“If I ran down the hall, Zinnie might make me sit beside her at the sewing machine all day long—just for running down the hall, for heaven’s sake. I started to hate her and I wouldn’t mind her unless Mama was around. One day Joe Pye chanced to come in when Zinnie was going after me with the buggy whip. He grabbed the whip and raised it at Zinnie. ‘You touch that baby, dammit, and I’ll beat you to hell,’ he shouted, and Zinnie never raised a hand to me again. From that day on, Joe Pye was my hero.
“The other one I loved was Sister Maggie. She and Brother Hen had been married for nine or ten years, with no children. So they finally adopted a premature baby boy whose mother died in childbirth. Sister Maggie had a heart big enough for all the orphans of the world.”
***
“When I was ten an awful thing happened in the family. Violet was having a baby and wasn’t married. Sister Maggie’s husband came down and made the boy marry her. The next morning Sister Maggie found me crying in the privy and asked me if I’d like to come live with them in Mitchellville. ‘The school is so much better,’ she said. ‘You want to be a teacher, it matters to go to a good school.’
“I wiped my eyes and asked, ‘At the new school, will you say my name is Sanna? Not Sanna Maria?’
“‘Yes, if you want to be just Sanna.’
“‘Will you ask Mama can I go? She’s got Tattie. She loves Tattie better’n me.’
“‘I already did. Come on, precious, let’s go get up your things.’
“‘But I don’t want to leave Papa. I help him put on his shirt and shoes and socks.’
“‘You’ll come home for Christmas and summer vacation.’
“‘I hate the farm. It’d be so nice to be in town and have a bathroom and go to parties. It’s awful here. One thing I know, I ain’t go’n marry no farmer. I wouldn’t have to mind Zinnie anymore?’
“‘Only when you’re home.’
“Even now that I’m grown, I’ve thought bitterly and often that Mama certainly never had spoiled me. The Christmas before I left home to go live at Sister Maggie’s house, Mama gave Tattie a little gold ring with a tiny diamond in it, a real ‘sho-nuff’ diamond. Her present to me was a dollar bill, not even wrapped up. She just took it out of her apron pocket and said, ‘Here.’
“Mama didn’t come to my graduation from Mitchellville High School. She didn’t come to my college graduation, either, though I went out home and begged her to. ‘Sister Maggie said tell you she’ll make you a new dress to wear, Mama, and buy you a hat and shoes to go with it.’
“Mama’s expression didn’t change. ‘Y’all don’t need me,’ she said, then leaned forward in her rocking chair and spat into the fireplace.
“I hated that Mama dipped snuff.”
Above: This photograph, taken in front of Olive Ann’s great-grandfather’s store, circa 1900, provides a glimpse of the real people behind the characters in Cold Sassy Tree. Grandpa Power (Grandpa Blakeslee), who owned the store, is al the top left. A young Arnold Burns (Will Tweedy) stands in front of him, next to his father (Hoyt Tweedy). Below left: Olive Ann’s father, William Arnold Burns, just before his discharge from the army in 1918, Below right: RubyCelestia Highi, Olive Ann’s mother, at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, circa 1916.
The wedding pictures of William Arnold Burns and Ruby Celestia Hight, upon whom the characters Will Tweedy and Sanna Klein are based
The first home of Arnold and Ruby Burns, in Banks County, Georgia
Olive Ann Burns, age two
Olive Ann Burns
The Burns children: Margaret, Jean, Olive Ann, and Billy, 1945
Olive Ann with her mother
Left to right: Jean, Olive Ann, and Margaret Burns, Easier 1944
A weary young journalist at her desk at the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. “I had absolutely no confidence in myself,” Olive Ann said. “It took me two or three weeks to write a simple story.”
Andy Sparks, the editor of the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. Olive Ann said, “It took me and Andy almost as long to fall in love—eight years of working together—as it took me to write the book.”
Olive Ann loved this publicity picture, taken by her son John.
Even after thirty-three years of marriage, Olive Ann and Andy were happiest when they could be together. “With him,” Olive Ann said, “even a simple trip is sprinkled with starlight.”
Olive Ann and the former first lady Rosalynn Carter (Conway-Atlanta Photography)
The author of Cold Sassy Tree, ready to address a crowd, “I am a ham,” Olive Ann admitted.
The Sparks home at 161 Bolling Road
Olive Ann at work on Time, Dirt, and Money, 1989
Olive Ann Burns
A Reminiscence
OLIVE ANN BURNS lived sixty-five years and completed only one book. Since its publication in 1984, Cold Sassy Tree has become an American classic, selling over a million copies worldwide and still going strong. It has inspired accolades and fan letters from readers young and old, from all walks of life. Schoolchildren and cancer patients, Broadway producers and country farmers have written to say that their lives were touched, even changed, by this remarkable novel. Barbara Bush named Cold Sassy Tree one of her favorite books; Oprah Winfrey, Craig Claiborne, and B. F. Skinner wrote grateful letters to its author.
Now, nearly ten years after its publication, Cold Sassy Tree is widely regarded as one of the best-loved novels of our time. It is required reading in English classes across the country; it still appears on best-seller lists, from Washington state to the East Coast, and fan letters continue to arrive, from people who have fallen in love with fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy and the story he tells of life in a small Georgia town at the turn of the century. Over the years, there have been literally hundreds of such letters, and rare is the one that doesn’t ask for a sequel to Cold Sassy Tree. People who read Olive Ann’s book can’t help feeling they know her—that she must be just like them, except that she happened to write this wonderful novel. That is how Olive Ann herself felt. “If I can write a book,” she often said, “anybody can.”
I met Olive Ann Burns for the first time in Atlanta, on the day Cold Sassy Tree was published. But by the time we finally met in person we were already fast friends. During the preceding year we had talked on the phone every few days, and we had embarked on a correspondence that was to transcend a typical author-editor relationship, if there is such a thing. The first thing she said to me, when we were face to face at last, was, “I thought you would be plump!” “And I thought you would be old,” I blurted out. Well, I wasn’t plump, and Olive Ann certainly didn’t seem old. In fact, she was beautiful—tall and slender, with enormous brown eyes and curly dark hair. She wore red lipstick and a silvery blue dress, long dangly earrings and a sparkly necklace—and, underneath it all, flat sensible shoes.
Surely our friendship was an unlikely one. I was a novice, a twenty-five-year-old editor from New Hampshire, making my way in New York City. She was a born storyteller from the Deep South who was about to publish her first novel at the age of sixty. I knew just a bit more than she did about how books get published, and she knew far more than I did about the things that really matter—life and death, for example. While I helped her cut some two hundred pages out of her manuscript, she taught me lessons that have helped determine the course of my life. We discussed punctuation, publicity, and print runs, of course, but we spent more time talking about husbands and children, the books we loved and the ones we didn’t, the secret of a tasty casserole and the key to happiness on this earth. At times I provided her a link to the publishing process that she found so fascinating and so much fun; at other times, she offered me motherly advice, shared stories about her next-door neighbors or distant ancestors, and brought me up to date on the goings-on in her family. Always, she was an inspiration to me in her ability to see the humor, and even the joy, in any situation.
Olive Ann battled cancer on and off for ten years and spent the last three years of her life
confined to bed with congestive heart failure. And yet, in the midst of her illness, she was able to look back on the previous year, a year during which she had left the house exactly twice—once to vote, and once to see the fall leaves—and say, “This has been a happy year.” She joked about someone who had referred to her bedridden condition as her “life-style,” as if it were something she had chosen. But she took issue with another friend, who had tried to sympathize with her “horrendous ordeal.” “I’m not trying to be brave or put a happy face on it,” she wrote, “but it has not been horrendous. Working on Time, Dirt, and Money gives structure to my days, and so many friends keep me integrated with the outside world.” Knowing that she would probably spend the rest of her life in bed, hooked up to an IV tube, Olive Ann never felt sorry for herself, and her enthusiasm for writing never waned.
She worked on the novel for almost five years, years during which she also had to cope with the demands of fame, with a recurrence of cancer and debilitating rounds of chemotherapy, and finally with the death of her beloved husband, Andrew Sparks, following his own long battle with cancer. Given the obstacles she confronted, it is a wonder she was able to work at all.
As readers of Cold Sassy Tree may know, the irrepressible character of Will Tweedy is based on Olive Ann’s father, William Arnold Burns, who was fourteen years old in 1906, when the events in the novel take place. In Time, Dirt, and Money, Olive Ann introduces us to Will ten years later, and to the young woman he is about to marry, Sanna Maria Klein, who is based on Olive Ann’s mother. The novel was to be the story of her parents—of how they met, fell in love, and raised a family during the Depression. Above all, it was to be a portrait of their marriage, a marriage that was nearly destroyed by poverty, disillusion, and disappointment, but that survived and flourished again, years after both husband and wife had all but given up on finding happiness together.
Time, Dirt, and Money was due to be delivered to Ticknor & Fields on January 1, 1991. Olive Ann knew she wasn’t going to make the deadline, but she always believed that she would finish the book. During the last years of her life, she so perfected the art of being both sick and productive that it was hard to imagine she wouldn’t always be there, in her bed at 161 Boiling Road, a lacy afghan over her legs, a basket of letters to answer at her side, a Dictaphone or a pen in her hand. Andy once said that Olive Ann could be sicker than anyone else ever was, and he was right. But she had been desperately ill, and had pulled through, so many times that the news of her death, on July 4, 1990, came as a shock. She had just been talking about Time, Dirt, and Money, and I’m sure that her dying surprised her as much as it did everyone else—just as becoming a published author had surprised her. “I always thought selling a book was rather like dying,” she once said, “something that happened to other people, but never to me.”
Even now, as I read through the chapters published here, it’s hard to accept that there are no more to come. Illness may have slowed Olive Ann down, but it never stopped her imagination or dulled her passion for storytelling. Months might go by, but then there would be another letter, full of funny anecdotes and wisdom. And there would be another batch of chapters to read after any long silence, miraculously produced through her painstaking process of jotting notes by hand, dictating, editing, and rewriting. (She never sent anything that was less than perfect—and she could never resist the urge to pick up her pen and start improving an impeccably typed page.)
Only during her final hospitalization did it occur to Olive Ann that she might not live to finish her book. Sometime after midnight, on June 22, 1990, she dictated a letter to her close friend and neighbor Norma Duncan, who had transcribed all the tapes for Time, Dirt, and Money. If she couldn’t finish the book, she said, she hoped that the chapters she had already written would be published. Olive Ann was thinking of all those readers who wanted to know about Miss Love’s baby and how Will Tweedy turned out. She had promised them a sequel, and she didn’t want to let them down. This book, then, is Olive Ann’s gift to her readers, and it is one way of saying good-bye, both to her and to the unforgettable characters she created.
Olive Ann started Time, Dirt, and Money the summer after Cold Sassy Tree was published. By the time she died, she had completed these chapters, had notes on several others, and had the rest of the novel in her mind. It was a story she knew well—in fact, she had already written the story of the real Will and Sanna. Long before she thought seriously of writing a novel, Olive Ann undertook to record the stories of her parents’ lives as a keepsake for herself and her family. She began early in 1972, shortly after she learned that her mother was dying. That year, Olive Ann spent countless hours with her, asking her to recall her childhood and the early years of her marriage. Olive Ann took notes as her mother spoke, and the long afternoons drew them close, diverting their attention from pain and illness. They also indulged Olive Ann’s lifelong love of storytelling.
Ruby Celestia Hight Burns died that September, but by then Olive Ann had become engrossed in her project. “What hooked me on family history was not names and dates,” she said, “it was the handed-down stories that bring the dead back to life.” She interviewed aging aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins. She found and copied love letters her parents had written during World War I and grocery bills dating from the Great Depression, which had somehow survived in the family possessions. Report cards, telegrams, early photographs, letters, and anecdotes contributed by other relatives—even a floor plan of the family home—all went into the book, evoking an era that Olive Ann knew would soon be lost forever, save for these memories and mementoes.
With her mother gone, Olive Ann turned to her father, a man who “could always make a good story better in the telling.” Mourning the loss of his wife and in failing health himself, Arnold Burns still found enormous pleasure in practical jokes and funny stories. “I’m sure he could have made a million dollars as a stand-up comic on television,” Olive Ann said. Now, he embellished the tales she had heard all her life, some of which had assumed the proportion of myth, and he recalled events he had forgotten but that came forth with her gentle urging and well-placed questions. Arnold’s voice later became Olive Ann’s inspiration for Will Tweedy, and many of Will’s boyhood adventures can be found, in their original versions, among Arnold Burns’s most delightful recollections. He painted a vivid picture of Commerce, Georgia, at the turn of the century, a picture that later served as a model for Cold Sassy. And one of his favorite stories was about his Grandpa Power, a store owner in Commerce, who got married again three weeks after his wife died. According to Arnold, Grandpa Power said he “had loved Miss Annie, but she was as dead as she’d ever be and he had to git him another wife or hire a housekeeper, and it would just be cheaper to git married.” Olive Ann recalled that, even as she heard her father tell the story, she thought it would make a fine first chapter in a novel. “But I never thought I would write it,” she said.
Arnold Burns died less than a year after his wife, and finishing the family history became a way for Olive Ann to cope with the loss of her parents and to preserve their voices for her own two children. She had taken down their stories in their own words, exactly as they told them, adding her recollections and contributions from other family members as she went. The result is two typewritten volumes crammed with letters, photos, and countless other small treasures, and brought to life by a chorus of voices from the past, preserved in all their raw beauty, humor, and eccentricity. “Details matter,” Olive Ann often said, and she paid attention to them. In searching for her ancestors, she wrote, “I was after the facts of their lives, of course, but also for anything anybody remembered about someone’s habits, sayings, or physical appearance.” She called the book Yellow Paint on the Cows’ Tails...and other Stories, in reference to one of Arnold’s boyhood pranks, and she dedicated it “to the memory of my parents and all those who come after them.”
When she began to write Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann found the family history an invaluable
source for the authentic expressions and anecdotes that give the novel its flavor. Much as she loved to write, Olive Ann’s real passion was collecting such bits and pieces. Whenever she heard a phrase that captured her fancy, she jotted it down and saved it; she kept lists of colorful country names and local expressions, and slap-dash files of amusing stories, dialect, superstitions, and lore. Like a quilter with a bulging bag of scraps, she loved to find ways to work these colorful fragments into her large design. As her daughter, Becky, observed, “Mother wrote backward. She had all these little bits and pieces, and she was always trying to find places to use them.”
***
A year after Olive Ann’s death, I spent several days in Atlanta going through her papers. It was hard to know where to begin. With the boxes of fan mail stacked up in her neighbor’s spare bedroom? With the piles of revised manuscript pages that represented so many years of work on Cold Sassy Tree and Time, Dirt, and Money? With all those scraps of paper and backs of envelopes on which Olive Ann had written bits of dialogue, ideas for scenes, and lists of funny names? With the files of correspondence to and from her family and friends? That first morning, I poked around just enough to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material and by sadness. I remembered the hours Olive Ann and I had spent one afternoon, side by side on the sofa, with the family history open in her lap. As we paged through it, she pointed to a photograph here, a letter there, and told the story behind it. Now, faced with the task of telling some of Olive Ann’s story, I realized that the family history was the place to start, for it holds not only the seeds of both Cold Sassy Tree and Time, Dirt, and Money, but also an account of Olive Ann’s own beginnings, on a hardscrabble farm in Banks County, Georgia.