Born Bertha Kaye Batts in 1960,
Kaye Gibbons was raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She lived
in this very rural area, about fifty miles east of Raleigh, with
her mother and father in a four-room farmhouse. Gibbons used her
experience in rural Rocky Mount to create the setting for Ellen
Foster. After graduating from high school, Gibbons studied
American and English literature at North Carolina State University,
and she continued her studies at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, where she wrote Ellen Foster. In 1987,
at the remarkably young age of twenty-six, Gibbons published Ellen
Foster, which she based on her own nightmarish childhood
experiences. When Gibbons was only ten years old, her mother committed
suicide by overdosing on medication. Like Gibbons, Ellen too is
only ten years old when her mother kills herself by ingesting an
entire bottle of pills. Also autobiographical is Gibbons's portrayal
of Ellen's father, who eventually drinks himself to death, as Gibbons's
own alcoholic father did. In Ellen Foster, Gibbons
fictionalizes her true life search for a loving home. Like Ellen, Gibbons
found such a home with a foster mother after suffering much abuse
by her cruel, self-involved relatives.
Set in the mid to late 1970s, Ellen
Foster takes place during an especially volatile time.
It is during this period that the modern civil rights movement,
which began in the early 1950s,
fought its continuous battle against racism, especially in rural,
southern communities like Ellen's, where racism and race-related
hate crimes were notoriously prevalent. In April of 1968 in
Memphis, Tennessee (just before the novel begins), the Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while he stands on his hotel room
balcony. The gunman, escaped convict James Earl Ray, later pleaded
guilty to King's murder. Only days after King's untimely death,
President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968,
prohibiting discrimination in the sale of property. Soon afterwards,
in 1971, the Supreme
Court upheld busing as a legitimate way of attaining racial integration
in the public school system. Busing programs, which literally bus
black students to attend white schools, were court-mandated in cities
such as Charlotte, Boston, and Denver. In Ellen Foster, Ellen
attends a racially integrated school where she maintains a close
friendship with Starletta, her black best friend who, presumably,
is bussed in from a nearby black community.
After leaving college to care for her first child, Gibbons
talked her way into attending a graduate course on the history of
southern literature. While taking the course, Gibbons read Mark
Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
was inspired to create a literary voice with the youthful brazenness
and intelligence that Huck embodies. It was this idea that began
Gibbon's work on Ellen Foster, the title character
of which is now frequently compared to Huckleberry Finn, as well
as The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, and To
Kill a Mockingbird's Gem, as each is a young, strong-willed,
and precocious character.
