Heroes and Other Mortals: Stories of Our Better Angels 

By Frye Gaillard 

Foreword by Cynthia Tucker 

NewSouth Books, 2025 

Paperback: $29.95 

Genre: Nonfiction Essays, History  

Reviewed by Patricia Foster  

What often calms my psyche in this troubled period of the American story is to sit quietly in my room on a comfortable sofa and read a book. Luckily, there is a new book by 2025 Alabama Writers Hall of Fame inductee Frye Gaillard – Heroes and Other Mortals: Stories of Our Better Angels – a provocative collection of essays, interviews, profiles, and stories that illuminates the turbulent, pivotal moments of our shared past. Within minutes of opening Gaillard’s book, I’m immersed in reading about Peggy Wallace Kennedy’s attempt to understand – and possibly forgive – her father, George Wallace, who fostered a climate of hate, first as governor in Alabama and then as a presidential candidate in 1968. As a teenager growing up during the heyday of Wallace’s reign as governor, I remember vividly the authoritarian order he created.    

Frye Gaillard recounts Peggy Wallace Kennedy’s “journey of reconciliation,” a literal and psychological pilgrimage as she reckons with the grave harm her father did to the South by affirming and perpetuating the disenfranchisement of Black people under Jim Crow and stirring “a catharsis of hate.” What Wallace Kennedy discovers in writing her memoir, The Broken Road, is how political ambition crippled her father’s ideology and how physical and mental suffering (after being shot) amended it. What Gaillard provides is an assessment of a smart, conflicted woman gaining her voice, moving from confusion to advocacy, writing and speaking at universities, churches, and civil rights celebrations, allowing her insights about pain and paradox to guide her. As with many of these essays, despair moves toward hope.   

 In his introduction to Heroes and Other Mortals, Gaillard quotes a favorite writer, James Baldwin, describing his life’s work as the act of “bearing witness” to the dark tragedies and fragile hopes of the 20th century. This is no small feat. To bear witness means to unravel the unseen forces within a story, to open the self not only to the surface narrative but also to the story beneath the story, the painful, distorted, or even hidden one.  Like his mentor, Gaillard invites us to travel with him as he bears witness to the dramatic and difficult historical narratives of our culture through profiles of well-known writers, artists, and activists, as well as those whose stories have resided in the shadows. This journey includes not only Peggy Wallace Kennedy but also Bishop Tutu, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jane Goodall, Kathy Mattea, Elyn Saks, Chief Calvin McGhee, and Benjamin Sterling Turner, to name but a few. Gaillard’s caveat, he tells the reader, is “to write about hard truths by celebrating people who make things better.” In Gaillard’s work, making things better is no simple conceit. It means stories of courage, stories that touch the nerve ends, and stories that educate us so that we might ask the necessary questions at this fraught moment when illiberalism is on the rise.   

For a long time, I have been guided by the belief that good writing is good thinking, thinking that asks hard questions, reveals hidden patterns, and acknowledges the conundrum of truth-telling and hope. In so many ways, Heroes and Other Mortals is such a book. It is also a book about writing, not overtly, but in the way that stories define our lives, shape our point of view, and help us to live in the world. Though I was engaged by each chapter, one story captured my imagination: “The Story of a Typewriter.” Here, Gaillard, a cub reporter, stands before a house, the front partially caved in by a bomb in “the eerie morning silence” of June 28, 1967, in Mobile, Alabama. The house belongs to John LeFlore, Mobile’s most prominent civil rights leader, a man I’d never heard of. Gaillard tells the backstory of John LeFlore: after an altercation in which a white man demanded his seat on a Mobile trolley in 1925 (for which he alone was arrested), LeFlore set out to revitalize Mobile’s chapter of the NAACP and continued to work for this cause for fifty years. In the years that followed, there were several attempts made on his life, but none had come this close. What’s surprisingly poignant about the story is the conceit of the manual typewriter left on the kitchen table during the fire. This burned artifact is “the weapon of choice in a crusade for justice,” the only armed asset of a man of thought, a man who uses the moral guidance of the written word to document lynchings, to advocate for fairer hiring in wartime industries as well as for greater access to the ballot. It is this ordinary tool, a typewriter, that allows for eloquence and the potential for change, even one might say, for redemption. In many ways, this ordinary but totemic typewriter is an allegory for Gaillard’s book: our histories (collective and personal) are stories that must be told – dramatically, metaphorically, casually, and with meaningful intention. Bearing witness is an imaginative act. Frye Gaillard knows this well.  

 

Patricia Foster is the author of four books, including All the Lost Girls (PEN/Jerard Award) and Written in the Sky (Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing).  She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for 25 years.