A Texas Jubilee: Thirteen Stories from the Lone Star State

Foreword

Foreword Most readers think it’s easier to write short stories than a full-length novel, and that’s as wrong as a thought can get. Those of us who write for a living know it’s damned near impossible to craft memorable scenes and characters in such a limited number of pages, let alone do it well and often enough to have the makings of a short-story collection. The collections that do reach print almost invariably disappoint, with maybe one or two good stories and the rest of them forgettable dreck. This makes James Ward Lee’s A Texas Jubilee doubly special; here is an author who not only conjures exceptional reading in short, lyrical bursts, but pulls it off time after glorious time. These thirteen tales of the small Northeast Texas town of Bodark Springs in the 1930s and ’40s are as good as anything in years. In recent memory , perhaps only Robert Olen Butler’s Had A Good Time and Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness match up in terms of pulling us in on the first page and breaking our hearts on the last one because there aren’t any more gem-like tales left. The best storytellers always leave us satisfied and yet wanting more, and that’s what Jim Lee accomplishes here. And that may surprise some people. Jim’s been a standout in Texas literary circles for decades, as a teacher and an editor and a critic and an essayist. His credentials include membership in both the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Literary ix Hall of Fame. But the scoundrel’s been holding out on us all that time—he can also create the kind of fiction that makes you laugh out loud or breaks your heart and sometimes does both at the same time. Even if you aren’t of a certain age, and even if you haven’t been to that part of the Northeast Texas-Oklahoma border where Ernest Tubb is a more respected philosopher than Plato What’s-His-Name, you still know A Texas Jubilee’s memorable cast of characters. Most of the featured ones are from the Dell family, county postman Grady and his much younger wife Mamie and their kids Jackie and Tommy Earl, plus Granny, who was a child back in the Civil War, and nephew J. T. and his wife Hattie, both three-hundred pounders. Grady drinks and Mamie sneaks off some afternoons with John Houston to the Rose Hills Tourist Cabins where it’s so romantic, and everybody interacts with other Eastis County denizens who are at once familiar and uniquely memorable. Just consider Edna Earle Morris, the town sex symbol, who claims that one day Jesus dropped in to visit while she was doing her ironing, and he was tall and blond just like Wayne Morris in the 1937 film Kid Galahad. Or, perhaps, my personal favorite, ten-year-old Peavine Deerfield, who tries to get himself baptized at every revival meeting, missing out only on sanctification by Mormons, Episcopalians, Catholics, and Unitarians because “there were none of them in Bodark.” How about St. Louis Cardinals’ pitcher Harry “Foots” Waller, the town’s most famous citizen, who gets out of World War II army duty thanks to his flat, size-sixteen feet only to be coerced into serving as Bodark’s head air-raid warden, tasked with spotting any waves of German or Japanese bombers trying to use the town’s lights at night to find their way to Fort Worth? I promise you that there is literary richness on every page. Jim builds these stories out of equal parts imagination, history, and heart. A Texas Jubilee captures the quirky past without mocking it and reminds us that, for all the changes in the x xi world since, human nature has remained essentially the same. Only the finest writers can make that case without getting cloying or preachy. After reading this collection, you’ll have all the proof you need that James Ward Lee ranks among them. Jeff Guinn Fort Worth, Texas ...