59 pages • 1-hour read
The Last House on the Street
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Background
Geographical Context: Changing Rural North Carolina
Content Warning: The novel discusses racism and racist violence.
The specific locations of the narratives, Round Hill and Derby County, North Carolina, are fictional. Chamberlain, however, gives some general clues to assist in geographically placing the area: 30 miles from Greenville, North Carolina. Because large waterways, inner banks communities, and saltwater sounds are not mentioned in the text, the text implicitly suggests that Derby County is closer to central North Carolina in the coastal plains area, an agricultural landscape where tobacco and cotton were the main cash crops grown until around 2000.
Chamberlain portrays Round Hill as expanding in population in the four decades between the narratives. This is characteristic of the state itself, particularly for those communities closer to Raleigh, the state capital. When northern students observe that Round Hill is entirely made up of farmers, Ellie points out that her father, a pharmacist, is the exception. This implies that there were few white-collar workers and professionals in Round Hill in 1965. By 2010, however, the area contains more individuals like Ellie and Jackson, architects who work in Greenville, making Round Hill a quasi-suburban community, as borne out by the erection of the new Shadow Ridge subdivision of larger, modern houses.
Rural, central North Carolina endured major population and economic shifts between 1965 and 2010. The loss of governmental subsidies for tobacco growers shifted the agricultural base toward wine grape and soybean growers. The rapid expansion of tech development in the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Durham) shifted the area’s financial base away from traditional farming industries. While white collar professionalism ascended in the major metropolitan areas around the state, extreme conservatism continued to rule state politics, indicating that the entrenched biases Ellie encountered in 1965 remain prevalent in 2010.
Historical Context: The Civil Rights Movement in 1965
While the outcry for racial equality, freedom, and justice existed in the US before the Civil War and in the century following 1865, many historians date the modern US civil rights movement from the Woolworth Sit-In of 1960. Beginning February 1, four Black students from North Carolina A&T University sat at the Woolworth food counter in Greensboro. They were refused service, though the manager never called the police. The presence of Black students at the counter continued until July, when Black citizens at last were served. This marked the onset of a number of similar sit-ins and protests throughout the South. The movement for racial equality and opportunity held center stage in the US for the following 10 years, involving great political upheaval, and legal challenges. Many historians perceive the movement to have crested in 1970 when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed the opinion that the civil rights movement should enter a period of “benign neglect.” Thus, Ellie’s summer of volunteering occurs right in the middle of the most turbulent years of the movement.
Much of the historical focus on this period centers on extreme acts of racist violence, such as the Selma riots in which state troopers attacked a protest, the Birmingham church bombing in which the KKK bombed a Black congregation, the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement leaders. This was also a period of riots in many major cities with large Black populations such as Los Angeles and New York City. Chamberlain points out that, while North Carolina escaped much of the attention given these headline grabbing events, the state had 10,000 Klansmen—more than all the other southern states combined—as a KKK member boasts at a rally.
Authorial Context: Diane Chamberland’s Background
Much as the novel is a confluence of two distinct epochs and two generations converging in one location, As is pointed out in the post-narrative sections of the book (“About Chamberlain” 348), Chamberlain was a young teenager during this turbulent period of the civil rights movement. The reports of white supremacist violence and injustice made an indelible impact upon her. Chamberlain trained and practiced for decades as a clinical psychologist. Her insight into the mindsets, motivations, and impulsive actions of human beings motivates her to portray characters with distinct, impassioned, and deeply held beliefs that contradict those of the people whom they encounter.
Chamberlain not only mirrors Ellie in engaging with the civil rights movement but also mirrors Kayla in that she moved to the transitioning state of North Carolina. She relishes the natural beauty and cordial customs of the state, while at the same time recognizing that vestiges of rigid, oppressive mindsets still exist.
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