Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (21 page)

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.'”

On February 1, 1960, Olive Ann gave birth to a son, John. During those years, she didn't write much at all. “Although I'm not a great housekeeper (I use a dust cloth when I can see the dust without my glasses),” she admitted, “I care about the house being a home. I don't resent the fact that cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes has to be part of homemaking, but I do wish I were more effective at it.”

When Medora Perkerson died, Olive Ann was offered her job as the newspaper's advice columnist, “Amy Larkin.” She snapped up the chance to work at home, and for the next seven years, she said, she “lived like a queen. I had a full-time maid and cook. I took care of the children and wrote the column, even when I was sick. It's easier to write than vacuum when you're sick, and I was always getting sick with sinus or chest infections.” At times she was too ill to care for the children, and John and Becky would go off to stay with their grandparents on Boiling Road, or at Olive Ann's sister Jean's. Even then, she realized that there was one great advantage to illness—it created space and time for writing. The mail to Amy Larkin made Olive Ann shock-proof and taught her much about human nature. But she knew that as long as she was answering letters, nothing more substantial would come from her typewriter. So she gave up the column and resumed writing three or four stories a year for the magazine.

In the fall of 1971, Olive Ann's mother underwent surgery for stomach cancer. On the morning of the operation, Olive Ann prayed all the way to the hospital, “Dear God, please don't let it be inoperable.” But the cancer had already spread. Afterward Olive Ann reflected that, of course, her mother's cancer was inoperable regardless of her prayer; it was simply too late for God to change it. These thoughts marked a turning point for her, for it occurred to her that she had always prayed wrong, that almost everybody did. It was a mistake to ask God for material things, “like Cadillacs, and a pay raise, and for the body to get well.” Still, it would be several more years before she carried this idea any further, or before she moved beyond what she called “appreciation prayers”—“Thank you, God, for this; thank you, God, for that.”

Because Ruby Burns was susceptible to bouts of depression and anxiety, the doctor suggested that she not be told the outcome of the operation, and Arnold agreed. Olive Ann thought that the challenge of keeping the truth from his wife was part of what sustained her father over the following months. “Deception for a cause never bothered him at all,” she said. The doctor predicted that Ruby would have one or two good months following the surgery, after which it would all be downhill. At the most, he thought, she had about six months to live. For Olive Ann, the hardest part was lying to her mother. “I seldom had in my life,” she explained. She also felt Ruby was fully capable of handling the truth. “She had always been the kind to go to pieces over a Disposall not working or a water heater exploding,” Olive Ann wrote, “but the big things she could stand. I knew she could stand anything if Daddy was holding her hand and loving her out loud. But I couldn't tell her if Daddy didn't want to, and what if he did know best?”

After Ruby's surgery, the family history became a family project and, as Olive Ann wrote later, “we had a wonderful winter and spring.” A relative had already worked on early genealogies, which Olive Ann's sister Margaret began collating and typing.

When Ruby Burns died in September 1972, Olive Ann wrote, “I have to mention Mother's beauty—physical beauty. As she lost weight in the last weeks I thought I had never seen anybody so beautiful. Her bone structure, her face, was an artist's perfection. It was the beauty of youth; I could now imagine how absolutely perfect her beauty must have been when she and Daddy married. She was five foot three and only weighed 112 when she married, but in maturity she had always been overweight, and though glowing and lovely, her face was just not revealed. I shall never forget her on her birthday—so physically beautiful, her dark eyes alive and sparkling with hope and love.”

By the time Olive Ann's father died, the next July, the family history was nearly complete. Olive Ann ended it with a eulogy for both of her parents, now “side by side in the twin beds of death.” Her mother's death was the first she had ever experienced in her immediate family. “After all that's happened,” she wrote to friends of her parents, “it almost seems now that Daddy died within weeks instead of ten months later, and that grief for one was all wrapped up with grief for the other, as if it were all one package.”