro, North Carolina.