Chinaberry (20 page)

That last morning at Chinaberry was writ large in my recollection.

As Ernest would be coming early to pick me up, Anson came to my bed at first light with a pan of warm water and a washcloth, a return to a routine now past. I sat up in bed. Presently he sat beside me.

After a while, he arose, withdrawing from me. He went out to the barn and did not return until he had milked three cows, fed the pigs and the rest of the stock. I sat up in bed, but he did not offer to hand my clothes to me, clothes freshly laid out by Lurie, or to put on my shoes. Nothing much was said until after breakfast. There was a telephone call from Ernest, telling Anson he was on the way to pick me up and head for Alabama.

Anson came into the kitchen, where I sat at the table, picking at my food. “I won't have my little salty dog around to prank with,” he said. “He's here,” he added, with no apparent emotion. But he looked pale and drained.

“I'm not going,” I declared.

“They're coming for you,” he said.

“I'll come back,” I said. “I will.”

He made no answer, went to the bedroom, and sat in his chair, the chair we had occupied so often. I stood stunned in the middle of the room. And then we heard the car drive up, and someone from out there called, “Hurry up!”

Anson sat without moving, as calm as the first day I saw him.

From the yard came another call: “We're here! Make it snappy.”

At this anguished moment, I sprang toward Anson, fell at his feet, and embraced his knees. He did not respond.

Lurie stepped into the room and said, “Don't go outside.”

“I'll not,” Anson answered. He watched me grovel at his feet, and when he did not reach for me, I sprang into his lap, crushed his neck with my arms. He held me loosely.

“Get your readies on!” came the call from the porch.

“I'm not going!” I screamed.

“Yes, you are,” Ernest hollered. “I'll come get you if I have to.”

I pressed tight in Anson's arms, pressed hard with my teeth against his shoulder. The fantasy had vanished. The one thousand miles that would separate us forever were already accomplished.

I heard the hum of the motor in my head.

Anson pried me loose and stood me on my feet, and I caught the frightened look on Lurie's face in the kitchen door. Then she ran forward and embraced me, and withdrew.

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 available 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.