Found this daguerreotype totally by accident on Flickr. She's related to my father's mother, through the Henings of Virginia. My grandmother and her siblings always talked about Aunt Julia of Smithfield, and I have some silver spoons with Hayden engraved on them. It's amazing to see such a lifelike likeness of someone who is just a name on a genealogical tree. Mr.Hayden was her second husband - her first, J.D. Wilson, died. My great aunt Dolly's real name was Julia Cabaniss Batten, in fact.
What a pretty lady.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
First Drafts and the Harper Lee Saga
I have to admit, the news of a new (old) Harper Lee novel sent me into a heavenly place. How wonderful is this, I thought. Then I had a second, third, and even fourth think, and I'm getting goosebumps. Not the good kind. The creepy kind.
So I pulled out the copy I own of Shields' unauthorized biography of Ms. Lee, titled MOCKINGBIRD. It's well written and feels very grounded, and I haven't read it in a while. So I looked up the pages about Mockingbird's evolution, and what I read reinforced the icky goosebumps.
Go Set the Watchman was a first draft, all right. The agent Maurice Cairn and his wife, Annie Laurie Williams, who agented film rights, saw it as a great start, but anecdotal with no story arc. It needed rewriting, so Ms. Lee rewrote and rewrote, for two and a half years. She produced the best book she could, and it was To Kill a Mockingbird. I'd been wondering at this news of a "newly discovered" manuscript, when it was clear the agents and Lippincott's editor, Tay Hophof (? I'm sure I've misspelled the editor's name) knew and had read Watchman. Why hadn't they published it after Mockingbird, especially since they were dying for a follow-up novel?
I'll tell you why. First drafts are usually so ugly only their mothers can love them. Then they go through growing pangs and the awkward phase, until they mature enough to be shown to the world. I have first drafts hidden in the attic that I should take out and burn. My bet is, Watchman is that first draft that was filled with passion but plot problems. We've all been there.
Anything by Nelle Harper Lee is worth its weight in gold. I get that. But after years of refusing to put out another book, I can't help but wonder what changed Ms. Lee's mind.
I can only come to ugly conclusions, none of which taint Ms. Lee, but only those she has trusted. I would hate to learn who it is, singular or plural, because the wrath of the reading public can be vicious. If only it doesn't taint Ms. Lee's literary heritage and well deserved stature as a great writer and social conscience.
I pray that is so.
So I pulled out the copy I own of Shields' unauthorized biography of Ms. Lee, titled MOCKINGBIRD. It's well written and feels very grounded, and I haven't read it in a while. So I looked up the pages about Mockingbird's evolution, and what I read reinforced the icky goosebumps.
Go Set the Watchman was a first draft, all right. The agent Maurice Cairn and his wife, Annie Laurie Williams, who agented film rights, saw it as a great start, but anecdotal with no story arc. It needed rewriting, so Ms. Lee rewrote and rewrote, for two and a half years. She produced the best book she could, and it was To Kill a Mockingbird. I'd been wondering at this news of a "newly discovered" manuscript, when it was clear the agents and Lippincott's editor, Tay Hophof (? I'm sure I've misspelled the editor's name) knew and had read Watchman. Why hadn't they published it after Mockingbird, especially since they were dying for a follow-up novel?
I'll tell you why. First drafts are usually so ugly only their mothers can love them. Then they go through growing pangs and the awkward phase, until they mature enough to be shown to the world. I have first drafts hidden in the attic that I should take out and burn. My bet is, Watchman is that first draft that was filled with passion but plot problems. We've all been there.
Anything by Nelle Harper Lee is worth its weight in gold. I get that. But after years of refusing to put out another book, I can't help but wonder what changed Ms. Lee's mind.
I can only come to ugly conclusions, none of which taint Ms. Lee, but only those she has trusted. I would hate to learn who it is, singular or plural, because the wrath of the reading public can be vicious. If only it doesn't taint Ms. Lee's literary heritage and well deserved stature as a great writer and social conscience.
I pray that is so.
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Darkroom
Jane Lewis photographs the dead. Inside, she's half-dead herself. Burying her past will be harder than it would be to lower her into the ground in a box.
Chapter 1
Staring
at the decomposing body, swelling like living tissue with insects, flesh
slipping into the dirt as another bone sank into the loam, Jane forced herself
to do what she’d come to do. Shoot the
dead woman.
Sliding the
glass into the box she’d made just for this project, she draped a black cloth
over her head, the camera, and her body.
Wearing deepest black for this shoot made sense. No one else was mourning these newly dead
bodies.
Sliding
the cap off the lens, she held her breath as pale light poured into the camera,
onto the silver, forging images of the decomposing body of a woman of an age
that no longer mattered. The corpse’s
flesh had sunk into a filmy coating for bones that would last a while longer,
as long as the wild animals were kept at bay by the Body Farm’s razor wire
fence. Gazing through the lens, Jane
counted slowly until the image was firmly planted on the glass. The lens cover slid back into place with no
hint of anxiety.
Jane’s
hands shook as she folded the black drape and dropped it into the back of her
Suburban. She had to expose the plate
quickly. Slipping into protective
gloves, she began the chemical wash that would turn this nameless, faceless
body into art. A silver plate she’d call
“Beauty from Ashes No. 3.” As the image
developed, she had to bite her lip to keep from shouting. She knew she had ‘it’ right this time. This poor woman, unknown and unburied, had
been relegated to the scientists after the medical examiner finished with her
and no one stepped up to claim the remains. What was left of her red hair
fanned the ground. Though her final bits and pieces would one day be excessed
to the crematory, she’d live on as long as Jane’s shimmery, ethereal picture
survived.
“I
won’t forget you,” Jane murmured as she fixed the plate with the reverence of a
pall bearer touching the coffin for the last time. She didn’t want it hurt during the long drive
back to her farm.
Stripping
off the gloves, Jane secured the camera and the rest of her equipment and climbed
into the driver’s seat. With a honk at
the guard, she let him know she’d finished for the day. Getting permission to photograph the
decomposing bodies at the Farm had taken a bit of arm-twisting. Much as she disliked it, fame held some
perks. Her agent assured the scientists
who studied the rates of bodily decomposition that Jane would treat her
subjects with respect and dignity.
Showing a few of her prior pieces in the Beauty from Ashes series to the
gruff, older men who spent their lives trying to find out how and when people
died, she’d earned their trust. She
didn’t know if they understood the questions she was asking in her art, but
they’d quickly comprehended she wasn’t a sensationalist. Dr. Brody had even paid her a quiet
compliment, when he’d told her he had the same feeling whenever he saw the
dead.
She
drove the long hours back to Culvert without seeing the road. Somehow, every face she’d shot today morphed
into that of her mother the last time she’d seen her - dead in the dirt of an
embankment hidden from the highway, her murky eyes staring straight at Jane’s
four year old self.
Now,
though, she had to get back to the farm and get ready for the work that paid
for her rolling acres and all that expensive fencing. As she pulled off the paved state road onto
the gravel drive, flanked by ancient magnolias, she felt some of the tension
that rode her shoulders ease up a bit.
The
white farm house, a classic American four-square, Granting in the shadows of
the huge oak trees that guarded its corners, welcomed her with its solid plain
lines. She’d worked long and hard for
this home. Her roots ran shallow, but
they grew deeper each day she lived on the this land, these gently sloping
pastures, by the pond with its mud-trampled bank where the horses watered each
morning when she let them out of their stalls.
Life
in the city had given her a name in art circles, showings in the right
galleries, and the luxury of paying for a big chunk of Virginia countryside. Now, she went to bed to the rustle of leaves
or the burping of mating frogs, instead of emergency sirens and neon
lights. The trade-off between the energy
of the city and hours that slipped by without notice was worth every penny her
farm had cost her.
Parking the Suburban by the back door, Jane
unloaded the plates onto the enclosed porch.
As she turned the knob into the kitchen, she paused, part of her
listening still for Beau’s raucous greeting.
His bark should have shaken the house’s framing by now. Sadness swept over her, a deep, bone-chilling
grief she lived with every day.
She’d
buried the Russian wolfhound near the pecan tree by the stable. Beau’s affinity for horses hadn’t been
returned by the equines he’d wanted as friends.
Nipping playfully at their heels, expecting a game of chase, he’d dodged
too close to a cranky mare named Letty.
One hoof caught Beau under his chin, killing him instantly.
She’d
run to his body, too late to save him, too late for the vet, in the middle of
the yard, his blue eyes clouded with death, his skin growing cold.
Her
hands ached to stroke his fur, to run down his spine to his tickle spot,
sending his tail beating against her leg.
The
quiet kitchen gave her no greeting.
“I
should get another dog,” she muttered, carting the precious glass plates into
her darkroom.
She
wouldn’t, however. She seldom made a
mistake like Beau. Everyone she loved died.
The horses had been purchased to serve as subjects for her art, nothing
more. She’d become death’s child at the age of four and the Grim Reaper had
settled in for the long haul. Beau was
just his most recent victim. Eventually,
death would cart her off too. Often,
when the quiet in her head threatened to explode, she wished it would be sooner
rather than later.
“Not
tonight,” she protested as she jerked off her filthy clogs and tossed them by
the back door.
Food. Work.
The trappings of normalcy, or as close as she could come. She shook herself out of memories of Beau by
staring in her refrigerator.
Nothing
there. Bread and peanut butter would be
enough. She hauled them out of the pantry and made dinner. Popping her answering machine on, she listened
as a man’s voice on the recording boomed into her quiet sanctuary of a home.
“Just
making sure we’re on for tomorrow. I’ll
be in the cabin out back, let yourself in through the garden gate,” he
continued after tossing his name out first.
Grant
Winston. Former stock car Cup
winner. More money than God, and that
was before his other enterprises. Part
interest in a professional baseball team.
Much to her shock, he was a Culvert neighbor. None of her neighbors recognized the name as
someone famous. In fact, was he just another farmer, raising big, black Angus
cattle on his many acres, using hundreds more as an environmental refuge. She knew that part had stumped the locals,
who wondered why any farmer in his right mind wouldn’t use every acre to its
fullest capacity.
Evidently,
the environmentalists backed by Grant wanted to use his image in an ad
campaign. A Jane Lewis portrait had been his request, her agent told her, and
since her astronomical price had been accepted, Jane was stuck. She’d really hoped she wouldn’t have to do
another portrait, and her fee would force them to turn her down. Evidently, Grant Winston wanted her and no
one else, her agent had told her when she’d called with the bad news.
Chewing
on the sandwich, Jane flopped on the ancient couch in the front room and
threw her feet onto the hassock. She was
in no mood to pamper some fancy, spoiled stock car racer with more money than
sense. Not that her portraits were
flattering, even when the subject sizzled with natural beauty. Beneath the skin and bone, blood and tendons,
everyone was a skeleton. Eschewing
color, Jane found the core within each subject in brutal black and white.
Often,
the results weren’t pretty. In fact, if
you looked at the Beauty to Ashes series, they were far from it. Grant Winston would get what he wanted, a
true Jane Lewis. If he didn’t like it,
well, tough. As a neighbor, she seldom
saw him. Picking up dog food for Beau,
she’d spied him now and then at the Southern States store, that was all. His name had meant nothing to her. It still didn’t. Nascar and stock car racing held no interest
for her, even if it seemed that every man in town sported a ball cap with a
number 24 or 8 emblazoned on the bill.
A
raindrop struck the porch’s tin roof with a quick ping. Another followed. Pulling her thoughts from Beau, Jane tried to
remember if she’d rolled up the driver’s window in the Suburban. Rain had
drenched the valley for a month, making it the wettest spring in memory. She’d pulled into her yard in a rare lull in
the deluge, sucking in fresh air through the opened windows like a drowning
victim.
A
flash of lightning followed by a roof-shaking burst of thunder jerked her to
her feet. Summer storms in the valley
had brutalized the lower-lying areas, swelling creeks over roads and into
basements with sudden savagery. Oblivious to the rain that now pounded her, she
hurried into the yard, car keys in her hand.
Sure
enough, she’d left the window down.
Inside, she turned on the power and pressed the button that raised it.
As rain sluiced down the windshield, she relaxed into the leather seat,
careless of her wet clothes, her soaked hair.
She loved the sound made by rain on the roof. The downpour promised air cleansed, even if
only for a few morning hours, of the humidity that bore down on the valley this
time of year. Crisp light. Clarity for
her lenses. If the storm blew over
before morning, she’d try her pinhole camera.
First,
though, she’d check on the horses. Braving the pelting rain, she popped out of
the Suburban and raced for the old barn.
Chris would have brought them in from the pasture and fed them. Eleven years old, he lived in a rundown farm
house on the north side of her property, a small buffer between her farm and
that of Grant Winston. Chris showed up
at her door one day and offered to take care of the three animals in return for
riding rights. She’d been glad to take
him up on it.
The
horses embodied beauty to her, nothing else.
Chris had shown her their power and personalities, and along with his
lessons, she’d grown to know and admire this resilient child who refused to let
anything stand in his way. If he
continued to grow at his current rate, however, he’d never become the jockey he
believed was his destiny. Maybe, Jane
mused, staring at the storm from the safety of the barn door, she’d find a way
to get him some work with a trainer.
Trainers didn’t have to weigh a hundred pounds.
Inside
the barn, the horses wickered with the next clap of thunder. Jane checked each one, stroking soft muzzles
to calm them as Chris had taught her.
Unsettled but fine, she decided, as she returned to the opened door to
risk a run to the porch.
The
torrent rampaging across the muddy paddock swept soil like a broken dam across
the ungrassed yard between house and barn.
Shoeless, Jane didn’t worry as she stepped into the muddy mess. Head
down, she raced for the house, cold water pummeling her back.
A
large lump of cloth and something else, something that seemed familiar, caught
her eye. Skidding to a stop, she shoved
rain-soaked hair from her eyes. Not
here, not now. She’d just driven
back from the Body Farm. How could this
be in her own back yard?
Not
this, but she. Touching
the fabric, caked with mud and debris, Jane made out a flower pattern. A bit of tattered lace. A mother-of-pearl button. A skull.
Bones tangled in what remained of a dress.
A
dead woman.
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