Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (20 page)

Olive Ann started
Time, Dirt, and Money
the summer after
Cold Sassy Tree
was published. By the time she died, she had completed these chapters, had notes on several others, and had the rest of the novel in her mind. It was a story she knew well—in fact, she had already written the story of the real Will and Sanna. Long before she thought seriously of writing a novel, Olive Ann undertook to record the stories of her parents' lives as a keepsake for herself and her family. She began early in 1972, shortly after she learned that her mother was dying. That year, Olive Ann spent countless hours with her, asking her to recall her childhood and the early years of her marriage. Olive Ann took notes as her mother spoke, and the long afternoons drew them close, diverting their attention from pain and illness. They also indulged Olive Ann's lifelong love of storytelling.

Ruby Celestia Hight Burns died that September, but by then Olive Ann had become engrossed in her project. “What hooked me on family history was not names and dates,” she said, “it was the handed-down stories that bring the dead back to life.” She interviewed aging aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins. She found and copied love letters her parents had written during World War I and grocery bills dating from the Great Depression, which had somehow survived in the family possessions. Report cards, telegrams, early photographs, letters, and anecdotes contributed by other relatives—even a floor plan of the family home—all went into the book, evoking an era that Olive Ann knew would soon be lost forever, save for these memories and mementoes.

With her mother gone, Olive Ann turned to her father, a man who “could always make a good story better in the telling.” Mourning the loss of his wife and in failing health himself, Arnold Burns still found enormous pleasure in practical jokes and funny stories. “I'm sure he could have made a million dollars as a stand-up comic on television,” Olive Ann said. Now, he embellished the tales she had heard all her life, some of which had assumed the proportion of myth, and he recalled events he had forgotten but that came forth with her gentle urging and well-placed questions. Arnold's voice later became Olive Ann's inspiration for Will Tweedy, and many of Will's boyhood adventures can be found, in their original versions, among Arnold Burns's most delightful recollections. He painted a vivid picture of Commerce, Georgia, at the turn of the century, a picture that later served as a model for Cold Sassy. And one of his favorite stories was about his Grandpa Power, a store owner in Commerce, who got married again three weeks after his wife died. According to Arnold, Grandpa Power said he “had loved Miss Annie, but she was as dead as she'd ever be and he had to git him another wife or hire a housekeeper, and it would just be cheaper to git married.” Olive Ann recalled that, even as she heard her father tell the story, she thought it would make a fine first chapter in a novel. “But I never thought I would write it,” she said.

Arnold Burns died less than a year after his wife, and finishing the family history became a way for Olive Ann to cope with the loss of her parents and to preserve their voices for her own two children. She had taken down their stories in their own words, exactly as they told them, adding her recollections and contributions from other family members as she went. The result is two typewritten volumes crammed with letters, photos, and countless other small treasures, and brought to life by a chorus of voices from the past, preserved in all their raw beauty, humor, and eccentricity. “Details matter,” Olive Ann often said, and she paid attention to them. In searching for her ancestors, she wrote, “I was after the facts of their lives, of course, but also for anything anybody remembered about someone's habits, sayings, or physical appearance.” She called the book
Yellow Paint on the Cows' Tails...and other Stories,
in reference to one of Arnold's boyhood pranks, and she dedicated it “to the memory of my parents and all those who come after them.”

When she began to write
Cold Sassy Tree,
Olive Ann found the family history an invaluable source for the authentic expressions and anecdotes that give the novel its flavor. Much as she loved to write, Olive Ann's real passion was collecting such bits and pieces. Whenever she heard a phrase that captured her fancy, she jotted it down and saved it; she kept lists of colorful country names and local expressions, and slap-dash files of amusing stories, dialect, superstitions, and lore. Like a quilter with a bulging bag of scraps, she loved to find ways to work these colorful fragments into her large design. As her daughter, Becky, observed, “Mother wrote backward. She had all these little bits and pieces, and she was always trying to find places to use them.”

***

A year after Olive Ann's death, I spent several days in Atlanta going through her papers. It was hard to know where to begin. With the boxes of fan mail stacked up in her neighbor's spare bedroom? With the piles of revised manuscript pages that represented so many years of work on
Cold Sassy Tree
and
Time, Dirt, and Money
? With all those scraps of paper and backs of envelopes on which Olive Ann had written bits of dialogue, ideas for scenes, and lists of funny names? With the files of correspondence to and from her family and friends? That first morning, I poked around just enough to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material and by sadness. I remembered the hours Olive Ann and I had spent one afternoon, side by side on the sofa, with the family history open in her lap. As we paged through it, she pointed to a photograph here, a letter there, and told the story behind it. Now, faced with the task of telling some of Olive Ann's story, I realized that the family history was the place to start, for it holds not only the seeds of both
Cold Sassy Tree
and
Time, Dirt, and Money,
but also an account of Olive Ann's own beginnings, on a hardscrabble farm in Banks County, Georgia.

***

Olive Ann Burns was born in 1924 on land originally farmed by her great-great-grandfather. According to her mother's recollections in the family history, “The pains started in the night and we called Dr. Rogers about six. He came about nine, said, ‘Oh, it'll be several days before she's born.' He gave me a shot, I went back to sleep, and about two your daddy called the doctor to come back. It was forty-five minutes before he arrived, and you had been here five minutes. Your daddy pulled the film off your face and sat down to read the paper to show me he wasn't upset. I said to him, ‘Honey, you're reading the paper upside down, that's how calm you are.' He later told it that the paper wasn't upside down, that I was looking at an ad for the circus with a clown standing on his head. Anyway, we could hear the doctor's car across the covered bridge at the river, so daddy went to the front door to meet him and left me with the baby. Your daddy laid you on some newspapers with the cord still uncut. You were born easy, you were always easygoing and good-humored, just the way you came into the world. That was on July 17, 1924, at two-forty. I only had three hard pains.”

Ruby Burns gave birth to four children in four years, creating a strain on her new marriage and on the family finances. She had never planned to have so many babies so fast. She and Arnold were married on September 8, 1918; Margaret was born one year later. Ruby confessed that she had screamed all afternoon. “It's a good thing I was out in the country,” she told Olive Ann. “There was nobody to hear me.” In April 1921, Emma Jean appeared, and then Billy in 1922. Olive Ann was the baby of the family. “I realized there were ways to keep from having babies,” Ruby said, “but we didn't know anything but old wives' tales, like keeping a pan of water under the bed, which I knew couldn't help. Anything that's a mystery always has untruths told about it, so I didn't pay any attention to all the things people told me about that. But I read everything I could find, about not having babies and about having them and what to do with them.”

Ruby said she never could have survived those early years without Arnold's help. When it was time to bathe the children, they set up an assembly line, with Arnold washing and Ruby drying and dressing. Olive Ann recalled that her father cooked breakfast every day, was around for any emergency, and had a wonderful way with children. “He was always an imaginative and flamboyant father,” she wrote. “Even after the Depression hit, he didn't act poor. He bought a pony named Beauty and brought her out to the farm in the back of the car, with the seat out.”

But money was a constant problem, and the farm on which Arnold—like Will Tweedy—had pinned all his dreams was a losing proposition. Recalling her earliest childhood, Olive Ann wrote, “In my mind I still see what meant country then—red dirt roads, dilapidated unpainted houses and barns, porch flowers growing in old coffee cans, mules in the pastures, shy, scrawny children with white rags tied around impetigo sores playing in swept dirt yards, and on hot Sunday afternoons, tenant families sitting on the porch watching cars go by and yearning for the fast lane.”

In 1931, the family could no longer afford to stay on the farm and were forced to rent it out while they moved in with Arnold's mother in Commerce, where Olive Ann attended school through fourth grade. Two years later, Arnold took a job in Dawson, and Ruby and the children moved into a tiny rented apartment in the home of some Commerce neighbors. The year of separation took a harsh toll on her parents, and Olive Ann intended to draw on her own memories of that time to show the initial strains between Will and Sanna. “They were both so lonesome,” Olive Ann wrote in the family history, “and so worried about money—they owed everybody in Commerce—and for Mother it was hard, having all the responsibility of the children.” When Arnold did make it home, he was often impatient and distracted, with little tolerance for his boisterous children. Once he stung Ruby by telling her that she was raising the worst children he had ever seen. But he loved her as much as ever, and pined for her when he was away. In one letter, written after a brief stop at home and preserved in the family history, he said, “You don't know how much I did enjoy being with you last night and how I hated to leave this morning...I just miss you so I can't hardly stand it.”

Olive Ann missed the farm—the cows, the sheep, the woods, the sound of the river. One Christmas, the renters gave the family a surprise: they were going away for two weeks and would let the Burnses move back in for the holidays. “It felt strange, seeing somebody else's furniture where ours had been,” Olive Ann wrote later. “Maybe that was part of the magic, but part of it was being seven and full of Christmas hope.”

When she was nine years old, Olive Ann began to keep a diary. But all it amounted to, she said, was, “Got up, ate breakfast, went to school, came home, studied, ate supper, read my book, went to bed, and prayed for everything.” It wasn't until she got to high school that she began to take writing seriously. The family was reunited in Macon, Georgia, where Arnold was working for a cotton cooperative, and it was here, Olive Ann wrote, “that we all grew up.” For her, that meant thinking about a career as a writer. Her first encouragement came from her ninth-grade teacher, who was teaching the class to write similes.

“
Violin
was one of the words she put on the board, and the one I picked out,” Olive Ann recalled. “I wrote, ‘A violin sounds like a refined sawmill.' The teacher thought that was wonderful and made me feel I was a poet or something. She told the woman who ran the high school newspaper to put me to work. So, really, those seven words changed my life.” The award-winning school newspaper was a good training ground. From the beginning, a by-line meant something to Olive Ann—no sloppy work. For a while, she also dreamed of being a doctor, but said, “I knew I wasn't efficient enough to be a mother and a wife and a doctor, and I wasn't willing to study that hard....Besides, I was more interested in catching a husband.”

By 1942, neighbors were calling the Burns house “little USO.” There was a brother in the Army and three pretty sisters at home, so it was not surprising that a steady stream of soldiers and air cadets came to call from nearby Camp Wheeler and Cochran Field. Olive Ann recorded her memories of that time in the family history: “Some weeks we went to as many as five dances a week, in the summer especially. To the three of us, names like Art, Jim, Clay, Jacobson, and Ralph have special meaning. At dances, all the dark-complexioned men lined up to dance with Margaret. [She was the sister on whose looks Olive Ann modeled Sanna Klein's.] Whatever they were—Jewish, Italian, French, Spanish, etc. —they were sure that's what she was. There weren't many dark people in the South then, except Negroes, of course. We were all in and out of love many times,” she wrote, “and it was a time when you grew up fast. We had been so insulated in the South....When all these Yankees came to town it was a tremendous integration of former enemies....Oh, the hours we argued the Civil War with those boys, and the hours we argued Protestant versus Catholic with those of the Roman faith.”

That fall, Olive Ann entered Mercer University, a small Baptist school in Macon, where she edited the campus literary magazine. After her sophomore year she transferred to the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, to major in journalism. Having read that it was not enough to get training for just one job, and having watched her father struggle to stay in work during the Depression, Olive Ann got a teacher's certificate in addition to her journalism degree. “I was so practical,” she said, “just awfully practical. My family had a long background in teaching—my mother taught, and my sister—and I had loved teachers all the way through school.” As a result of her practicality—which required that she split her course work between education and journalism—Olive Ann never took a literature course in college, something she always regretted.

By the time she graduated, in 1946, her parents were living in Atlanta, and Olive Ann joined them there, in their modest brick house at 161 Boiling Road. In addition to her degree, she brought home from college some newly formed opinions about politics and about racial matters in particular. “Racial slurs and anti-Semitic remarks made me livid,” she recalled years later. A Methodist, she had fallen in love with a Jewish boy at Chapel Hill, but had ended the romance when she realized that she lacked the nerve to tell her parents about it. “I was very much in love,” she said, “but I wasn't strong enough to face the difficulties with his family or with mine.” Instead, she proudly proclaimed herself a liberal and was adamant about her opinions, which she aired at every opportunity. Her father told her she was going down a one-way street and had lost sight of the fact that some people have to go the other way. The criticism hit home. “He wasn't a philosophical man, but he made me realize I was prejudiced against people who were prejudiced, and that my prejudice was as bad as theirs. And this freed me to live among all kinds of people and accept them as they are.”