Leaving Cold Sassy: The Unfinished Sequel to Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

  Olive Ann’s words were far more captivating than any sales line we might produce. Here, Chester realized, was the perfect way to introduce Olive Ann Burns to everyone else in the company; to let them know, as she put it, “what they were dealing with.” He sent copies of this letter to all of the Houghton Mifflin sales reps, and they, in turn, started showing it to booksellers they knew. Everyone was charmed and intrigued. B. Dalton Company, a large bookselling chain, reprinted six pages of the questionnaire in their merchandising newsletter. By early September, the New York Times and the Washington Post had both caught wind of the story and responded with features about Olive Ann and Cold Sassy Tree—several weeks before books were in the stores. “It remains to be seen whether the book has any merits,” Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Post, “but there can be no doubt that its author does.”

  On September 27, the first copies of Cold Sassy Tree came off the press. Already there had been a cover story in the Sunday Magazine (now renamed the Atlanta Weekly) and a special boxed review in Publishers Weekly, proclaiming Will Tweedy “one of the most entertaining narrators since Huck Finn.” The advance reviewers were unanimous in their praise, and early readers of Cold Sassy Tree concurred. Ferrol Sams, author of Run with the Horseman, said simply, “Olive Ann Burns has laid claim to all the literary territory between Tobacco Road and Gone with the Wind.” The Georgia governor, Joe Frank Harris, announced that October 18, publication date, would be Cold Sassy Tree Day in Georgia. When Olive Ann received the first copies of her book, she set them all up on top of the hunt board and the mantelpiece in her living room so that Andy would see them as soon as he walked through the front door. She was delighted that the colors on the book jacket perfectly matched the autumn hues of her upholstery. “Sometimes I feel like Cinderella,” Olive Ann wrote to a friend, “scared I’ll forget to leave the ball before my coach turns back into a pumpkin. But I’m about to believe I will at least get to the ball.”

  The ball was a party at the Atlanta Historical Society, attended by over 150 people, including about twenty-five of Olive Ann and Andy’s relatives; the former first lady Rosalynn Carter and the governor’s wife, Elizabeth Harris; Joan and Chester Kerr and four of us staff members from Ticknor & Fields; and an assortment of local writers, booksellers, and friends. Cold Sassy Tree was already a hit—the first printing of twenty-two thousand copies was nearly gone and we had gone back to press for twenty thousand more the day before—and the party was really a celebration of Olive Ann and her success.

  When Chester Kerr stood to introduce his “star” author, she admitted that she had been more than a little intimidated by him when they first met, at Anne Edwards’s party. Chester took the ribbing in stride, delighted that in a year’s time Olive Ann had gone from thinking of him as “Your Eminence” to being able to joke with him in front of a crowd.

  Although he had retired from Ticknor & Fields five months earlier, Chester was clearly the host of Olive Ann’s publication party in Atlanta—in the very room in which they had first been introduced. The Kerrs and Olive Ann remained good friends and correspondents, and Olive Ann never forgot that it was they who had given her the confidence she needed to finish her manuscript. “If the Kerrs hadn’t encouraged me,” she told one interviewer, “I might have gone on like Miss Santmyer did with...And Ladies of the Club.” Olive Ann always recalled the day that she opened that very first enthusiastic letter from Joan Kerr as one of the high points of her life. “My joy at receiving that letter would rate at least twelve on a scale of one to ten,” she said.

  Just the year before, Olive Ann Burns had stood in this room trying to describe her sprawling, unfinished manuscript to a stranger; now she was the guest of honor at Atlanta’s literary event of the season. She had a wonderful time. For a few hours Olive Ann seemed to forget that writing a 600-page novel had actually been hard work; she was having so much fun entertaining her friends and family. “I think everyone should write a book,” she said happily.

  Later that evening, all of us from Ticknor & Fields sat around Olive Ann and Andy’s living room, getting acquainted in person at last. Norma and Charlie Duncan came over from next door, and we had another party, reliving the first one. I don’t remember all that we talked about, but I do remember that Olive Ann and Andy and Norma began to tell dying stories, just so we Yankees could see that Southerners really do entertain one another with accounts of dramatic deaths and good funerals. Later Olive Ann told me that she and Andy had lain awake most of the night. She was almost as happy and excited as she had been on her wedding night, she said, knowing that she was surrounded by people who loved her as she embarked on a new life, not as a bride this time, but as a published author.

  She was about to discover just what that meant. The next morning, the first autographing party for Cold Sassy Tree was held at one of Rich’s department stores. Olive Ann had asked Norma to come, because she had been warned that sometimes no one shows up at book signings. When Olive Ann and I arrived a half hour early, people were already lined up, holding their books. Most of them had two copies, and one woman had a Rich’s shopping bag full of books: she was going to give Cold Sassy Tree to everyone on her Christmas list. Olive Ann talked and signed, signed and talked, until we were out of books and time. It was only the beginning. Rich’s had arranged for the first autographings to be held at their stores, and they had placed an initial order for twenty-five hundred books. According to the former bookstore manager, Faith Brunson, “It should have been five thousand.”

  Faith Brunson had been with Rich’s, Atlanta’s largest department store, since 1945 and had a reputation as one of the shrewdest buyers in the industry. As soon as she read a bound galley of Cold Sassy Tree, she knew we would have a best seller on our hands. She requested galleys for every bookstore clerk and made the book required reading. “After that,” she recalled, “it was a snap.” Over the years, Faith had built a formidable book department on her ability to get people excited, and she went all out talking up Cold Sassy Tree to her employees and customers. In the first few days after publication, Olive Ann autographed books at each Rich’s store, and there was a crowd every time. People came because they knew Olive Ann—from church, from her days at the magazine, even from grade school or high school or college. They came because they loved the book and wanted to meet the woman who had written it, or because they had heard about Cold Sassy Tree and wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. All over Atlanta, bookstores sold out their initial orders, and many people showed up at autographings with books that they had stayed up all night reading. Most came with their own stories to tell—about growing up in small towns and how things really hadn’t changed, or about parents or grandparents who were just like the folk in Cold Sassy, Georgia.

  The stories Olive Ann enjoyed most were the ones about relatives who, like Grandpa Blakeslee, had married scandalously soon after a spouse’s death. She wrote to us about meeting a young woman who said, “My parents were Grandpa and Miss Love. I’m the product of the union. They married six weeks after his first wife died.” Another woman said that her father was a fifty-five-year-old bachelor when he married her twenty-four-year-old mother. Her family protested that she would spend her life taking care of a sick old man. “The mother died at forty-eight,” Olive Ann reported. “He was healthy and died two years later at eighty-one.” Olive Ann had something to say to everyone; she asked questions and cracked jokes and made sure that the people who had come out to meet her were all having as good a time as she was.

  Within a week of publication, Olive Ann had talked herself hoarse. Exhausted and unaccustomed to such a relentless schedule, she landed in bed with a racking cough. But, true to form, she took a week off, marshaled her resources, and declared at the end of October, “I’m coming back to life.”

  In the months that followed, she attended parties and autographings almost every day. Norma remembers how wonderful it was to look out the window and see her neighbor all dressed up and heading off to another even
t in her honor, after so many years of sickness and confinement. Several weeks after publication, Olive Ann wrote, “I think I’m going to like being an author. I’m now looking at my schedule as a job instead of as an interruption of writing or as an intrusion on this do-my-own-thing life I’ve had.” For her, the best part was not the pile of glowing reviews, which continued to grow, or her sudden fame and popularity; it was meeting new people every day. The most interesting ones found their way into her letters—more stories and characters for her collection. “Saturday in Fayetteville,” she wrote, “I met a ninety-one-year-old lady who grew up in Commerce and worked for my great-grandfather when the store was Power and Williford. She was a milliner! Trained by Miss Love herself—by a milliner who came to the store from a hat company in Baltimore.” She was excited about attending a homecoming reception in Commerce, which was suddenly famous itself as the model for Cold Sassy. “I am to give a talk, eat homemade cookies, and sign books—all from 7 to 9 P.M.,” she wrote, “and everybody plans to come.”

  Cold Sassy Tree was a phenomenon in the South. The reviewer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution admitted, “About a quarter of the way through Olive Ann Burns’s Cold Sassy Tree, I stopped taking notes. But I continued reading, and now, several hours after finishing the book, I am still searching—sweating, if not blood, at least the last good drops of several pots of black coffee—for the words to do it justice. This is the best I can do: Cold Sassy Tree is simply great. And Atlanta’s Olive Ann Burns, who suddenly has bloomed into a novelist at age sixty, is as good a writer about the South as you’re going to read for a long, long time.”

  Still, Olive Ann and Andy were amazed to see the book in the number one spot on the Atlanta Journal’s best-seller list week after week. By Christmas, it was popping up on best-seller lists across the country. “Not since Flannery O’Connor has the state of Georgia produced a storyteller to compare with Olive Ann Burns,” wrote one reviewer. “Not since Eudora Welty and Alice Walker has the whole country spawned an author with so flawless an ear.” The Boston Globe called Cold Sassy Tree “no less than brilliant,” and the Washington Post described Will Tweedy as a “rare literary character who is so perfect that his existence can be credited only to magic.” Readers agreed. At the end of the year Ticknor & Fields had fifty thousand copies of Cold Sassy Tree in print, and we were waiting for the fourth printing to arrive. Paperback rights were about to be auctioned off, and inquiries were coming in from foreign publishers and the film industry. Olive Ann had appearances booked throughout the spring and into the summer, and the mailman was delivering her fan mail in bags.

  In January, in a letter to Chester and Joan, she wrote, “Somebody quoted Will Campbell, the folk hero of the civil rights movement, as saying you don’t need to worry about success. ‘Fame don’t mean much,’ he said, ‘and it don’t last long.’ I’m so naive about books that I don’t even know what success really means. Five thousand books would have been success to me. Fifty thousand is hard to believe.” She still expected that the dust would settle before long, and that she would be able to resume some semblance of normal life. “I began the winter in bookstores,” she said, “and I hope to end it working on the next book.”

  The next month, Andy retired from the editorship of the Atlanta Weekly, after thirty-nine years, and celebrated his final chemotherapy treatment. “Around here,” Olive Ann wrote, “that is even bigger news than paperback rights.” There was still evidence of lymphoma in his bone marrow, however. “We feel disappointed that he isn’t well,” she wrote, “but we’re delighted that he’ll have a chance to recuperate from the treatment awhile before diving back in.” Andy embarked on retirement with as much zest as he had brought to his work on the magazine. In his first three weeks at home, he wrote three articles and conducted an interview in South Carolina, and Olive Ann joked that she was beginning to think he wouldn’t get the kitchen painted after all. Andy always claimed he was thankful that he didn’t want to write a book—he knew better than anyone how hard Olive Ann had worked on hers. But he was a first-rate writer himself and, in addition to the articles he continued to do for the magazine, he composed long, delightful letters to friends scattered all over the country. He carried on a passionate gardening correspondence with the writer Mary Hood, and he stayed in touch with members of his Eighth Air Force unit from World War II. He was enormously proud of Olive Ann and didn’t mind it a bit when people referred to him as “the husband of Olive Ann Burns,” or even as “Mr. Burns.” In February he wrote to a friend, “Olive Ann told her publisher that she was going to start her second book in January and so far she hasn’t written a word. She is running here and there to autographings and speechmakings, and generally having fun.”

  “Running” was just the word for it, too. Between the middle of March and the first of June, Olive Ann attended three library receptions in her honor, over half a dozen autographings, and one concert. She addressed four writers’ clubs, students at five schools, and the Sunday school class of over a hundred members at her church. She preached one Methodist sermon, in Thomasville, Georgia, and she did a TV interview in Macon. She was the featured speaker at one luncheon and two dinners, did two days of publicity in Tallahassee, Florida, taught a three-day course in novel writing at the Hambidge Center, signed books and performed at a three-day literary symposium at the University of Georgia in Athens, and spent a week teaching writing on St. Simon Island. She and Andy also found time to fly to Colorado to spend a week visiting John. In April she flew to Virginia to give a dinner speech for a library fund raiser. “Imagine anyone that far away thinking I can draw a crowd,” she marveled. “But they say the book has caused a stir there. Isn’t that something?” There was one day on which she gave both breakfast and dinner speeches, at two different locations. “Some of those weeks are really overloaded,” she conceded, “but I think I will enjoy them.” Still, she was beginning to realize that she could easily spend the rest of her life on the road promoting Cold Sassy Tree. “Anybody else who calls,” she said, “I’m saying call me back next year, or in two or three years. At my age it is important to get on with the next book if I intend to write it.”

  One of Olive Ann’s favorite opening lines in her talks was “I now know the difference between a writer and an author. Writers write, and authors speak.” She told everyone that she didn’t intend to be an author much longer. But even with her good intentions, it was hard to say no and return to the lonely life of a novelist. Writing Cold Sassy Tree had been tremendously fulfilling; it had given her a new identity. “Writing the book was like getting born again as ME instead of remaining forever a wife and mother,” she wrote. “I like wifery and motherhood, but it’s like being young again to create something of one’s own—young again, only better.” She was having a grand time taking advantage of this second youth. In the course of autographing books all over the state of Georgia, she claimed, she had seen every boyfriend she’d ever had—“all those that hadn’t died.” Some of them came accompanied by wives, who didn’t believe that their husbands had actually dated the author of Cold Sassy Tree. She even signed a book for a man who told her, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t marry me. My last name is Olive.” Olive Ann laughed and said she was too old for him anyway.

  If Olive Ann had had to say what pleased her most about the success of Cold Sassy Tree, the fact that her book was read by schoolchildren would surely have been at the top of her list. Her favorite audiences were “the eager ones among high school and college students,” because she could encourage them to pursue their own writing. She was living proof that anyone with the determination to stick with it could write a novel. Now that she had published a book herself, she was delighted to share what she had learned, lessons gleaned not from any writing workshops, but learned during forty years of journalism and nearly a decade at her own desk, as she figured out for herself how to write a novel.

  “Use words that make pictures,” she would tell every group of schoolchildren. “If you
say the word animal, you can’t see it. You don’t know what it looks like. If you say horse, you can see it very well. If you say somebody is riding the horse, you don’t know who. If you say the word boy, it makes a picture.”

  Even before Cold Sassy Tree was published, Andy’s sister Jane, a high school English teacher in College Park, Georgia, had invited Olive Ann to visit her classroom. Not only did Olive Ann encourage Jane’s students to write; she urged them to seek out stories from their families just as she had done in her family history. “Stories bring the dead back to life,” she told them. “With only a name and dates, all you can see is a tombstone. Yet if all you find out is that Uncle Quillian was short and his wife tall, you can see them.”

  Inspired by Olive Ann’s visits to their classroom, the students embarked on an oral history project, honoring their black heritage by interviewing relatives and members of their community, who described a vanishing way of life. The annual magazine that grew out of these efforts was a source of great pride to Olive Ann—she knew that, in a small way, she had made a difference in these students’ lives. Cold Sassy Tree provided her with countless such opportunities to reach out to children, and she seized them all. She was just as happy talking with a group of sixth-graders as she was giving a dinner speech or being interviewed. She cherished the letters she received from schoolchildren and made a point of answering each one personally. When the American Library Association and the New York Public Library put Cold Sassy Tree on its list of books recommended for teenagers, Olive Ann was unabashedly thrilled. “The New York list had my name right there between Emily Bronte and Willa Cather,” she exclaimed. “Think of that!”