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Tarleton State Univ./Langdon Center Sept 2007
East Texas Historical Association 2006
Combining Family History and Local Culture Through Novels
In the Rivers’ Flow, Rivers Crossing, & Rivers Ebb
(c) 2007 Jim H. Ainsworth
I used to make presentations across Texas about a covered wagon journey my cousin and I made. I made these presentations dressed in a pair of boots with high riding heels. My Wranglers were stuffed into the boots’ bright yellow tops. I wore the biggest hat I owned, shaped at my own hat steamer while I stared at a 1914 photograph of my great-grandfather wearing his old hat. A red wild rag flopped across the front of my shirt in the same style displayed in that picture. Of course, I cannot be sure his was red, but from what I know of him, I just bet it was. A leather lanyard draped across my jeans with a small spur rowel attached. The spur rowel served as a fob to announce the presence of my grandfather’s timepiece in my watch pocket. My great-grandfather wore chaps, or leggin’s, as he called them, in that picture. I had on a pair of antique batwings that were almost identical to his.
I was always prepared for those programs. I had my slide projector set up and a pictorial history of a horseback-and-covered-wagon journey my cousin and I had made from Ranger, Texas, to Cooper, Texas, in 1998. Two weeks—three hundred and twenty-five miles. We duplicated the trip our ancestors had made eighty years earlier. I had my non-fiction book about the trip, Biscuits Across the Brazos, in hand. Talking about that book and that journey was easy. There were no plots, no secrets, no lies, and I had the pictures to help me if I forgot any part of the journey.
Today, I am here to talk about combining family history and local culture through novels. My first novel, In the Rivers Flow, takes place from 1954 to 1956—the second, Rivers Crossing, from 1956 to 1958. The third, Rivers Ebb, covers 1958 to 1961. These books are fiction based on real events—real people—a unique period in history, and I think, unusual places (Northeast Texas and the Texas Panhandle). Rivers is the fictional name I gave to the protagonist family. When I wrote the first novel, people in my part of the country saw the title and asked, “Which rivers are we talking about, the Red—or one of the Sulphurs?” I started to think that choosing fiction was a mistake. Evidence quickly accumulated to support that conclusion.
I wrote the opening pages to my first novel a week after my mother died. I saved as much as I could from her memories, but I knew that most of her library was lost on the day of her death. Was it her death that moved me to tell my stories? Was it the little message on my bulletin board that says You are only old when regrets replace your dreams? One of my dreams was to write a novel. Was it my desire to record precious and unusual family memories that would be lost if not recorded—or was it to preserve for generations to come family history and the way things were in rural Northeast Texas in the fifties—to stimulate discussion of the past that formed my future? It may be a selfish reason, but I sum it up by saying I write my novels to keep my library from burning down when I die.
I chose to write fiction because I wanted to be free to write about others as I saw them as a child—maybe not as they were, but as I saw them. If they were not really that way, maybe they should have been. Most of all, I wanted to be free to tell stories, to inspire curiosity in my children and in my grandchildren. When I put my young grandchildren to bed at night, they do not say, “Papa Jim, give us a lecture or share some family history.” They say, “Tell me a story.”
What do we remember most from seminars or even scholastic lectures or programs? What do we recall about a politician’s speech? Stories. Stories are an excellent way of learning—maybe the best way. Stories bind our families. They bind us as fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, and friends. Stories heal.
But can you learn anything from a story if it is fiction? Ernest J. Gaines said, “Fiction writers try not to provide answers, but to perk the interest of readers and let them ask questions.” I believe that we can reveal more in fiction by exploring the depths of our personalities and that of our characters—especially when they are based on real people.
Many people forget that research is important in fiction as well as non-fiction. Fortunately, my life-long habit of saving almost everything provided a wealth of existing research. People who know me assume it was carefully organized in appropriately named and categorized computer files. They would be wrong. Mostly, it was in scrapbooks, dusty boxes, and scattered notes written on everything from hotel stationery to the backs of business cards and napkins. Some did eventually make it to old floppy disks when computers came along. Something had told me two decades earlier to start recording memories as they came to my conscious mind, and memories do not always come at convenient times. I was able to complete the first draft of my novel using this existing treasure with a little help from libraries and the Internet.
After the first draft, additional research was done on the ground—walking around the places of my childhood—talking to folks who inspired my characters. Unfortunately, a lot of the places of my childhood are now at the bottom of a lake. Some of my best inspiration came as I tromped around bottomlands, examining old bois d’arc stumps where houses used to be and abandoned yards where I had played as a child. I was inspired as I stood on the shores of Cooper Lake and imagined what my childhood haunts looked like underwater.
Alone, I searched the places where pivotal scenes took place in my novels. I found the site of a Baptist Church in the old colored community of Klondike with binoculars as I stood on the road that used to lead to it. The road, the church, the cemetery and many homes are underwater now, but I knew the landmarks and how oak trees were positioned around the old church. An experienced guide could not get me any closer. Jernigan Bridge was one of my favorite places to play and hunt as a child. My brother and I killed our first squirrels there, and I committed my first illegal act there. (I shot a buzzard). The old wooden bridge and the creek it crossed were the most mysterious places of my childhood. I knew the area like the back of my hand as a child, but I got lost twice trying to find it as an adult. Using the abandoned railroad as a guide, I found it on my third trip. When I finally spotted it, I was knee deep in water and lily pads. As I pointed my camera at the overgrown, mossy bridge, a water moccasin casually swam by my leg. As I felt the motion of the water against my legs, I realized that my body would never be found in this remote area.
As part of my research for my third novel, I visited the house where I lived pivotal years of my life on the lonely prairie of the Texas Panhandle. Ours was the last family to occupy that old house, but it still stood resolutely in the middle of nowhere, even more isolated than it was when we drove away from it for the last time forty five years earlier. From the outside, lack of humidity kept the house looking almost the same as it had back in the sixties. Inside, little was recognizable. It had been used for storage by my cousin. He farmed the land, but did not live in the house. My cousin had told me that rattlesnakes enjoyed the old house during certain times of the year, so I was careful as I moved scrap lumber and junked pieces of farm equipment to make my way. My breath caught in my chest as I imagined my mother’s voice in the tiny kitchen, the scraping of my father’s coffee cup across his saucer as he saucered-and-blowed his coffee each morning. I went through the second bedroom, which was really a converted porch, saving my bedroom for last. I had to shove the door open to my old room, and as it scraped against the worn linoleum, a huge white bird fluttered its wings and flew through what had once been my window to the world. On edge because of snakes, it took me a few seconds to recover. I stumbled outside for a better look, but the bird had already reached soaring height. I watched it out of sight, wondering what, if anything, that soaring bird symbolized. I felt as if I could have written the entire third novel at that moment.
James Fenimore Cooper said, “The historian seeks to record facts as they occur—the novelist can garnish a probable fact.” Compression of time and events and matching them is sometimes necessary to make a story more readable. Fiction lends itself to that. Family history is fraught with clouded memories. We remember things differently, and a writer can squelch a lot of arguments by saying, “It’s fiction, Stupid.” When fiction tells an uncomfortable truth, the fiction label on the book gives the author something to point to. A cousin inspired one of the characters in In the Rivers Flow. His family and friends readily recognized him when they read the book. When he is teased about some of the youthful indiscretions portrayed in the book, he always points to the fiction label.
My first draft was written without benefit of knowing the craft of writing fiction—without a voice. I did follow one rule that I had heard about and followed when writing four non-fiction books—write what you know. When I started studying the craft, I was glad that I had written before studying. One two-day session on writing novels taught me that there must be tension on every page—that most readers will give you only a couple of paragraphs to hook them—some only a couple of lines. Conflicts must constantly increase as the novel progresses to a steamy or heart-stopping climax and ending. I recognized that my manuscript either failed or came close to failing on many of these essential ingredients. Of course, real life seldom happens that way. I wondered if all readers require that much escapism in their books.
I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and the related The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. I searched my manuscript for the call to adventure, the refusal, the first threshold, the tests, allies and enemies, the inmost cave, the ordeal, the reward, the road back, the resurrection, and the elixir. I was amazed when I found them in my story of family history and culture, and then assumed that I had imagined them because I wanted them to be there.
Many drafts and many edits later, I discovered from reading many more novels that one needs to know the rules so he can figure out when they can be bent or broken and how to do it without losing readers’ interest. I came to believe that there are many readers who will give a writer as much as a chapter to hook them if the prose is good and the characters interesting. Some readers, like myself, enjoy identifying with and caring about characters in the novels they read. Characters are even more important to us than plot. Such readers recognize that characters worth caring about cannot be fully developed in one page. We actually enjoy getting to know them line-by-line, page-by-page. I think we underrate readers today—underestimate their desire to absorb themselves in the pages of a book—even one that admits to being fiction and that does not have tension on every page.
What about novel characters who are based on real people—people who are still alive? Do truth and fiction collide? My brothers are central characters in both my books. Both are no longer alive and have become so identified with their fictional counterparts that people confuse their real names with their fictional ones. My children and grandchildren point to photos in the family album and identify them with fictional names. Is that a good thing? I think so.
I have a grandson who is named for two fictional characters in my books. Well, they are real people with fictional names. I love the confusion. It inspires questions about our history. I even catch myself referring to my family members by their fictional names. I am surprised when readers recognize someone else in a character who is actually based on myself. I cannot decide if I should be flattered or disappointed when that happens. I do know that I enjoy getting to be child, father, grandfather, and even mother when I write. It was cathartic trying to get inside my parents’ and grandparents’ heads during times of crisis as well in ordinary living. Anton Chekhov said, “Any idiot can face a crisis—it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.” I like to read about conflict and tension, but I also like to read about day-to-day living. I like a lot of that interspersed with my action and thrills.
This is a tranquil, day-to-day living excerpt from Chapter 5 of In the Rivers Flow.
On the back porch, Jake drew water from the cistern and poured some
into a wash pan and some into an empty Garrett’s snuff glass…. He removed his toothbrush from the snuff glass and mixed baking soda and salt for toothpaste. As he brushed, Griffin Rivers and Buddy came through the pasture gate. Griffin rode Buddy all the way to the back porch and relaxed in the saddle while his grandson rinsed and spat over the shelf into the yard.
This scene, of course, is not filled with tension, but it shows a little slice of the
characters’ daily lives.
Real characters and fictional ones definitely blur, but what about events? Same thing. Few who lived in Delta County during the fifties will fail to recognize a scene in Rivers Crossing in which a young girl drowns in a cistern. I first wrote the scene exactly as it happened because it occurred less than a mile from my childhood home, and I was at the scene that terrible day. However, the editing process required me to change it because the truth was so unbelievable. For those of you who have read Rivers Crossing and those of you who will, two people died in that cistern on that awful day—not one.
Have people challenged me about changing that? I expected many readers to help me out with the real facts. I have received many e-mails and letters about this part of the book—even several phone calls, but not one challenge. People who lived there during this time seem to intuitively know that I am aware of what really happened. Other readers are left with a believable story. Many have written me about their own recollections of the day and night it happened, including a future physician who was on the scene with his physician father. I do not believe this event has been recorded for history anywhere other than in local newspapers at the time. Is it harmed because the story I wrote is not factual? You decide.
My sister’s teacher friends from a different part of Texas asked for a Rivers’ tour after reading my novels. They wanted to see the places described in the books, especially those where significant events took place. That tour ended at the Old Klondike Cemetery at the side-by-side gravestones of both people who died in that cistern. They were interested enough in the fictional story to discover the whole truth.
I hope that place and his friend weather are characters in my books. I want readers to smell and feel the black gumbo soil, hear the tree frogs on spring nights in Texas, smell a rare thundershower on ground that has not felt rain in months. I tried to bring the mystery of East Texas creek and river bottoms and the merriment of Saturday nights on a small town square to the printed page. I hope my readers experience the economic, emotional, and physical hardships brought on by drought and by flood in the same way that my characters did back in the fifties. I have had comments and questions from readers about dogtrots versus dog-runs, galluses, saucered-and blowed coffee, cisterns versus wells, Prince Albert tobacco, brogan shoes, lightning rods, coal-oil stoves, and what a real push mower is. Explaining slop jars to my grandchildren took some time and acquired some giggles. All inquiries and comments inspired me.
From Chapter 4 of Rivers Ebb, Jake Rivers is getting his first look at his new home in the Texas Panhandle. A sense of place.
He stepped on the trailer fender, pulled himself up, and looked around. The house had been painted at least once, probably when it was built. Some white paint was left, but the flakes shook in the wind, trying to turn loose. The white looked dull compared to the snow. Mixed with the unpainted parts of the boards, it all blended into a motley gray thing, the color of nothing—the color of his new life. The rectangular house appeared as an afterthought, an intrusion that tried not to be noticed by the field crops and pasture surrounding it. He could see no path or walkway to the front of the house. The hut Jake had entered last night hid the back door. Mattie had called it the dirty-boots-hut. Jake thought it looked like a good places for possums to hide—or a rattlesnake.
And from Chapter 21 of Rivers Crossing, some East Texas weather. Eleven-year-old Jake is speaking to his father.
“Shy’s acting funny today, Daddy. Won’t come out of his house. Been in there since dinner. He never does that in the daytime. You think he’s sick?”
Rance peeked in the doghouse. Only the tip of Shy’s nose protruded from the door. He glanced toward the southwest horizon, looking for signs of the storm that Scar and Peanut had seemed to sense. The sky was a smoky gray, as if a fire was smoldering somewhere. The air was still and heavy with moisture. Rance, a man who did not sweat easily, felt a bead of sweat run down his spine.
“Shy knows a storm is comin’. Maybe a cyclone.”
Lightning danced around the horizon at dark, circling them like torches carried by an approaching army.
I think dialogue is necessary for a good story, and dialogue is more comfortable in fiction than in non-fiction. I maintain that most dialogue I read in non-fiction books is fiction. I like imagining what people said to each other, what the weather was like, and how it figured into their discourse and what their gestures were. I like hearing the accents, the slang. Fiction allows us to make some assumptions about those things. When I was writing about family and the people I grew up around, I did not have to make many assumptions, however. I was there, and I still talk the talk.
From Chapter 34 of Rivers Ebb, fifteen-year-old Jake gets advice from his mentor, a cowboy called String. String is bathing, wearing overalls, in a water tank at a windmill.
“Man feels the need to go to town every once in a while, Jake. Tonight’s one of those nights. As I recall, I felt the same calling when I was your age. You been stayin’ home too much. Got woman problems?” String ducked his head under the windmill pipe to rinse with fresh, cold water.
“What makes you say that?”
String dropped the overalls in stages as he stepped out on a board and began drying with a towel. “I heard the talk. Figured it was just that—talk.”
Jake turned his back until he heard the sound of String’s Wranglers coming up. “Got any advice?”
“Some folks would say, and they’d be right, that you’ve come to a mighty poor source for advice about women. I never been much count when it comes to the opposite sex.”
Jake heard the snaps as String snapped his shirt. “You ever have this kinda problem?”
“Not at your age, Jake. Guess it ain’t fair that you drew the wildest bronc in the string for your first rodeo.”
In one of the many books I read about the art and craft of writing novels, the subject of message and themes kept coming up. I was alternately told to leave them alone or include them only if I must—very carefully. I struggled with that and I still do. I plead guilty to putting messages in my writing. I am also guilty of trying to disguise them—probably unsuccessfully. I struggle with this as I try to imagine the types of readers who will read my work. One day I write for my children, another for my grandchildren, a third for seniors, baby boomers, … the list goes on. Seldom do I try to write for the market. I try not to preach because I am clearly unqualified to do so, but I think a writer who is writing about family history (and one who has lived six decades) has some obligation to talk about mistakes that were made so that we can learn from them. I am again inspired by Chekhov in this matter of message. “A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty.”
From Chapter 20 of In the Rivers Flow, twelve-year-old Jake is talking to his grandfather as he saddles his horse, Buddy. See if you think I have been too obvious with the message.
Jake put his hand on Buddy’s hip and looked up at his grandfather.
“You’re saying that all it takes to make you happy is a good cup of coffee and some ham and eggs to go with it?”
Griffin pulled his hat down a little and squinted into the morning sun. “On some days, you bet.” He crossed the reins and allowed them to rest on Buddy’s neck. He used his hands to play an imaginary fiddle. “Other days, it’s the feel of a good fiddle and bow, sharing a laugh or two with old Bob Gant, a hug from a grandchild. Griffin touched Jake’s shoulder. “Sometimes, it’s the touch of a good lookin’ woman.”
Jake had never heard his grandfather mention women before. It gave him a good feeling, like they were talking man to man. Jake could smell the leather mixing with Buddy, already starting to sweat under the blankets.
Griffin seemed to be talking to himself more than Jake now. “I especially like the feeling you get when your hand is resting in the middle of a woman’s back before the music plays. Then the sound of music courses through your blood and sweeps you both across the dance floor.”
Griffin lifted the reins from Buddy’s neck and they moved away. He held the horse for a second and spoke over his shoulder. “It ain’t just any one thing, Jake, it’s every little thing …you need to look at what you have to be grateful for, not at what you lost.”
Did I preach? Well, I apologize.
What about fame and fortune from combining family history and culture in novels? Fiction is much harder to sell than non-fiction. Mainstream fiction is much harder to sell than genre fiction. Literary fiction is the hardest to sell. Unwittingly, I chose to write books that are hard to sell. Well, I did not really choose—this type of writing chose me. An agent asked me if my book would have a broad audience because of its setting. I had to tell him that it took place in one of the smallest counties in the state—a rural county with a tiny population—a low-income county where people do not have lots of extra money to spend on books.
I am still surprised when some folks walk away when they learn that my books are novels. “I don’t read fiction” or “I don’t have time for fiction” are common remarks. Forgive me if I have become a little sensitive, but saying “I don’t read science fiction or horror fiction seems restrictive, but reasonable—but “I don’t read fiction?” Please. I understand that James Frey wrote his Million Little Pieces as a novel. Publishers hinted that they might accept it if it were true. He changed one word and a novel magically became a memoir. Voila—a bestseller—one that most novelists recognized as fiction by the end of the first chapter. Novelists have to work hard on believability, and they quickly recognize its absence. Tom Spanbauer said, “Fiction is the lie that makes the truth truer. Facts are about a series of events. Truth is about the meaning of those events.” A novel that contains truth can effectively combine enjoyment with learning. A novel disguised as a memoir is just a simple lie.
Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, (whom I recently learned is a distant cousin) was one of several passengers who escaped a sinking ship on a lifeboat. As a journalist, he wrote a factual account of the survivors’ experiences. It received little attention. However, when he fictionalized it in The Open Boat, the story became one of the most famous in American literature. It is said that he conveyed universal truth in his fiction that he could not convey though non-fictional accounts. That is what I have tried to accomplish with my books. To bring some universal truths to things that really happened. Fame and fortune? Well, they are still forthcoming.
Jim Ainsworth
September 2007
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