***
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. “Rac
ial 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.”
Within a year, Olive Ann had landed a job as a staff writer at the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, under its founding editor, Angus Perkerson. A remarkable editor with a sure instinct for what people would read, Perkerson was already legendary, known for his magnificent tantrums and respected as a great teacher. Although dour and shy by nature, he was fully capable of letting rip a stream of profanity that would leave even seasoned newspapermen trembling. Olive Ann always remembered him with great affection, but she also admitted, “Mr. Perk fired me three times in the first six months and scared me to death for five years.” Angus Perkerson had given a young Margaret Mitchell her first job, in 1922, and he remained in charge of the magazine for most of Olive Ann’s ten years there. She gave him full credit for turning her into a writer.
“Everything I know about writing began with Mr. Perkerson,” she said. “He never rewrote a writer. You had to do it yourself. You learned not to be sensitive about the x’s he put in the margins. He’d go through the copy with you like this: ‘Don’t you think a the would be better than an a here?’ ‘Dammit, that whole page is boring.’ ‘This word is too long. We ain’t putting out the magazine for Ph.D.s.’ ‘You used the same word five times in two sentences.’ (Once when I said I repeated a word on purpose, for emphasis, he said, ‘Hell, it’s bad enough to be careless without being stupid.’) If he said, ‘That’s funny,’ he meant suggestive; being young and unworldly, I was often ‘funny.’ He never gave praise. You knew he liked your story if he put it up front in the magazine. He was obsessive about two things: being interesting and being accurate. Once he asked me when George Washington’s birthday was. I said, ‘February twenty-second.’ ‘Well, call the reference department and make sure.’”
Much as she loved her job, Olive Ann had no confidence in herself; it often took her two or three weeks to write a story—a pace that wouldn’t cut the mustard at a weekly magazine. Whenever Angus Perkerson couldn’t stand her pained efforts any longer, he’d come over to her desk and yell, “Hell, Olive, if you don’t finish that story by three o’clock, I’m goin’ throw it in the trash can.” In 1952, she accompanied her family on a trip to Europe, despite Perkerson’s opposition. This time she was sure he meant it when he told her she was through. But when she returned two and a half months later, she found that he had kept up her payments to Social Security and that the job was still hers. Once she realized that Perkerson had confidence in her, Olive Ann was able to laugh when he scolded, “Olive, you gnaw on a story like an old dog gnawing on a bone,” or “You rewrite so much, your copy looks as if you wrote it by hand and corrected it on the typewriter.” She came to love him very much. She also credited her newspaper work with giving her the tools she needed to write a novel. “I was used to listening to what people said and how they said it, quoting dialogue exactly the way it was said and paraphrasing only when a speech was boring or too long. Also, newspaper work made me think and look for what was interesting. If it’s not interesting, readers put that newspaper down! And they may plod on through a book for three pages if it starts out boring, but then they put it back on the shelf.”
***
The memory of Margaret Mitchell still cast a spell over Atlanta in the 1950s. Although it was nearly twenty years since Gone with the Wind had been published, readers had continued to hope right up until her death in 1949 that Peggy Mitchell might write a sequel, and her many friends continued to talk about her as if she had been with them just yesterday. Certainly, for any young writer in Atlanta in those days, Mitchell’s legendary success was vivid. She had come out of obscurity with a novel that had taken the entire country, if not the world, by storm, and that had gone on to sell more copies than any piece of fiction before or since. Little wonder, then, that Atlanta was a fine town in which to be an aspiring novelist, or that a group of young hopefuls banded together to read and criticize one another’s work.
The Plot Club convened on the shady front porch of the home of Wylly Folk St. John, who later became a successful children’s book author, as well as one of Olive Ann’s most treasured friends and supporters. Other members were Margaret Long, Celestine Sibley, Robert Burch, Genevieve Holden Pou, and Mary Cobb Bugg—published writers all. Olive Ann was pleased to be included—indeed, she was a member of the group for thirty-five years. But she never thought she would write a novel, and, according to one veteran of the club, neither did anyone else. She had never read Faulkner or Hemingway or any “important” writer; she was too restrained, too innocent, “the wide-eyed one.” Olive Ann herself claimed that she never took her writing seriously. “I was too busy dating to write more than two or three pages for those evenings, and I never finished anything I started,” she said. “I figured I’d never get married if I spent every night at the typewriter.”
Getting married was very much on Olive Ann’s mind, for she was over thirty, and, although she had plenty of dates, there was no serious beau in sight. She had, however, become friends with Andy Sparks, a fellow staff writer at the magazine, who was the first person she met when she came to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution to apply for a job. Angus Perkerson was out, so she handed her portfolio of college stories to the handsome young man behind the desk. They worked side by side for the next nine years, and Andy thought she was so funny that he sometimes took notes on things she said at the office. He planned to use them, he teased, for the role of the ingenue in a play he was writing that would be called Peachtree Island. One line he thought worth saving was Olive Ann’s confession that “at cocktail parties, I never know whether to order ginger ale, so people will think I’m drinking, or milk, so they’ll know I’m not.” On another occasion, she told her colleagues that she had been kissing a man she wasn’t in love with. “I just wanted to teach him how,” she said. “I think it’s a pity, a thirty-year-old man, so uneducated. I’m just doing it for the sake of the girl he’ll really fall for someday.” (After Andy’s death, Olive Ann found his transcription of this line among his things. On the scrap of paper he had saved, she wrote, “How silly can a young girl be?”)
Olive Ann was always willing to provide a full account of her previous night’s date, good or bad. One day Andy remarked, “If you and I ever fall in love, I don’t want you to tell ANYBODY at the office what I said last night and what you said.” “All right,” she promised, taken aback.
On New Year’s Day 1956, Olive Ann was interviewed on a local radio show, “a young-girl-reporter sort of thing,” she recalled. Andy was listening as the host asked his guest what she wanted most in the year to come. “Well,” Olive Ann replied, “I just want to get married.” As soon as the show was off the air, Andy was on the phone. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that’s what you wanted?” he asked. He picked her up at the station, and at midnight they kissed for the first time. And then, said Olive Ann, “the magic started.” She kept her word, and “didn’t tell anybody anything.” Their colleagues at the office didn’t even know they were dating, much less in love, and when they went together to tell the Perkersons they were getting married, Medora Perkerson was shocked—she thought that Olive Ann was in love with someone else. Arnold Burns was glad to hear that his youngest daughter was finally leaving the nest. �
�Good,” he said when she told him the news. “That will be someplace else to go.”
***
The wedding took place on August 11, 1956; Olive Ann was thirty-two and Andy thirty-seven. She continued to write for the magazine, using her maiden name because, as she explained it, “two hot names like Burns and Sparks would look silly together in a by-line.” Several weeks after the wedding, Andy developed mononucleosis and was told to stay away from his new bride lest he infect her. Olive Ann was convinced that he had gotten the “kissing disease” by kissing every girl who had offered her cheek at the wedding, and she found their enforced separation hard to take. Finally, in desperation, she held a piece of plastic wrap over her mouth and said, “Kiss me, Andy. I can’t stand it anymore.” “It wasn’t very effective,” she said later, “but it made us laugh.” For them, being in love meant always being able to laugh, no matter what, and one of the things they most appreciated in each other was a sense of humor. As one close friend observed, “They might come close to having words, but they could never do it—they would always end up giggling instead. They just adored each other.”
On December 6, 1957, Olive Ann gave birth to a daughter. She had Becky under hypnosis. At a time when women were routinely drugged for labor and delivery, Olive Ann knew that she wanted to experience fully the birth of her baby. “Not even an aspirin,” she wrote. Afterwards, she was alone for a few minutes in the delivery room, “after the OB, nurses, assistants, and gallery of OB observers (who didn’t believe it would work) had all left. The big lights were off, and an old Negro man came in to mop the floor. I was crying with joy. I told him everything was fine, I was just happy. He said in the sweetest voice, ‘You jes’ go on and cry, ma’am. Yes, hep yo’sef.’”
Leaving Cold Sassy: The Unfinished Sequel to Cold Sassy Tree Page 15