The angel worked on Wolfe as well. From an early age he was an avid reader and dreamer, “whose eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.” The gawky boy with the unhappy home life believed that beyond the hills of Asheville the land “bayed out” into exotic scene after scene. The marble angel was a link to fine art and the great world beyond. In her smile, one reader has said, was “the unverifiable promise of salvation—at once the marker of death and the covenant of life.” The symbolism of the angel for Wolfe lay “not with the marbles of the father’s failed art and life, but with the transformation of all the beauty and passion of that failure into art.”
In Look Homeward, Angel, W.O. Gant sells the angel to a local madam, to mark the grave of a young prostitute who died. The real angel that stood outside the Wolfe shop was sold to the respectable Johnson family. She stands, a cool marble white, just down the road in nearby Hendersonville, in a large cemetery that surmounts a hill. Her hand is still raised in graceful benediction. If she was brown and fly-specked she is no longer. She smiles her noncommittal smile to this day
