Understanding Truman Capote

Chapter 1 Understanding Truman Capote

chapter 1 Understanding Truman Capote Lillie Mae Faulk desperately wanted an abortion. Within a few weeks of her marriage to Archulus (“Arch”) Persons in 1923, she realized she had made a terrible mistake. At first Arch seemed like her ticket out of small-town America. A natural salesman with a charming personality, Arch came from a well-respected Alabama family, and his talk of money-making schemes dazzled the sixteen-year-old girl, who dreamed of going to the big city. She would finally escape Monroeville, a town with no paved streets and a population of just over one thousand people . . . or so she thought. She soon discovered that her new husband was not what he appeared to be. Arch ran out of money on their honeymoon along the Gulf Coast, and after deciding to stay in New Orleans to find work, he scraped together enough cash to buy his wife a return ticket to Alabama. Lillie Mae felt duped. She was right back where she started, living with her three spinster cousins and their bachelor brother in the family house. She was not going to let these circumstances dim her aspirations, though. She enrolled in business school with plans of making it on her own, but a few weeks later she realized she was pregnant. The thought of having a permanent connection with Arch chilled her, but it was difficult to get an abortion in the 1920s—particularly in the South. As a result Truman Streckfus Persons (whose name would later be changed to Truman Capote after his mother’s second marriage) was born on September 30, 1924. Neither Arch nor Lillie Mae had much interest in parenthood. Arch, who possessed P. T. Barnum’s hunger for get-rich-quick schemes but lacked the showman’s acumen, spent much of his life moving from one fruitless enterprise to another. One of his more curious ventures involved managing the Great Pasha, a sideshow performer who could survive being buried alive 2 Understanding trUman capote for nearly five hours. (Capote would later resurrect this figure in his haunting short story “A Tree of Night.”) As Arch’s entrepreneurial efforts became less scrupulous (particularly through his habit of writing bad checks), he would find himself in legal trouble and behind bars numerous times throughout his life. Truman’s mother was preoccupied with her own affairs—literally. She began seeing other men a few months after Truman’s birth, and her young son witnessed a number of these dalliances firsthand. In short, Truman was a neglected child who, not surprisingly, developed a profound fear of abandonment—a fear his parents did little to assuage. When the family traveled together, for instance, Arch and Lillie Mae had no scruples about locking Truman in their hotel room (sometimes in a dark closet) and leaving him for the evening. They simply told the hotel staff to ignore the boy if he started screaming, which was often the case. His parents came back on those nights, but in the summer of 1930, with Arch away to pursue yet another scheme, Lillie Mae left Truman with her relatives in Monroeville indefinitely. She decided to follow her own dreams in New York City. The three Faulk sisters, Jennie, Callie, and Nanny Rumbly (“Sook”), became Truman’s family for the next two years, and they would inspire the central characters in a number of his works, including The Grass Harp and “A Christmas Memory.” Jennie, the most authoritarian member of the family, owned a successful hat shop that sold a variety of women’s goods. Her volatile temper helped fuel a contentious relationship with her youngest sister, the proper and sanctimonious Callie. Though she had been a schoolteacher, Callie eventually managed the finances of Jennie’s store. Sook possessed a childlike spirit and rarely left the property. Only twice a year did she walk to the nearby forest to scavenge ingredients for her dropsy cure and Christmas fruitcakes. Two African American women, “Aunt” Liza and Anna Stabler, also spent a great deal of time at the Faulk house, and as hired help they did much of the cooking and cleaning. The cantankerous Anna, who would become Catherine in The Grass Harp, lived in a shed behind the house, had no teeth, played a mean accordion, and argued fearlessly with whites. She also denied having any black blood. Truman spent most of his time with Sook, who played games with him in the attic, and Nelle Harper Lee—a neighbor and...