Chinaberry (2 page)

The story of a young, unnamed boy who travels to Texas without his parents and is taken in by a grieving rancher and his beautiful wife,
Chinaberry
is a remarkable capturing of a place and time that is gone forever, a place of ranches that went on for miles and miles, of cotton fields that stretched to the horizon, of free-range cattle, and of schools that were set up by the ranchers themselves. This is a book that forever preserves a place and
time in history that might have been forgotten otherwise. And while it is a beautiful look at a pivotal time in the narrator's childhood, it is also an unforgettable portrait of the people that narrator came to know during this trip to Texas: sad, troubled, yet confident Anson Winters; his caring and tender wife, Lurie; Ernest Roughton, the narrator's honest and solid caretaker; the Knuckleheads, two inseparable friends who enjoy nothing more than a good prank (and are obviously literary kin to Harl and Tibb Logan, the prankster cousins in
River of Earth
).

In editing this book, my main goal was to stay completely true to Mr. Still's intentions in creating plot, theme, tone, and syntax. His precise, elegant language and wonderful rhythm—each sentence taut with a specific beat that you can almost tap your foot to—were present throughout the original manuscript, even though he didn't complete the book before his death.

For the most part, the manuscript was in excellent shape. Some chapters are presented here just as he wrote them, with almost no changes. His ability to write a tight, lyrical sentence on the first try is absolutely amazing, and this is some of his finest prose. Witness this line, picked at random: “We had arrived at siesta, that period between high noon and two when the Texas sun is at its most torrid and brightest, and the leaves of the trees hang limp and blades of the corn curl.” Within this sentence lies an entire world, and it is a sentence wrought with action, imagery, and the senses. Note how perfectly the monosyllabic words are spaced out from the polysyllabic words, the strength of this sentence's construction. A reader could sing this line aloud if she took a notion and all the while feel the heat of the Texas sun on her neck, smell the corn baking in the fields, and see the limp leaves on the trees. A whole way of life packed into one rhythmic and lovely sentence. This book sings with the strength of a writer working at the height of his powers.

Occasionally the chapters were too short or episodic, and it seemed obvious that these were instances in which Mr. Still was just laying down notes so he could polish them up and stretch them out when he could turn his attention back to the book. In these instances I usually combined chapters or scenes, adding only brief transitional sentences to keep the flow from being interrupted and to preserve the beautiful rhythm that he had established so well. Only occasionally did I add a few words or a sentence. And sometimes I had to hope I was choosing correctly without any real direction from Mr. Still. For example, in the original manuscript, Ernest is sometimes known as Andrew; Anson is sometimes referred to as John or Johnnes; Rosetta is sometimes known as Roseena. In these instances I had to make a decision—usually based on the number of occurrences—to use one name over the other.

Sometimes the narrator contradicts himself in this book. At first I thought I might have to adjust the text in those instances, but ultimately I felt that Mr. Still was usually doing this on purpose, that this was another example of his brilliance at examining the strange wonder of memory. For example, early on the narrator says that he “was not shy,” but later on he assures the reader that he
was
shy. Perhaps this is a commentary on memory, especially childhood memory, when we tend to let a particular thing about ourselves suit the situation. This, to me, reveals Mr. Still's deep and generous honesty about being a child, about memory, about the operations of the heart and soul. Mr. Still understood the beauty and absolute complexity of human beings.

One of the major changes I made to the book was to title it
Chinaberry
. Sometimes the pages of this manuscript were marked with “Gone to Texas” at the top of the page, but I was still not sure if this was what Mr. Still had intended for the title or not. Once I had finished editing the book, however, it was
clear to me that the title needed to be
Chinaberry
, because the so-named ranch becomes a sort of magical place for the narrator, timeless and representative of much more than his time in Texas. Chinaberry is also the narrator's whole childhood, his entire life. Chinaberry is his memory and grief and joy.

We each have our own Chinaberry.

I felt the word suggested innocence, even the loss of innocence. I also loved the image of the chinaberry trees on the ranch, which Mr. Still mentions throughout. Like the narrator, the chinaberry tree is tough and resilient and a stranger in a strange land, having been brought to the United States from Asia, much like the boy is brought from Alabama to Texas.

I rewrote the entire manuscript on my own laptop to give myself a better feel for the words, for the rhythm, for the perfection of Mr. Still's language. Piecing this book together often felt like constructing a wonderful quilt that was all there, even though the pieces had been mixed together in a deep basket. The chapters, as he had written them, were not in any discernible order, but while going through his papers (which his daughter, Teresa, generously shared with me), I happened upon a hastily written outline. Mr. Still had jotted down on a legal pad the order in which he wanted this story told for the first several chapters. I have put them in the order he wished and guessed at the order for the remaining chapters, which were easier to place because of chronological hints within the text. This ordering was made much easier because of the earlier work of two friends of Mr. Still, Carol Boggess and Sam Linkous, who first reviewed the handwritten manuscript and spent many hard hours typing it simply because they loved his writing.

Among the people who knew Mr. Still, there is much debate about whether or not this book is true. He often told similar versions of the story to many of his confidants, and even to people
he had recently met and had taken an immediate liking to. While I worked on this book, at least a dozen people related to me their memories of Mr. Still's sharing the story with them. Some felt it was outright fiction, and others were certain his tale was word-for-word memoir. The bottom line is that we have no way of knowing if this is memoir or fiction. I believe it is a more powerful book because of that mystery. There seems to be one thing that is incontestable:
Chinaberry
is at least rooted in some deep essential truth, which is at the heart of all the best writing. When writers give advice to “write what you know,” they are not necessarily telling you to tell your life story so much as they are saying that writers ought to tell their own essential truth. Whether this book is memoir or fiction, Mr. Still's truth lives within it. The wonderful messiness of real life exists in these pages, and the characters become real people to us, whether they were or not.

There are some things within the book that are undeniably autobiographical. Woven throughout this tale of Texas is also a lovely ode to Mr. Still's birth-state of Alabama, as well as a careful tribute to his parents, whose love was large if not demonstrative, something he wrote and talked about freely. The narrator's father is a veterinarian, or “horse doctor,” to use Mr. Still's description of his own father's profession. Like the narrator, Mr. Still had a short-lived stint as the first boy in the family and was doted upon by his many sisters. In his brief autobiographical writing (
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series
, vol. 17 [Detroit: Gale Research, 1993]), Mr. Still wrote this about his childhood: “Sometimes I tell folk I was born in a cotton patch as one of my first memories is of running about with a small sack Mama had sewed up for me.” He echoes these lines in
chapter 1
of
Chinaberry
, when the narrator says the following: “Later in life I would joke that I was born in a cotton patch, but sometimes
I felt as if I had been, for my first memories are of running along the rows of cotton, picking a boll here and there. By the time I could walk, my mother had sewn up a muslin sack for me.” There was an actual, known family connection to Texas, as his parents had homesteaded there before his birth, just as the narrator's had, and the narrator's father “never got Texas out of his mind.” When he was five, Mr. Still and his family moved in with his grandparents near Hootlacka Creek, which the narrator mentions as a place where he had picked flowers with his sisters. Likewise, Mr. Still wrote in his autobiography of a “black wet nurse” named Fanny, “who helped Mama care for us. She diapered us, comforted us, shielded us. We loved her with all our hearts.” She shows up in
Chinaberry
as the narrator's wet nurse: “There was one, Aunt Fanny, who had helped my mother care for the ten children as they arrived. Diapering, and diaper washing, seemed to be her chief employment, along with quieting whines and rocking infants to sleep.” Mr. Still says nothing in his autobiographical writing of having gone to Texas as a teenager, however. In fact, he skips over his teenage years almost completely.

All of the best writers use their own lives in some way. And Mr. Still was surely one of the best.

Chinaberry
is an ode to storytelling, since we learn an equal amount about the dead and the invisible characters in this story as we do about the ones involved in the present action, and all these tales are related to us by way of stories being told around the farm, whether they be Lurie's quiet recollections as she lunches with the narrator beneath the chinaberry trees or the tales Anson delivers in his boisterous way on the swing during a hot summer night.

And
Chinaberry
is certainly complex, with some puzzlements for readers. What exactly are Anson and his wife up to, anyway? How does the narrator really feel about all of this? Each
reader will read the book in a different way, of course. The most brilliant thing is that Mr. Still allows the reader that power, and he refused to let things be easily resolved. He knew that real life is complex, so writing must be as well. Mr. Still allowed his characters to speak for themselves, and for that reason I will not share any of my own judgments on what all is happening here beneath the surface, between the lines. But there is much going on in those hidden, secret places. This book proves that Mr. Still was a master of the subtle, a position that most writers can only hope to achieve. It seems to me that in this book Mr. Still has hidden as many things as he has revealed, and those secret things hunched in shadows are just as beautiful and complicated as those that he chose to illuminate.

No matter, as Mr. Still often said. The most important thing is that
Chinaberry
is a wonderful, lovely piece of art. In fact, I think it is even more wonderful because it is a great mystery. I like to think that Mr. Still would have enjoyed the fact that no one really knows whether this book is true. We do not know, but we do know that each reader is able to decide for himself or herself. This is one of the many gifts Mr. Still has given us with
Chinaberry
. As one of the earliest readers of this manuscript, as the person who had the great honor of editing the story, and as a writer who was taught by a master to discover something new every day and then to think intently about it, I know what I believe.

There are also several quotes Mr. Still wrote down within the
Chinaberry
papers that lead me to believe that he was playing with the notions of memory and memoir, of fiction and essential truth, while writing this book. Chief among them are these: “When you die others who think they know you will concoct things about you.… Better pick up a pen and write it yourself, for you know yourself best,” by Sholom Aleichem; “Of course
one must make allowance for the tendency to heighten and colour memories,” by Professor Tinker in
James Boswell's London Journal 1762–1763
; and “How does a man—be he good or bad—big or little—…make his memories interesting?” by Augustine Birrell in
Obiter Dicta
. Mr. Still jotted down many other similar quotes among his
Chinaberry
papers. There were also many magazine articles about the way memory can play tricks on us, about the way we sometimes transform childhood memories to be what we want them to be.

I have chosen two quotations from among his papers to be on the frontispiece of this book. The Lillian Hellman comment about childhood was written on a sheet of paper surrounded by Mr. Still's notes on Texas. His own comment about reality was scrawled on a sheet of paper all by itself, as if he had set it apart to open the book. Both seem appropriate for a story involving tender childhood memories interwoven with the wisdom of an old man. Likewise, I chose another of Mr. Still's scrawled notes to serve as the last line for
Chinaberry
, since it seems to sum up everything he was trying to show: “I grew up; I remembered.” Isn't this what every artist is doing, in one way or another? For writers are nothing without the remembering.

Throughout my editing of this manuscript it seemed very clear to me that Mr. Still wanted, more than anything, to tell the truth in this book while also leaving some mystery behind. The truth, of course, is nothing less than the human condition, and conveying it is a tall order for any writer. That's exactly what the haunting ending does. I believe the last chapter of this book is right up there with the five or six best endings of all time, dripping with perfection.

While editing this remarkable book, I was moved and changed. Mr. Still's writing is so beautiful and rhythmic and precise that it made me more excited about being a writer myself.
This book affected me to the core, for it is more than a record of three months in Texas during the narrator's childhood. It is a history of his entire life's thought process. It is a record of a place and time gone with the hot and ever-present Texas winds. It is a collection of stories about people who mattered, who are gone except in the memories of those who loved them and in these pages. Mr. Still has given them all to us in this wonderful last gift he left behind. He has given us his narrator (and, by extension, himself), along with Anson, Lurie, his parents, Ernest, the Knuckleheads—all of them—and once met, they will change and move you, too.