Tracey Porter: The Reader
As a child, I had pretty bad asthma. The medicines weren’t nearly as good back then as they are now; consequently, I had to spend many hours resting quietly in my room. This, coupled with my longing for adventure, led me to become a voracious reader. I read everything—all the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Bobsy Twins mysteries, all the dog and horse books from Call of the Wild to Black Beauty, all of Beverly Cleary’s books, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (a sort of Shakespeare for children from 1807 in which the plays are retold in stories), The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (so many of the Beatles songs are poems and deserve careful, frequent readings), all the Peanuts comics books I could find, etc. Several of the books I read as a child I revisited at college and graduate school. I had the opportunity to study them deeply in a room with other devout readers and a very smart professor. This was pure heaven to me. Some books I’ve read over and over, at different stages in my life. Each time I find something new, something I missed before—a beautifully written phrase, a startling image, an observation about what it’s like to be human. I’ve probably read each of the books listed below about ten times.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
David Copperfieldby Charles Dickens
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnby Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyerby Mark Twain
The Secret Gardenby Frances Hodgson Burnett
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Annie Johnby Jamaica Kincaid
Great Expectations and David Copperfield I read with a pen in my hand to underline and star passages I find especially mysterious or beautiful, authentic or insightful. My copies of these two books are positively riddled with ink. Dickens is known for his characters, but his quiet little descriptions of a mood or a place are just as amazing. For example, when David Copperfield is about to be told that his ailing mother is dying, he says, “There was no need to tell me so. I had already broken out into a desolate cry, and felt an orphan in the wide world.” I love the rhythm and the alliteration in that second sentence. I also love the way Pip in Great Expectations sees things when he is particularly sad or scared. Dickens is a master at making sure that the way his characters see things reflect their inner moods. In this passage, Pip is burdened with a terrible secret and has a sort of moral crisis. He has just helped a runaway convict by stealing a meat pie from his aunt and a saw, so the man can get out of his shackles. Pip feels terrible for the theft and deeply conflicted about whether or not he should have helped a criminal. Yet, his compassion for his fellow man is so strong, that he did it anyway. All of this wrestling between his morality and his empathy is beautifully conveyed in the middle of chapter six, when Joe and Pip are sitting by the stove after dinner.
It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in the glittering multitude.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: There are many great passages in this book, passages that startle you either because they’re so beautiful or so funny, or both. One of my favorites occurs when Huck describes his education at the beginning of Chapter four.
Well, three or four months run along, and it was well into winter, now. I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
I like this so much that I borrowed part of it for Billy. You can find it toward the end of chapter twelve. As Peter Leavitt taught me, when I borrow, I borrow from the best.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I first started thinking about the book that would become Billy Creekmore, I thought about the books that meant a great deal to me, books that concerned children alone in the world, working for their living and scrambling to simply grow up. It didn’t take me long to realize that the books I loved most, both then and now, were those by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations, among others, all deal with children who were ill treated or abandoned by parents and society. I loved following the rise and fall of the main character’s fortunes, how each chapter began with its own suspenseful title and ended with a sentence that made you want to turn the page. These books—suspenseful, traditionally structured, plot and character bound—became my model for Billy Creekmore.
I began to research child labor in the United States and incorporate elements from my family history into a narrative. I was fortunate to have a landscape that called to me and became the setting for my book. My father was born and raised in a small Appalachian town on the Ohio River. I remember the long drive from our home in Columbus to Ironton, Ohio, and how I used to look out the car window at the small towns along the way. The smell of minerals was in the air, and the broken edges of the hills around my grandmother’s house were veined with coal. From her house, it was only a short drive to the coal camps and hollers where children like Billy lived. I was in grade school then, reading Tom Sawyer and The Secret Garden, and listening to my father’s stories of growing up on the river and roaming the woods.
Like Billy, my mother, Susan Morcone, spent time in a foster home at a working farm. She, too, was abandoned by her father after her mother died in childbirth, and was later adopted by her aunt and uncle. To this day, she is afraid of cows, goats, chickens, and mules. Because of her stories about being chased by geese and nipped by a pony, the typical peaceful farm scene has always read false to me. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather and his mother were sent to debtor’s prison after his father drowned off the coast of Liverpool. Eventually, my great-grandfather was indentured to help pay off the family debt to a farmer in northern England. He was badly beaten and near starved, so this adventurous relative of mine stowed away on a boat to Canada (an illegal immigrant!), where he found his way to a kind baker who taught him the trade. Much of my immigrant family experienced the harsh face of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century capitalism.
I spent five years researching and writing Billy Creekmore. I read everything I could find about the early years of coal mining in West Virginia, the daily lives and struggles of the boys working the mines, the United Mine Workers and the battle to unionize the coal industry, and how and why joining the circus would seem to be a terrific alternative to life in the mines. On a ten-day road trip with my father and my brother James, we drove through southern Ohio and West Virginia, exploring coal towns, hollers, and bends in the river. We walked through Matewan, West Virginia, and saw where the bullets from a gun battle between striking miners and Baldwin-Felts agents are still lodged in a brick building on the main street in town. We visited the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine and spent an hour deep in the mine (more than enough time, I can assure you. It’s spooky down there!). The next afternoon, in the archives of the West Virginia State Museum in Charleston, I had the great opportunity to look through a very old book that recorded the deaths of miners in the early years of the twentieth century. I found the names of many boys who were killed in the mines, and recorded them in the notebook I devoted to taking notes and scribbling ideas for my book. I wasn’t sure why I wrote down so many names at the time, but I found them haunting and beautiful, names such as Clyde Light, Frank Moon, Rufus Twilly, and Golden Breedlove. Eventually I realized that one part of my book wanted to be a memorial of sorts to these boys, so, with the exception of the title character, every boy character in Billy Creekmore is named after a boy who died in a mining accident before reaching his seventeenth birthday.
I also traveled to Sarasota, Florida, to spend some time wi
th my stepfather, Larry Short, and his wife, Roberta. They had long told me about the Ringling Circus Museum, and thanks to them my knowledge of the early American circus deepened considerably. The curators at the museum were kind enough to let me look through their archives, and many of the facts and details of Billy’s experiences with the Sparks and Graftin circuses are based on what I uncovered there. Charles Sparks, the great, benevolent circus owner, is a historical person, and I was thrilled to look through one of the few remaining copies of the Sparks Circus route book, just like the one Billy looks at when he’s feeling lonesome for his old friends. Captain Graftin is not a historical person, but his character is an amalgam of several of the grifters and showmen I read about.
It’s often said that everyone’s story is unique, but I’m more interested in how our stories are similar. All of us are haunted by scraps of memory, family history, books we’ve read, and stories we’ve been told. These elements are elusive and powerful, like the spirits that visit Billy. Should we choose to listen, they’ll connect us like an invisible web, holding past and present, the distant and familiar together. I hope Billy’s story encourages my readers to connect to children like him, to other books, and to their own family stories.
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Copyright
Billy Creekmore
Copyright © 2007 by Tracey Porter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Porter, Tracey.
Billy Creekmore / by Tracey Porter. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1905, ten-year-old Billy is taken from an orphanage to live with an aunt and uncle he never knew he had, and he enjoys his first taste of family life until his work in a coal mine and involvement with a union brings trouble, then he joins a circus in hopes of finding his father.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201762-8
[1. Self-reliance—Fiction. 2. Orphanages—Fiction. 3. Coal mines and mining—Fiction. 4. Circus—Fiction. 5. West Virginia—History—To 1950—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P83395Bil 2007 2007000001
[Fic]—dc22 CIP
AC
Typography by Neil Swaab
First Harper Trophy edition, 2009
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