The Minnie Youmans Place

From "19th-century farmhouse, Lexsy" by Brian Brown. This is grander than
my grandparents' house, but it is in Lexsy--my grandmother Kate once had
a fistfight with another woman in Lexsy, back when she lived there for a time.
Evidently Kate "Little Bear" was defending one of the children...
I am hoping Brian will not mind if I "borrow" his image, as he once
borrowed from one of my posts to illuminate something about
the house my maternal grandfather, a house builder, made for his wife...
Be sure and visit his wonderful site, Vanishing South Georgia.

     It never belonged to my grandparents, even though they worked the land near Lexsy for decades, plowing with mules, shaping the resistant earth until gullies became flat and usable. Even the girls plowed, at least until the last baby came along. Preston and Kate labored as tenant sharecroppers in south Georgia, and if you have ever read James Agee's passionate Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or seen Walker Evans's photographs wedded to that prose, you have a hint of what that means. It was a postwar world, after all--why wouldn't the neighbors eat dirt, why wouldn't my father see his first jealous, throat-slitting murder before he was ten, why wouldn't he early on see the rural ways of sexual congress in a field, why wouldn't he run to join up with the Army Air Corps at 17?
       A long pale road of packed dust led by swamp and blackberry tangles: then a turn, and a visitor drove between fields of horse corn, tobacco, and cotton. The shack with its burst of trees in the midst of flat fields, its tumbledown outbuildings, the rusted stove that sometimes held rattlers, the gaudy flowers rioting from coffee cans, the half-fallen cedar with tiny scorpions in the cave underneath, the cloyingly sweet but tiny white blooms in the shining hedge that sheltered the porch from a blaze of sun: there is not one picture of the place. Not one. No one thought it worth the cost, I suppose. And later on the four-room house (living room, two bedrooms, kitchen--no bathroom, no hall, no closets or frills) was burned by vandals.

Public domain, Wikipedia. Walker Evans photograph of 3 sharecroppers,
Frank Tengle, Bud Fields, and Floyd Burroughs, Summer 1936

     Long ago I read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as I biked around the perimeter of Ireland on my green Peugeot that German tourists fondled whenever I left it outside a pub. (They seemed to spring into being whenever I lashed the bike to a post.) I left the book behind somewhere in a Derry that, terrorized only hours before, was full of drifting smoke. I hope someone found the book, took it home, read, and passed it on.
     How I still wish there was a photograph somewhere! One of the reasons I wrote A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage was to make a sort of picture for myself. And it is a book where my family slips in--my grandfather's mixed race brothers (my great-grandfather Nathaniel Youmans/Yeomans sired twenty-two legitimate children and at least two illegitimate children, though Ancestry.com doesn't know the half of it!) inspired the loss at the start of the book, and Pip contains elements of my father and one of my children. The well with ferns growing inside, the pomegranate trees, the chinaberries, the smolder of summer sun, the graveyard with its stones topped with shells: I wanted to keep those things, as much as I wanted to hold on to people.
     Some years past I went back to the site of Lexsy and then the Minnie farm. No one then lived in Lexsy; perhaps they have come back now, though I doubt it. The farm was now owned by an international corporation; there were signs meant to bar us from a place that was one of my loadstones in this life. My mother and I bumped down the road, still pale dirt, between the blackberry ravels, and turned down the drive toward the house. Nothing built by hands remained, not the shack, not the outbuildings, not the well. Doghobble ran wild in the yard. The chinaberries still stood in a messy row. The fields went on forever under the hot Georgia sky.

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

Ecclesiasticus 44:1 King James Bible

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Mercer at PW

Congratulations to Mercer University Press, director Marc Jolley, and staff on Mercer's 35th anniversary! Here they are on the back cover of Publishers Weekly. Below, see them on the interior back cover. (You can find Glimmerglass on one of those, and me on the other.)

As someone who writes both poetry and fiction and who values collaboration, I've inevitably found a wild range of publishers--Big 6 (now Big 5) houses, mid-size houses, small presses, and university presses, and there are very different things to say about each. But I can say that Mercer is distinguished as producing immaculate books that pass my librarian mother's tests (the only time a book has ever passed her demanding scrutiny), allowing writer input and collaboration (as Glimmerglass, with art by Clive Hicks Jenkins), and possessing a stellar design team (Mary-Frances Glover Burt did a wonderful job with Glimmerglass.) I have enjoyed frolicking with smaller houses and being a part of making beautiful books like Glimmerglass, Thaliad, and The Foliate Head. Mercer's designers also made very handsome books for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and The Throne of Psyche, which won an Addy for design. (See tabs above if you're curious about any of those books.)

As a child I spent part of every summer in Georgia and still go back there at times--mostly for funerals, alas. I was born barely over the South Carolina line in Aiken, but Georgia was the only constant place in my childhood because my father--the bright Georgia sharecropper's boy who became a teenage tail-gunner in World War II and then a professor of analytical chemistry--had a strong itch to move on and see the world. So I rather like the idea of having a publisher who returns me to that part of the country.

Addendum to the day: West Chester Poetry Center and Conference

To support Kim Bridgford, just removed as Director of the WCU Poetry Center, write to:

Dr. Lori A. Vermeulen
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Chemistry
West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Anderson Hall, Suite 119
West Chester, PA 19383

Thanks to Allison Joseph for sharing the news. If you care about the conference and poetry center, please write in support of the stellar job Kim Bridgford has done.

Riding the rails with Pip Tattnall: no. 1

The first piece of my one-and-many interview for the March 30th book launch of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is up at Hannah Stephenson's grand blog, The Storialist. The interview will be strewn, like a dismantled Osiris, around the world, and to see and read all one has to travel and pick up the pieces. Why? Because it's a traveling book set in the Depression, and protagonist Pip Tattnall is fleeing the tragedy at the heart of his childhood and growing up as a road kid, riding the rails into manhood.

And whether you shop at your local indie (mine are The Book Nook and Augur's in Cooperstown, both a portion of larger stores, and The Green Toad in Oneonta) or at a chain shop or online, I hope you will want A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage for your very own. It's close to my heart, this book, and uses landscapes and facts close to my family history.

Thanks to Hannah for her interesting question and the time she spent making a post about the book! Comments off; please comment at The Storialist.

Very High Romance

You know, I just tumbled into a site where I read the most dreadful, laughable bit of a novel--all full of grammar mistakes and European counts and barons and crazy syntax and misspellings and lovely young girls and jewels and passionate flingings-about. Then I read a statement by the author, all about her joy in making stories and the stored-up treasure in her heart, and I was so, so touched somehow that this royal nonsense, poorly-worded and poorly-punctuated and packed with rubbishy dreams, came flowing from her heart, so that she thanked God for the goodness of the world and for her precious gift.

Still in pre-order.
The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction

La! I was abashed.

All the same, if you have to choose between that one and mine, I do advise--forgive me!--that you send for mine. There are no counts and barons and jewels (except for a bit of jet bead that some boys pretend is a jewel), and though there is love, it is often unspoken or refused. No Cinderella-worthy carriages fetch a baron home; no, just a train to go steaming by, if only the traveler can catch hold without paying with a leg or life. I trust there are no mistakes on hand, no bizarre commas or lack thereof, no grammatical contortions.

But the joy of telling stories: evidently that is the same.

Moonlight Requisition

Blogger? Tumbler? Enjoy chatting on some sort of social media? Interested in hosting one smallish question (yours) and some information about A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction) in time for the March 30th book launch?

The idea is for one large interview to appear (cut up in pieces like Osiris--to be eventually collected like Osiris as well), sprinkled here and there over the web. To put it another way (without that troublesome Osiris), your question will appear in three ways: on your blog, along with my answer; here, as a question only but pointing to your blog; and lastly as an item in a round-up Table-of-Contents post (also linking to your blog.)

Confused yet?

Along with the piece of an interview, I'll ask you to post some information about the book--an image, some comments, some information.  Note: you don't have to be an author or have a blog that focuses primarily on books. In fact, I think the idea of having launch posts on all sorts of blogs is a fun idea.

Write me at smaragdineknot [AT] gmail.com for The Complete Skinny on The Great Blog Pilferage. Or, less sweetly, An Infestation of Blogs. Or Major Palace Annexation. (I hope for major, rather than minor--one never knows with takeovers.) Or whatever it shall be named.

Update, late March 4th:  So far I have three visual artists, a novelist, two poets, and one historian signed up. And I've already answered two questions. Come play!

Georgia cussing

Photograph credit:  Justyna Furmanczy (UK) and sxc.hu

My father was born in 1926 and grew up on a little sharecropper's farm west of Savannah. I was trying to remember the Lexsy cussing of my childhood--it was nothing like swearing today. Even after he ran away and became a teenage tailgunner and then eventually a professor of analytical chemistry--a sample of the American-dream rise that I still think a remarkable one--he still would come out with one of these curious, Depression-era words.

cotton-picking

dadblameit

dadgum

dagnabit

dang

darn

darnit

sapsucker*

shoot

*I do not remember this one, but my cousin Mike Davis says it was in regular use, particularly by my Uncle Aubrey--so I slap it in the list.

Seems to me there were lots of mule and jackass comparisons... days behind the plow.

Gardenias for Kate Deriso

The Pot Boy has not yet moved from the fire. If you have a question, leave it in the question box, one post below… When he moves, all will be answered!

***

Today is the birthday of my paternal grandmother, Kate Deriso Youmans of Lexsy, Georgia. In the past decade I’ve heard that her grandparents owned much of Treutlen County and were big slave-owners. Evidently they lost everything after the Civil War and were pitiful and often starved in their old age. I found the idea that they had been owners of land and slaves very startling because I had long connected my grandma's past history with the sort of plow-mule poverty that features in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the accompanying photographs by Walker Evans. The shack at Lexsy was crowded with flowers and trees and a great shining hedge that shaded the porch; it is a primary place in my imagination, a place out of time—the sort of place where people do the same things in the same way for hundreds of years.



Kate Deriso Youmans was a Primitive Baptist who lived hard and close to the bone; she was a sharecropper in the Depression and for most of her life, and she could make fried chicken and cakes and pies like nobody's business. At the farm, we would go out on adventures to gather food, crossing a stream to collect the wild sweet plums, yellow and clear red, or toting buckets for berries. My grandmother carried a cudgel against cottonmouths and rattlesnakes from the swamps. It seemed to be that she was always busy shelling lady peas or canning peaches or capping blackberries, her arthritic fingers never at rest. Her table was always a bumper crop.

She gave birth to six children. In her youth, she was called "Little Bear" because she was willing to defend them with her fists if she had to do so. Willie, a little boy nicknamed “Peter Rabbit,” died of meningitis in the wagon on the way to the doctor. The others grew up and became what they became. My daddy became tailgunner and a chemist and then a Professor of analytical chemistry. He is dead, and she is dead, and the world is still spinning and flowering and burning and needing all the things that it needs so desperately.

In speaking of her, I have limited what she is. She rode wagons under the stars, she pushed children from her body, she buried a child, she plowed a mule and labored in the hot Georgia sun, she did infinite things I do not know. Widen all that I have said by a thousand miles on foot and add a million over-heated suns, and you and I might get an inkling of what that life was like.

Credit for photographs: The gardenias are courtesy of "xymoneau" or Dez Pain of Australia and www.sxc.hu/. I believe I've used some of xymoneau's images before...







***

Here is how my day is going:

Hokay,

I start out the outer-world part of my day by running two blocks to the bus-stop to hand R the forgotten dowel for her dratted art project: all this dressed in my bathrobe, tucked under a long coat. The thermometer says 10 below zero--dunno if I believe it, but it's cold. Fine. Done. Can sit down and work on the FAFSA form at last.

Phone rings at 8:15.

"Hi Mom."

"Hi B. What did you forget?"

"My backpack."

Oh, only a two thousand pound backpack... Only a thing as big as a small icehouse that straps to one's backside. Only every single book and notebook and pencil needed to attend high school.

Sigh.

The wackiness never ends.

Reader, I did not marry him--

Old Point Loma

Lighthouse

The Backyard Zoo

(praying mantis)

Jewel
(a "Mississippi Garden Spider" in its stabili-mentum?)

Gryphon & Dog Statue

These are a few of the pictures that one of my cousins has sent me this year. Frank Morris provides me with lots of lovely, warm Charleston shots, as he lives part of the time in Charleston and part of the time in Jacksonville. It sounds like a darn good idea to me.

When I was little, I was quite sure that I would marry Frank when I grew up. We used to run away from his red-haired sister Nancy, who pinched the most powerful and potent pinches ever pinched in the history of childhood. We'd grab some boiled peanuts or figs off the tree and run away from our grandmother's lovely Queen Anne house in Collins, Georgia, down to the railroad tracks where the puff briars bloom. And there we would ramble and hop along the tracks, watching for the next train with its endless Southern Serves the South boxcars and keeping an eye out for Nancy and her pernicious pinches.

She and I were really alike, though, skinny with long fat braids and the mandatory cat-eye glasses and a mania for reading. I had an intense scissors phobia (you knew writers were weird, even when they were children), and so my hair grew and grew until it tickled below my knees. Yes, I had to put on Mother's blue-and-green corduroy bathrobe and take down the rippling Rapunzel hair, all to play Mary in the nativity pageant. You guessed that, too, no doubt.

Before 6th grade, they finally chopped off my hair and gave me a permanent: I looked the fool.

Be afraid of scissors.

***