Walking Across Egypt
Oct 16, 2005
Reviewed by: Marybeth
Ramblings of a Southern Goddess
Walking Across Egypt
by Clyde Edgerton
ISBN #: 0-345-34649-1
Random House, 1987
Seventy-eight year old Mattie Rigsbee is on a journey. And you know how that is. We never know where our journeys may take us. But that's what makes this story so much fun to read. It's deeply spiritual yet
hysterically funny. It's as familiar as own your child and just as
unpredictable.
Ms. Mattie is your typical small town Baptist. You know her. She's the little widow woman who's in church every time the doors are opened. She's the vice president of her Sunday School class and she heads up the Lottie Moon offering every year. But on one particular Sunday, Ms. Mattie takes the scripture they read in Sunday School to heart. Jeremiah 31..."And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Hummm, what does she do for "the least of them?" Here she begins her journey.
Wesley, 16 year old delinquent, has a passion for cars. Other people's cars, that is. His current home is the Young Men's Rehabilitation Center. This is where Ms. Mattie meets Wesley and begins to feed his soul and her own. He doesn't look like Jesus but surely, he'd be considered one of the "least of these." Wouldn't he? Ms. Mattie brings Wesley some of her mouth-watering pound cake just because she's the best cook in Listre, North Carolina and she's always feeding somebody. Wesley has never tasted anything so good in his life and to be honest, nobody's ever cared that much for him. No matter what it takes, he's got to have some more of that cake! So the story goes.
This book is a wonderful story about Ms. Mattie's spiritual journey to inner peace. You will laugh out loud all the way through this book and you may even shed a tear or two. You will care about the characters because you know them personally. You will feel right at home because you feel like you are in your own backyard. This book doesn't reek of "my way or the highway" Christianity as you might expect. No, not all. Yes, it is a beautiful story of a spiritual journey but Edgerton writes it with so much flair that you may not even realize the metaphorical meanings until you finish the last page. This book didn't end. It just ran out of pages.
