by James Still
I appeared in this world on July 16, 1906, on Double Branch Farm near LaFayette in Chambers County, Alabama. I was the first boy after five girls. Eventually, the count ran to five girls and five boys. Our black wet nurse, “Aunt Fanny,” helped Mama care for us. She diapered us, comforted us, and shielded us. We loved her with all our hearts. When my legs were long enough I would run away to her house, and she would let me sop syrup out of a bucket lid. When they came hunting for me she would hide me under the bed. Her unmarried companion was named Porter and was uncommonly white for his race. He had been struck by lightning twice and survived, and that we thought was the reason for his light skin.
Sometimes I tell folk I was born in a cotton patch. Some of my earliest memories are of running about with a small sack Mama had sewed for me; of picking a boll here and there; of urging my sisters to pick faster, as Papa had promised I could go to the cotton gin with him if we finished out a bale that day; of taking the wagon trip atop two thousand pounds of cotton; and of losing my cap up the suction tube. It was a memorable happening for a boy of four.
After Grandma Still’s death we moved in with Grandpa and Aunt Enore, a maiden aunt, on the farm between Pigeon Roost and Hootlocka Creeks, near Marcoot. I was five. A brother had long since kicked me out of the cradle—almost before I could walk. (I believe that was a deciding factor in my development.) About then I fell and stuck a rusty nail in my stomach and had to learn to walk a second time. In our family, once you learned to stand alone, you were treated as an adult. Although a quiet child, I’m told, I was independent—one who wouldn’t allow my aunts or my kissing cousins to “smack” me. I began early to think for myself. My father once told me, “You had a long childhood.” He meant that my youth was spent in a schoolroom instead of in the fields. Of his own schooling Papa said he got as far as “baker” in the Blueback Speller.
Grandpa Still’s homestead was antebellum with all the attributes associated with pre-Civil War architecture: gray, with sand mixed in the paint, large rooms, high ceilings. The kitchen and dining room were set back from the living quarters as a precaution against fire. There was an attic with a full measure of artifacts from the past. Clear in memory are the boxwoods crowding the front steps and the paths among Grandma’s flower beds. And the buckets of water thrown on the cape jasmines on summer nights to enliven the fragrance.
I was six when we moved to the Carlisle Place two miles from LaFayette on the Buffalo road. Within a year we were living in our own newly built and mortgaged home. Standing today in Chambers County are many dwellings of the same pattern: roomy, hall down the middle, veranda halfway round, a frosted pane distinguishing the front door. From a rise on our forty-acre farm a body could see the Talledega Mountains like a train of smoke to the north. To the south, out of sight, were the Buckelew Mountains where Joe Louis, the boxer, was born in 1914. Chambers County has several other historical connections. Woodrow Wilson’s grandfather taught school weekdays in the old Presbyterian church, and Stonewall Jackson’s father-in-law was a pastor there for a time.
The “Mark Twain” in my nature compels me to relate a story from Chambers County, one that Papa told me. Passing through LaFayette on a Sunday, he heard the Baptist congregation singing “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?” and the Methodist congregation singing simultaneously, “No, Not One.” Papa liked a good joke—such as when Grandpa Lindsey accused Papa’s bull in an adjoining pasture of “demoralizing” his cows. When Papa and my uncles laughed, they could be heard a half mile.
At the Carlisle Place in summer we children worked in the fields, Papa with us when not on call, Mama alongside when she could spare the time from cooking, sewing, laundry, preserving fruits and vegetables, and other household tasks. To ward off suntan and freckles my sisters greased their faces and necks with cream, wore stockings on their hands and arms, and covered their heads with wide-brim straw hats. My sisters would never work in sight of the road. While our main crop was cotton, we also raised sugarcane, sorghum, soybeans, and corn. The sun was hot, the days were long, and the rows of cotton seemed to stretch to the horizon.
One day, when I was hoeing cotton, my sister Inez began to tell a story from the next row—a true story, I thought. It continued for hours as our hoes chopped and pushed and rang against stones. Then I learned that her story was a fabrication. She had created it while she was working. From that moment my horizon expanded into the imaginary. I could make my own tales, and I did. Oral ones.
The boll weevil made an appearance in the South, and we walked the rows with a cup of kerosene and picked them off. We picked potato bugs as well and rooted out nut grass (chufas). An established colony of nut grass was considered the death of a farm, yet the bulbs are good to eat and taste like coconut. When we located a plant, we ate the enemy.
At seven years of age, I started school, walking the two miles to the “college” in LaFayette with my three sisters, bearing a lunch of two biscuits and slices of bacon. My first teacher, Miss Porterfield, wrote my name on the desk with chalk and handed me an ear of corn. My duty was to outline my name with the grains. A hands-on beginning. By day’s end I knew my name’s shape and could write it myself. Small for my age, I was the only pupil who needed to stand on a box to reach the blackboard. On Class Day I stood in chapel and recited Stevenson’s “Birdie with a Yellow Bill,” and I brought down the house. My knee pants were unbuttoned. We acted out “Hiawatha.” I was Adjidaumo, the squirrel. Hiawatha’s thanks linger: “O my little friend, the squirrel,/Bravely have you toiled to help me;/Take the thanks of Hiawatha.” Some thirty years later, Miss Porterfield was to tell me, “I can still call the name of every child in your class, but I never thought you would be the one.”
The two events that figure largely in my younger years were the American Civil War and the Great Depression. My grandfather Still had served in the Confederate Army and had a finger severed by a Yankee bullet. My maternal grandmother’s first husband lost his life in north Georgia attempting to head off Sherman’s march to the sea. Many veterans were alive when I was young, and sometimes they would sit on Grandpa Still’s veranda and reminisce. I recall vividly the account of the tunnel the Yanks dug under the Confederate trenches at Petersburg and the aftermath of the explosion. On Confederate Day we students were given small “bonny blue flags” and marched to the cemetery to decorate the graves of veterans. Although we harbored little knowledge of the cause of the struggle, we were certain it would be fought again, and the next time we would win. In later years I visited the major battlefields and the sites of many of the smaller engagements. Appomattox brought tears. I was readying myself to write a novel based on the prison at Andersonville, Georgia, only to be thwarted by MacKinlay Kantor publishing his own book on that subject.
Aside from the Holy Bible, we had three books at home: The Anatomy of the Horse; The Palaces of Sin, or the Devil in Society; and a hefty volume with a missing back, Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge. I learned from Palaces the sin of drinking gin and playing at cards. The author was one Colonel Dick Maple, who “spent his fortune with lavish hand, but awoke from his hypnotic debauch at Society’s shame”; the scene of action was Washington, D.C. A full-page drawing depicts “Jenny Manley of Alabama rebuking guests at table for drinking wine.” The Anatomy was beyond my comprehension.
The Cyclopedia was my introduction to a wider world. Subjects covered were eclectic—philosophy, physics, rhetoric, as well as such topics as the pruning of fruit trees, rules for games, social and business correspondence, the language of flowers, and capsule histories of nations. There were also many poems—by Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, among others. I memorized the haunting “Ozymandias” and Cleopatra’s swan song, “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” The Cyclopedia was my first stab at a liberal education. During those years I saw my first motion pictures, Damon and Pythias and The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin. With a ticket provided by a teacher I attended Chautauqua—a classical guitar performance and a lecture that I choose to beli
eve was the famed “Acres of Diamonds.” Jean Webster read from Daddy Long Legs at the school, William Jennings Bryan came to town, and the warden of Sing Sing Prison lectured. Papa once pulled me through a crowd to have me shake hands with Governor Comer. A circus came to town and our class learned to spell elephant, lion, and tiger.
I remember the day World War I ended. A truck loaded with celebrants passed, shouting, “The war is over! The war is over!” One morning we hurried to LaFayette early to attend a hanging. We stood in the road before the jailhouse while this gruesome rite took place. On that day I became a foe of capital punishment. In my teens, witnessing a Ku Klux Klan initiation involving the burning of a cross with citizens in bed sheets taking the oath, my liberal instincts rose, and they have remained.
At school there was “Old Black Joe,” the janitor who befriended a generation of children. Such was his respect in the community that he was one of the two blacks allowed to vote. The other to share the privilege was the barber Green Appleby, who served only whites. Appleby’s advertisement in the LaFayette Sun listed him as a “Tonsorial Artist . . . Neat shop . . . Sharp razors.” Another black held in esteem was “Puss” Irwin, the wiry courthouse janitor, who dutifully held us youngsters up to the fountain for a drink of ice water. His assistant was Joe Barrow, the father of Joe Louis (Barrow). I recollect Joe Barrow usually dozing on the courthouse steps.
I was grown and in graduate school before I became acquainted with the writings of Johnson Jones Hooper, author of Some Adventures of Simon Suggs, Late of the Talapossa Volunteers—antebellum humor of the Old Southwest. Born in North Carolina he came to Alabama and founded the LaFayette East Alabamian in 1842, a newspaper with the motto: “It’s good to be shifty in a new country.” Later, while practicing law, he edited the Chambers County Tribune. In my first encounter with Hooper’s works I was put off by the rash of dialect—a briar patch of contractions, elisions, and apostrophes. Probably not aware that I had lived in the same geographical spot, critics have more than once suggested that Simon Suggs is the father of my character Uncle Jolly, who appears in both my novels River of Earth and Sporty Creek. Uncle Jolly, in fact, was my great-grandpa, with some of the attributes of a cousin, and that’s as near as I’ve come to using actual persons in my fiction. When I started writing about Kentucky, dialect was both a problem and a challenge. Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic, warned me early on, “Dialect is out of fashion.” My intentions are to evoke speech. Dialect too strictly adhered to makes a character appear ignorant who is only unlettered; yet, Simon Suggs has lasted and is a pleasure when read aloud by an apt interpreter.
We moved to LaFayette for a couple of years—something to do with the mortgage—and into the Judge Norman house, a dwelling of many rooms, spacious grounds, flaming crepe myrtles, and giant magnolias. The air was scented with cottonseed oil being processed in a nearby plant. Within earshot of the back fence lived “darkies,” as they were referred to in those days. We heard their laughter and singing and cheerful banter and mistakenly judged them as being without the cares that plagued white society. Our neighbor was “Cotton Tom” Heflin, U.S. congressman or senator for decades. The Heflins were rarely at home. The straw mat on our hall floor was a gift of Mrs. Heflin. A Heflin son once fired a shotgun in our direction, raining pellets on our roof. The Norman house, though it has been drastically altered, still stands, as does the white-pillared mansion of the Honorary J. Tom Heflin.
The “college” that I was to attend through the fifth grade had actually been one in times past and was in need of major repairs. A proposed three-mill tax was put on the ballot and defeated in the election. In talking to the editor of the LaFayette Sun the next day my father said, “The building will have to fall down for the voters to wake up.” The roof of the auditorium collapsed that night.
At war’s end the price of cotton fell. We had moved back to the Carlisle Place for two or three years when our long-carried mortgage on the farm was foreclosed. We moved to Shawmut, a textile town in the Chattahoochee Valley. Although we lived on “Boss Row” (Lanier Avenue), my father was not employed in the factory. The company wanted a veterinarian handy, since many townsmen kept a cow or horse in the backyard. On Christmas Eves we children hung our stockings by the chimney and were rewarded with an orange, an apple, peppermint sticks, and a handful of nuts. Once, I got a toy pistol. Our first Christmas at Shawmut, the factory gave every child a paper bag brimming with a variety of fruits, nuts, candy, and a toy.
Up to then the only fiction of value I had read was Treasure Island—not even The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Last of the Mohicans, or Robinson Crusoe. There was to be much catching up in the years to come. Against the librarian’s suggestion, I borrowed Balzac’s Father Goriot. It was a revelation. I can still smell the boardinghouse depicted in the early chapters. And I began to write my first novel, of boats and sailors and whales, even though I had never beheld a boat larger than a bateau, known a sailor, or viewed an ocean. I have no further memory of this venture.
I got caught up in the game of basketball, often playing from school’s end until dark. Our team was invited to the state tournament at Birmingham. Only one member of the team was taken along, the other players being “ringers” recruited from the factory. They attended classes a half-day to qualify. We were joyful when they were roundly defeated in their first game, probably by another team of ringers. Such affairs are better ordered nowadays. I won second prize in a Birmingham News essay contest on the subject of insect control in gardens. First prize went for chemical treatment. I plumped for birds.
I was in the ninth grade when we moved farther down the valley to Jarrett Station. I attended Fairfax High School in another factory town that was within walking distance. I joined the Boy Scouts of America, earned twenty-three merit badges and achieved the status of Eagle Scout; later, I published one of my first poems in Boys’ Life.
During my senior year I happened upon a catalog of Lincoln Memorial University, located near Cumberland Gap in Harrogate, Tennessee. The college–established after the Civil War by General O.O. Howard to reward the loyalty of the area to the Union cause–flourishes to this day and is in a natural setting probably unequaled in America. The opportunity to work my way through was the draw. In the fall of 1924, with sixty dollars earned as an office boy at the factory and as a door-to-door delivery boy of the Atlanta Constitution, I set off for this school of some eight hundred students drawn mainly from the mountain areas of the three adjoining states. I had made a genealogical circle. Up the road in Virginia was the site of the Stills’ pioneer home.
Most students at Lincoln Memorial worked for their tuition and keep on campus, on the farm, or at the hatchery, dairy, or rock quarry. I was assigned to the quarry, where I pried limestone croppings out of a pasture and sometimes operated a rock crusher. One Christmas vacation, lacking a ticket home, one nickel in my pocket, I shoveled gravel onto roads and crosswalks. I spent the nickel on chewing gum. Once, I put a hand in my pocket and found a silver dollar. An “angel” had put it there. My grades suffered during my freshman year, as I was too fatigued to study. They picked up during subsequent terms after a change of chores—I was now raking leaves, mixing concrete, mending roofs, painting houses, and working as a janitor at the library. I attended classes mornings and worked afternoons. As janitor I took over the library at 9:00 P.M.
A majority of the students had no money to buy extra food. My overriding memory of those years was of being hungry. We ate everything off of the tables. Walnut trees were plentiful on the hills around Harrogate, and we cracked bushels of walnuts. We raked our hands through snow under apple trees for overlooked fruit. The president of Lincoln Memorial spirited me into his house to try on a suit he could spare, and it fit perfectly. I broke into tears when he presented it to me–not from joy, as reported, but from humiliation. I never wore it.
The third and fourth year I kept the job of janitor at the library. At 9:00 P.M. I locked the door, emptied the wastebaskets, swep
t the floor, and rubbed up the tables, and until daylight it was my private domain. Many nights I became too sleepy to make it to the dormitory, so I slept in the stack room, a book for a pillow. I hardly knew what to take up first, what book, what periodical. Discovering the scholarly journal American Speech, I wrote two articles for that publication; H.L. Mencken was to quote from them in The American Language. I particularly noted the Atlantic, and it became a future target for my poems and short stories. The library became the recipient of many years of this periodical, and I was asked to check the files for missing issues and to dump the rest into the furnace. That summer I freighted virtually a ten-year collection of issues home, and with the Great Depression in full swing and work unattainable, I read every story, poem, and essay. During the next quarter century the Atlantic would publish three poems and ten short stories of mine.
At Lincoln the provider of the “work” scholarships was an elderly gentleman by the name of Guy Loomis, heir to a sash-and-blind fortune who was providing assistance to students in several institutions in the southern mountains. I managed to learn his address, and I wrote in my senior year to thank him and to invite him to the graduation exercises. He actually came, driving down from Brooklyn in a chauffeured Cadillac; he remained several days and attended class exercises. After I won the Rush Strong Medal and prizes in four other essay contests, Mr. Loomis offered to sponsor me for a year in graduate school, provided it was in the South. In extending the scholarship he said, “I’ll make it possible, not easy.” His warning proved correct. I chose Vanderbilt University and was off to Nashville in the fall of 1929.