Chinaberry (21 page)

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.

9  Still to Miller, 31 December 1985. Correspondence: box 33, folder 12. James Still Papers. University of Kentucky Margaret I. King Library.

10 The Aleichem quotation was found among the notes included with the Texas manuscript. Access to these materials was provided by Teresa Reynolds.