On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is a 1998 historical novel by American author Kaye Gibbons. Narrated by elderly Emma Garnet Tate Lowell on what she hopes will be the last day of her life, the novel recounts a sweep of 19th-century history in the American South, from Emma’s childhood on a plantation owned by her abusive father through to her marriage to a Yankee doctor and their work tending to the wounded of the Civil War. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon was the first historical novel written by Gibbons, best known for contemporary novels of Southern life such as 1987’s Ellen Foster. It received mixed reviews, with critics praising its depth of historical detail but finding it “psychologically the stuff of melodrama” (Kirkus Reviews).

In the year 1890, Emma Tate Lowell is dying. She longs to rejoin her beloved husband, but as she waits, her mind casts back over her life. Her thoughts settle on an event that happened when she was 12, and which irrevocably set her direction in life.

Twelve-year-old Emma is in the kitchen of her family home, helping Clarice—one of the family’s black slaves—to make sausages. Her father Samuel comes staggering through the door. He is covered in blood and unhinged, but it is not he who has been hurt. He bellows that he “did not mean to kill the nigger.” His raving is interrupted by Clarice, who gently prompts him to clean himself up, without helping him to do so. Clarice is the “only woman he would allow a riposte, to tell him how to manage an affair.” When he is clean, she orders him to “go upstairs and dress and not wake the twins.”



With Emma at her side, Clarice investigates. She learns that Samuel has cut the throat of one of his slaves for daring to “talk back” to him. The corpse is being watched by two traumatized field hands. Clarice orders them to cover the corpse and perform a toe-touching ritual to banish the dead man’s ghost.

Bearing witness to this scene is a sudden coming-of-age for Emma. She overhears Clarice explain to another slave that she knows “a fat budget of stories” about “Mr. Tate when he was what he was before he became what he is.” She begins for the first time to worry about her and her family’s culpability in the slave system, and the possibility of justified retaliation from the slaves: “This is what things did. They came back.”

Emma also recognizes more clearly the situation of her much-loved mother, Alice, who is not on the plantation at the time of the murder: she has fled her husband for some temporary respite with friends on another plantation. Emma sees her mother as “a woman of nightly-broken spirit.”



From the moment of the murder onwards, Emma undertakes to place herself on the side of right, despite her complicity as a member of a slaveholding family. She learns to distinguish her family’s slaves one from another by “the quality of their faces, the way they [hold] themselves, their voices, the same way I [know] anyone on the James [River].” She also all but apprentices herself to Clarice to learn the formidable woman’s skill in managing the household. When Clarice gives her orders in front of the other slaves, Emma makes a point of bowing, to show that “at least one Tate had respect for a Negro.”

The main thing Clarice and Emma must manage is Samuel Tate himself. A proudly self-made man, Samuel collects Titians and studies Latin to disguise his humble origins. He despises his children, seeing them as tainted by their own origin: himself. He reserves particular cruelty for his eldest son, Whately, a sensitive, bookish boy whom Samuel brands a “failure.” Samuel constantly threatens to disinherit Whately, but in the event, he is beaten to it by Whately himself, who rejects his inheritance: “I do not think I will ever live here…If I take up your living, I will take up your Negroes. Thank you though.”

Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Whately pursues his passion for literature, instilling a similar passion in Emma along the way: “Without my brother, I would not have known to use books as a haven, a place to go when pain has invaded my citadel.” Samuel is further infuriated: He wants his daughter to be feminine, not bookish.



When she is 17, Emma meets Quincy Lowell at a dance. She flouts convention to show him her bare foot, ostensibly in order to prove that her tiny slippers are not too small for her. Quincy is a doctor and a scion of the Boston Lowells. Samuel is so incensed at his daughter’s marrying a Yankee that he curses her unborn children.

Emma and Quincy move to Raleigh, North Carolina, but not before freeing Clarice and offering to employ her for a wage. For a few years, Emma knows true happiness with her loving husband. They have three daughters.

When the Civil War breaks out, Quincy establishes a field hospital, treating the men who have been wounded fighting for a cause he despises. As the casualties mount, Quincy works himself harder and harder. Soon Emma is helping in the hospital. Eventually, their home becomes an extension of the hospital, with the piano serving as an operating table. Quincy works himself so hard, in such terrible conditions, that he falls sick and dies. For the rest of her life, Emma grieves her husband, grateful for the three daughters that remind her of him.