Chinaberry

by James Still

  Anson looked at me without emotion. “Well, we conquered your rusty ankles, didn't we? Keep working on them.”

  Ernest was at the door.

  Anson turned me around, facing him. “Go home, Jim,” he said.

  I never saw them again. I grew up; I remembered.

  AFTERWORD

  Carol Boggess

  James still is a writer who leaves his readers wanting more. His works are not long, and in my mind, there are not enough of them. Thanks to Silas House and the support of Still's literary advisers, along with his daughter, Teresa Reynolds, the publication of this special volume of Chinaberry is a welcome addition to the Still canon. Not surprisingly, a good part of its appeal is that the story raises more questions than it answers. Still was that kind of man, too. He liked an audience and enjoyed telling stories about his life and place, but it is the seeming contradictions and the parts he left untold that I find most intriguing. My desire to know more about the man and his work has led me to research Still's life, and in the next few pages, I will share some discoveries that may enhance your experience of Chinaberry.

  Although Still never completed and polished the “Texas manuscript,” as it was known, and never submitted the book for publication, he was wholeheartedly committed to it. He had its pages with him in his hospital room the day he died. What stronger evidence could there be that he held this work close to his heart? In giving Chinaberry its final form, House successfully accomplished the task set for him: editing the manuscript while remaining true to its creator. Readers who know Still's writings easily realize that the story, characters, and style belong to Still. For example, we recognize traces of the growing, nameless boy from River of Earth and of the troublemakers and the truck driver from “Run for the Elbertas.” Familiar Still motifs thread through the narrative: the family under stress, the journey of discovery, the exploration of a simpler time and place, the strong evocation of landscape. The style represents Still's most masterful prose: the first-person narrator who tells his tale in a simple voice, the descriptions of people and places that come alive on the page, and the stories that recreate a world long past. Chinaberry recalls the best of James Still, but it is not simply a replay. This piece is different. It is the exploration of a mature writer, a man who was sure enough of himself and his creative powers to move into unknown territory but unsure enough of the results to postpone its completion.

  Although Chinaberry has much in common with Still's earlier stories, the differences are more likely to interest readers. This boy is not a six-year-old like the child in River of Earth but a thirteen-year-old who appears to be six. The setting is not the hills and coalfields of Eastern Kentucky but the ranch lands and cotton fields of central Texas. The prose in Chinaberry moves beyond Still's typical understated narrative style to a slightly more self-conscious, sometimes emotional meditation on an atypical experience.

  Perhaps the most striking difference between Chinaberry and Still's other writing is that this work seems to be told by the author himself about his own childhood experience—a recalled story that explores an event long past but not forgotten. Is this master storyteller transforming his own childhood memories, or is he blending fact and fiction in order to inspire readers to confront the power and vulnerability of adolescence? Whether Chinaberry is mostly fact or mostly fiction, the result is indisputable—a beautiful but haunting tale, a simple but complicated situation, an adventure taking a real Alabama boy into a fantasy world in Texas, then sending him back home again, changed forever.

  I agree with House that one of the book's greatest assets is the mystery it leaves behind. The following observations do not attempt to solve that mystery or to determine which events in the narrative are true and which are imagined. Instead, these notes trace Still's interest in Texas through his accounts of trips he made there, and they explore his process of drafting the manuscript.

  Readers who want to know more about the autobiographical aspects of the story should consult the sketch that Still wrote for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.1 Much of the boy's background is Still's own. For example, Still grew up in a cotton-farming family in Alabama; he was the first son after five daughters; his family had only four books at home, one of which, The Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, provided his entry to a wider world; and, of most importance, he loved hearing and telling stories, even as a child. Other interesting bits about his teen years that do not appear in the story include the fact that he was twelve when World War I ended; that he played basketball on a local team; that he joined the Boy Scouts and regularly visited the library.

  In the autobiographical sketch, he does not mention Texas except to say that when his parents were first married they had homesteaded there and his three oldest sisters were born there (although the 1910 census listed all the children in the Still family as having been born in Alabama). The family moved back to Alabama, according to Still, with the plan of someday returning to Texas, but when his third sister, Nixie, died of scarlet fever in Alabama, his mother would not leave. Perhaps this family history partly explains the source of Still's longtime love affair with Texas. In Wade Hall's biographical work James Still: Portrait of an Artist as a Boy in Alabama, Still comments: “When I was a boy I heard a lot of talk about Texas, and I always thought of Texas as our once and future home. But about the closest I ever came was when I was stationed for a while at San Antonio during the Second World War.”2

  That military experience may have been the closest he came to living there, but he did make an extended trip to Texas when he was twenty. After his sophomore year at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, he stayed at home in Alabama for a year. Late in the summer of 1926, he made a trip to Texas, which he described in a letter to his college friend Dare Redmond. Jimmie (as he signs his letters to “Red”) does not state with whom he traveled or the purpose, but he does give a perfunctory account of their two-week journey, including place names and directions, as though he expects Red to follow along on a map. Here is the entire description as written by Still, complete with typos.

  Oh, yeah … promised I'd tell you about my Texas trip … here goes.

  Left Fairfax Aug. 31 taking the Dixie Overland Route. Slept a few hours in Meridian, Miss, then went on to Jackson (some burgh). Reached Vicksburgh where we went through the National Military Park. Crossed the Mississippi just as the sun was setting on the water, Tuesday night. Music was playing on the boat and naturally it makes one feel romatic. Its been a long time since I've had another thrill that could equal that. Proceeded to Tullulah, Louisiana where we camped in the fair grounds and slept on a lumber pile. Saw the oil refinery's at Shreveport. Spent Wednesday night near Marshall, Texas. Reached Dallas Thursday, spent the night in a tourist camp at Fort Worth. Went through the Museum and Art gallery there. Saw some friends at Palo Pinto; visited Lovers Retreat (a mirical of nature). From there to Ranger, and saw the famous oil-field; thence to Cisco and to winters where we spent a half day. Spent the night at a tourist camp at Abilene. Went to Anson the next day and spent the week-end with an uncle. I've got some fine cousins too. Real westerners.

  Pulled out Monday and went back to Fort Worth. Went South from there to Temple. Spent Tuesday night there. Went to Killeen the next day and visited another uncle. Spent the night a Bruceville. Stayed at a fellows house there and picked a bale of cotton for him in three days. Left Saturday evening and came to Waco. Saw Baylor university. Rode most of the night. Slept at Palestine near a Catholic grave-yard. Spent Monday night in a Mississippi church yard. Reached home Tuesday night about 12.

  And that's a that. I will not bother you with detail.3

  While we now wish that he had bothered to include details, the account does show that he went to Texas as a young man and that the adventures he had there were implanted in his memory, along with the place names Anson and Winters.

  Much later, Still made two clear references to this Texas trip. One was in his 1992 interview with Judi Jennings, which is availa
ble on the Heritage audiotape.4 The following segment, which is not included in the final edited interview, occurs in the full interview, which I have transcribed. Still is referring to his father having homesteaded in Texas in the 1890s: “Our farm in Texas is now part of Fort Hood, near Killeen. I have many relatives out there, many. But I never went back until, let's see. We went when I was twenty. We visited that farm and relatives or the spot where it had been. And the graves of some relatives are still there at this place. I can see my father pulling up the weeds off the graves.” Presuming this is the same trip that he described to Redmond, one of his travel companions was his father. The memory of his father at the cemetery suggests an interesting if vague connection with Anson's visit to the grave of his child.

  The second reference to the trip appears in an unpublished piece titled “Was There Ever a Good Poem about Texas?” which was probably written in the early 1990s.5 Included is this description of the trip he and his brothers made with their father, who was exploring his dream of remigration to Texas:

  Took his three sons along in a Model-T to prospect out a location. It was Depression time. We ran out of money for gasoline. The transmission was acting up. The tires were as slick as pool balls. Papa bribed our way onto the ferry to cross the Trinity River. We ate sardines, slept in lumber mills and in church yards. Papa was a horse-doctor and he medicated enough animals to get us somewhere beyond Waco. Here we picked cotton. The cotton wasn't fully open but we picked anyhow in the unblinking Texas sun hovering at 100 degrees; the headache wind fanning the heat. A cent a pound. We picked two hours before breakfast before the sun found us, after breakfast until twelve. Back in the fields until supper time after supper until you couldn't see cotton. … The family's name was Mangram. They lived in a two-room house, a bedroom and a kitchen, and we slept on our cotton sack on the floor. … Besides the sun, the torrid breeze which never ceased, our chief complaint was the alkaline water from the well that tasted like horse piss smells.

  Though written more than sixty years after the letter to Redmond, this account includes interesting and precise details about the trip, plus phrases and motifs that appear in the manuscript. Recall from Chinaberry the cotton pickers’ schedule, the “tires as slick as pool balls,” “the headache wind,” and the boy's biggest problem—“alkaline water.”

  Biographical evidence suggests that Still's most memorable experience of Texas is this trip, which he made when he was twenty. But he revisited and refashioned that memory many times before he began writing the Texas manuscript, probably in the mid- to late 1980s. We do not have a clear idea of Still's creative process when he was writing most of his fiction in the late 1930s. Several letters from fellow writers imply that he was a perfectionist who tinkered with every sentence, but the copies of manuscripts he chose to preserve do not, for the most part, indicate substantial revision. So the Texas manuscript offers a valuable glimpse into how he went about casting a long piece. As House observes, Still told versions of the story to many of the people he knew well and to some he had just met. Frequently, he would tell and retell the story to the same person, pushing the narrative forward each time. Perhaps he was trying it out on his listeners as he was writing, or perhaps he was simply using them as a sounding board to search his own memory. Regardless of exactly how he was doing it, he was forming the story from creative memory and writing it in pieces. At the same time, he was conducting extensive research.

  One of the people he chose to hear the story was also his helper. A visitor from Fort Worth, Texas, Juanita McCulloh was serving as a volunteer with dyslexic children in Kentucky during the summer of 1984. The work brought her to the Hindman Settlement School for a few days. There, at the cafeteria evening meal, she met James Still, whose attraction to her must have been intensified by her Texas address. After returning home, she sent Still a book—Texas Blackland Heritage, by Troy C. Crenshaw—that she felt would help prod his memory and “set the exact county.” From her letter accompanying the book, we cannot know what section of the story he had told her, but it had made a deep impression: “I can see the man, the horse, and the child, and I can almost hear them speak. It is a story that grips the heart. I hope the material and data are helpful and you will write the beautiful story as you told it to me.” Six months later, she wrote him again and included more material about the area that is bisected by the blacklands and prairies. Again, she mentioned the story, this time as “haunting” but also “strong and vivid.” Most of all, she remembered his telling of it.6

  Still's process for creating the Texas manuscript went beyond research and retelling. He left many scraps of paper and full pages that are loosely associated with the project: some in longhand, others typed; some containing large sections of what is now Chinaberry, others filled with notes and quotes of interest to him; and still others merely listing words and phrases. Any direct connection between what is written on these pages and the emerging story would be hard to make if he had not marked all the materials with TX in the upper left corner. Some bits seem to be offering a psychological context for the story, such as the definition of adolescence—“Period of transition from the dependence and immaturity of childhood to the psychological, physical and social maturity of adulthood … from 13 to 21 in boys”—which is followed by these fragments: “his chance to explore life and develop his own values and goals … encouraged to be emotionally independent.” On one sheet, Still records others’ thoughts about memory. For example, in his notes he references Jerzy Kosinski's words: “What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. … The remembered event becomes an incident, a highly compressed dramatic unit that mixes memory and emotion, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. If it weren't for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp.”7 Another interesting, even provocative, comment he includes is neither statement nor question: “Could it have happened this way. It was long ago, and I was thirteen, and since have indulged in fiction as a way of life—J. Still.”8

  During the time that Still was working with his ideas and pages for the Texas story, his most trusted correspondent was his friend and fellow writer, Jim Wayne Miller. In 1983, Still attended the summer writing workshop at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Miller was there as well. Although they would have known each other before then, the time they spent together that summer brought them much closer. Still must have been forming the story in his mind, and if so, he would have begun telling it to his friend. Many of Still's personal letters to Miller throughout the last half of the 1980s were signed not James Still or Jim but Anson Winters, or AW, or merely Anson. Was it a private joke, or was Still somehow entering into his own story, not as the boy but as the man, or as the boy grown into the man?

  One of Still's letters to Miller conveys an intriguing comment about Katherine Anne Porter, a friend and fellow writer whom Still had come to know personally in 1940, the first time he attended the Yaddo workshop. Miller was writing an article about Porter (whose given name was Callie Russell Porter) in which he had quoted Still's statement that “Porter's version of her childhood was just another one of her inventions.” In this letter, Still praises Miller's article but suggests that he reword that statement: “[T]his sounds critical on my part—those six words—I am not at all adverse to Callie Russell Porter changing her name to one that pleased her ears and view of herself, or to her ‘inventing’ a childhood that never was. The greatest reward for being an artist is that if there is something they want with all their heart and cannot have in reality, they may possess it in fantasy. In Porter's case, this was necessary for her happiness, her relating to her world, in the last analysis, her art.”9 This letter, like most of his to Miller in the 1980s, was signed “Anson.” Could it be that a similar sort of fantasy was necessary for James Still's happiness and for his art? Or is it more appropriate to see the Texas project in the context of a quotation of Sholom Aleichem that Still wrote in his notes? “When you die others who think
they know you will concoct things about you. … Better pick up a pen and write it yourself, for you know yourself best.”10

  The factual context of James Still's Texas manuscript is unresolved and irresolvable, but mystery is a big part of its attraction and force. In the second chapter of Chinaberry, Lurie is telling the boy about Anson's background because she wants him to understand and not to fear. The narrator says wisely, “We can never get plumb to the bottom of anybody.” That truth applies to James Still, the writer and the man. We will never solve the mystery, but we can hope to experience it fully.

  NOTES

  1 James Still, essay in Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, ed. Joyce Nakamura (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), 17: 231–48.

  2 Wade Hall, James Still: Portrait of an Artist as a Boy in Alabama (Lexington, KY: King Library Press, 1998), 2.

  3 Still to Redmond, 27 September 1926. Courtesy of Alan Redmond. Dare Redmond's letters to James Still are now held at the Lincoln Memorial University library.

  4 Judith Jennings, “James Still on his Life and Work,” Heritage audiocassette (June Appal Recording, 1992).

  5 A copy of “Was There Ever a Good Poem about Texas?” was provided by Teresa Reynolds.

  6 McCulloh to Still, 31 July 1984 and 21 January 1985 (the letters cited here were provided to me by Teresa Reynolds). Four other letters from Juanita McCulloh to James Still (written between September 1984 and January 1987) are available in the James Still Collection at the University of Kentucky Margaret I. King Library.

  7 Jerzy Kosinski, interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 320.

  8 A variety of notes and quotations handwritten by James Still were included with the original Texas manuscript. Access to these materials was provided by Teresa Reynolds.