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Reviewed by:
  • Chinaberry by James Still
  • Ellesa Clay High
Chinaberry. By James Still. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. Pp. xviii, 153.)

Some writers carry their most poignant, personally haunting stories to their graves. James Still, the celebrated “Dean of Appalachian Literature,” left behind an uncompleted manuscript when he died at 94 in 2001. He probably began this autobiographical novel in the mid-1980s and still kept it close [End Page 95] to him in his hospital room, in a battered suitcase like the ones packed with essentials and placed by the door for emergencies. He hadn’t finished the book, but he also hadn’t abandoned it.

When approached by Still’s literary executors, Bill Marshall, Lee Smith, and Bill Weinberg, novelist Silas House agreed to edit this work by one of his “literary heroes” (ix). The daunting task took six years; the result is one Still’s readers will appreciate and perhaps even treasure. As House relates, the novel “changed me forever by showing me that every single sentence in any book has to be fretted over; polished, pruned,” and that the best writing was “packed tight with emotion.” He became convinced that it was “the book that Mr. Still most wanted to write” (x).

Unlike such previous classics such as River of Earth (1940), Pattern of a Man & Other Stories (1976), and The Wolfpen Poems (1937), Chinaberry isn’t set in Appalachia, but in regions from Still’s childhood. The narrator, who remains unnamed until the last page, is similar to other Still protagonists—young, sensitive boys, innocent yet filled at times with shame.

The story covers a summer when the boy travels with family acquaintances from Alabama to the East Texas cotton fields where his father hopes his son can experience Texas as he himself had in his youth (10). The “Texas” the narrator encounters, however, is quite different: a ranch named Chinaberry that is located in the “blacklands,” the most “fertile landmass” in America, a “geographical miracle of black dirt” that also is “bursting with stories” (107). Wealthy owners Anson and Lurie Winters embody this rich complexity, and, as the narrator later realizes, looking back, “we can never get plumb to the bottom of anybody, not all the way down to what is dark and hidden and cannot bear the light of recognition” (16–17).

Chinaberry is filled with mystery and ambiguity: twins who aren’t really twins, a generation of boys named Jack, a wife who feels she is third in line for her husband’s affection, a thirteen-year-old narrator who is asked to deny his identity and become an eerie replacement for the six-year-old son Anson Winters had lost in a previous marriage. The teenager literally is treated with a love and diligent closeness reserved for babies, hobbled by his own need for missed childhood attention and by his desire to assuage the grief of a man who is “bigger than life.” In the process, he must transform into a “Mini-Me” of Anson: “What he wore, I wore in a smaller version,” dressed “like a toy cowboy” (32, 50). As he is taken into the Winters family, Anson whispers in his ear, “My little man . . . my little Anson . . . my baby boy . . . you’re already home “ (68). Only when Lurie later becomes pregnant is the narrator abruptly released by Winters.

The novel moves with an uncomfortable undercurrent of actions hinted at but unsupported by evidence: relationships not realized or perhaps not even [End Page 96] experienced, and concludes with a last chapter that is “right up there with the five or six best endings of all time, dripping with perfection” (xvii). When the narrator returns home, another character declares, “Something’s done happened to you like I said it would. It’s writ on your forehead and buried in your eyes. Whatever it was, it’ll go with you to your grave. Whoever it was, you’ll be looking for them till death takes your breath” (139).

And so it seemed for James Still. Almost. Thanks to Silas House and others, this “ode to storytelling” and “history of [Still’s] entire life thought process” is ours to inherit (xviii...

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