“Green Forest, Red Earth, Blue Sea” by Jim Gulledge

An heirloom pocket watch loosely links three novellas together in Green Forest, Red Earth, Blue Sea by Jim Gulledge. Each story captures the distinctive beauty of a different North Carolina community—Saluda, Peachland, and Beaufort.

The prologue presents a striking image: a hawk, a rabbit, and a rattlesnake, each “oblivious to all hungers but its own,” while “the bloodlettings of men were about to play out again.” This meditation on instinct and conflict foreshadows the human dramas to come.

In the first novella, the Keller family struggles in the aftermath of war. Vancie Keller’s father returns to the family farm “but not in one piece,” missing part of a leg “and even more of his mind.” His death leaves Vancie’s mother embittered and overburdened, struggling to sustain the farm and developing “a sharp tongue and dark disposition.” Gulledge’s prose often rises to the level of poetry, and his dialogue rings true:

Every time Vancie made a false step, her mother’s words rained down on her like hail in a summer thunderstorm.

“Go ahead then, you fool child. You are more like your daddy every day. Always off in a dream. Well, dreams won’t fill your belly, and honor and nobility don’t satisfy the bank. . . . Instead of looking for a man to come along with a buggy load of fancies, you had better be looking for a man to come your way with a pocket of silver!”

Vancie resists her mother’s harsh pragmatism. She “would rather be wrapped in barbed wire than strapped into a church dress,” preferring the freedom of creeks, meadows, and woods.

She finds a kindred spirit in Josiah Buckland, a quiet boy who prefers solitude to the noise of town. Gulledge captures his presence vividly:

“. . . Josiah’s eyes did not reflect the sky. They seemed to be the sky itself—at times nearly gray and at others dark and sapphire, like the sky in the mountains before the sudden crash of thunder and the fall of rain.”

These two nature-bound souls are drawn to one another, and the pocket watch first appears when Josiah’s boss gives it him to present to Vancie as a token of love.

The first novella also introduces a villain, the immoral Jagger Hill. The plot unfolds with enough twists to keep the pages turning, yet Gulledge’s lyrical descriptions invite the reader to slow down and savor the language. In a passage describing a waterfall, the prose becomes meditative:

“As clouds thinned overhead, the curtain of the fall morphed from gray to dazzling white. James’s knees slowly buckled, and he fell to the rock beneath him. Kneeling, he was enveloped in light, mist, and sound as leaves rustled gently around him. He lost any sense or capacity for words. Everything became feeling. Later, when some ability to think and speak returned, the word that would finally come to him was ‘oneness.’ ”

The second and third novellas follow the Elliott and McClure families, respectively, as the pocket watch moves forward through time and across the state—from the forested mountains to red clay peach orchards to fishing communities along the coast. Each section offers a rich cast of characters who embody both the best and worst of humanity.

Throughout the collection, Gulledge’s prose serves as a love letter to North Carolina. Hymn fragments are woven into the narratives, reflecting the author’s theological background and adding a spiritual dimension to the stories.

Green Forest, Red Earth, Blue Sea is a sweeping, magical journey through time and place, filled with love and loss, good and evil, sin and redemption. Don’t miss it!

Jim Gulledge

Jim Gulledge earned an AB in Christian education from Pfeiffer University, an MA in English from Clemson University, and a DM in theological studies from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has also participated in the Adult Development Institute at Harvard University, the Fulbright German Administrators Exchange Program, and the C. S. Lewis Summer Residence program in Oxford, England. Gulledge is the author of the novella A Poor Man’s Supper and lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina, with his wife, Linda.