Walking Across Egypt was published by Algonquin Books in 1987. Mattie Rigsbee is a widow in a small North Carolina town, a woman whose identity is built on feeding people — her children, her neighbors, her church, anyone who comes to her door. Her children think she should slow down. She agrees, in principle, but then a stray dog shows up in her yard, and shortly afterward she meets Wesley Benfield, a sixteen-year-old delinquent in the custody of the Young Men’s Rehabilitation Center.
Wesley is hungry, neglected, and suspicious of kindness. Mattie is constitutionally incapable of not feeding a hungry person. The collision between Wesley’s defensive hostility and Mattie’s relentless hospitality is the novel’s comic engine, and Edgerton manages it with perfect pitch — Mattie’s generosity is neither saintly nor naive but the natural behavior of a woman who has been cooking for sixty years and cannot see a skinny boy without reaching for a pot.
The title comes from a hymn, and the novel’s religious dimension is genuine: Mattie takes Wesley in because her faith demands it, and Edgerton treats that faith with respect, even as he gently satirizes the church community’s preference for comfortable charity over the messy, inconvenient kind. Ellen Burstyn starred in the 1999 film adaptation.
Collecting Walking Across Egypt
First edition (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20