If Ruby was feisty and independent, it was because she had been forced to be. Her life had been shaped by her father’s early death and by her mother’s rejection of her. “Ruby’s father got sick when she was eight,” Olive Ann wrote, “and after that nothing was ever right again...From then on she always expected the worst to happen, not the best.” Sanna’s childhood was based on Ruby’s as Olive Ann had recorded it. “When Ruby was ten,” she wrote in the family history, “Sister Ollie and Brother Ed invited her to stay with them in Greensboro so she could go to a better school. This made a good education possible for her, yet it was the beginning of an isolation complex from which she still suffered as an adult. To belong somewhere became an obsession. Her education cost her a mother, for she never again felt that Mama was interested even.”
Olive Ann had grown up hearing about the unloved little girl who was given just a dollar for Christmas while her six-year-old sister received a diamond ring; whose mother hadn’t attended her high school graduation or her wedding. “I went to see my mother when school was out,” Ruby told Olive Ann, “and showed her my engagement ring and she didn’t say anything. She just looked at it. Arnold and I were married on the eighth of September at Sister Ollie’s house. Mama didn’t come to the wedding.” Olive Ann found it hard to believe that any mother could reject a daughter like this. Such experiences went a long way toward explaining Ruby’s bouts of moodiness and anxiety, and the sometimes unreasonable demands she made on those around her. In creating Sanna, Olive Ann tried to see the world as her mother had seen it. Soon after she returned from the Hambidge Center, she sent me a photograph of her mother, taken when she was a dark-haired young beauty with large, sad eyes. “This is Sanna,” Olive Ann wrote.
Olive Ann describes Sanna as “a perfectionist and a worrier.” She is obsessed with the idea of finding happiness, and for her, as Olive Ann wrote in her notes for the novel, “happiness means being first with somebody, having her own home, being loved by a perfect man and perfect, loving children.” Much of the dramatic tension was to come from the difference between Will and Sanna, each wanting such different things from their marriage. Rejected by her mother, Sanna spends the rest of her life seeking love and acceptance. “The theme of Sanna is disillusionment,” Olive Ann wrote. “Her life is the pursuit of happiness and perfection, but she finds happiness and perfection impossible to obtain—her idea of happiness is constant joy, no changes.”
By contrast, “Will’s idea of life is to be challenged. [He] loves trying anything new, loves change—is impatient with Sanna—living is a matter of making things work if you can....In fact, the harder things are, the more he is excited and challenged.”
Ten days before their wedding, Arnold Burns sent Ruby Celestia Hight a diamond engagement ring. Olive Ann wrote in the family history, “All her life she treasured the fact that it was a perfect stone. Then perhaps five years before she died the jeweler who cleaned it said it had a crack—he said a diamond can survive all manner of licks and then get hit just the right way, maybe on a sink, and crack like that. It was a great blow to Ruby, who treasured perfection. But to me—I wear it now—it is a symbol that a marriage that was a victim of the Depression, and the fact that these two, so in love in the beginning and so in love in the end, with so many troubles in between and personalities so opposite—it’s a symbol that an imperfect marriage can still survive and be good, and much good can come out of it. And if any grandchildren or great-grandchildren reading this has a cracked marriage and is thinking of divorce, remember Ruby and Arnold and try harder before you give up.”
The Depression nearly crushed the fragile bond between Arnold and Ruby; he had to struggle just to keep food on the table, and Ruby yearned for romance and affection. Her dreams of perfect married life were replaced by a reality that included four rambunctious children, piles of unpaid bills, cramped rented rooms, and a husband who was away from home five nights a week. Olive Ann remembered those years all too well; she had sympathized with both her parents. Her notes for the novel show that Will, like her father, was stretched too thin, trying to help his parents, to earn a living, and to be a good husband and father. But Sanna wants all of him. Olive Ann intended to show “Sanna caught in another situation where she feels second, except with the children. She centers her life in them. So does Will, so this is their togetherness. Their separateness comes from his being pulled between his family and Sanna, and from conflicts over money.”
At one point, trying to explain her unhappiness, Sanna was to say to Miss Love, “I read some psychology books in college. Everything that’s supposed to warp a child happened to me.” Miss Love, who had been raped as an adolescent, replies, “Everything that could warp a child happened to me, too. But understanding that doesn’t help. It’s interesting but it doesn’t help. I figure that what you do with your life now is all that counts. I try not to look back.”
This is Will’s philosophy, too. Much as he loves Sanna, he can’t understand her constant brooding, and he cannot bear the feeling that no matter what he does, he can never meet her expectations. Olive Ann knew how hard her own father had tried to make her mother happy, and she saw the disappointment on both sides. In the family history, she transcribed a 1943 letter that Arnold had written to Ruby from a hotel in Alabama, where he was working for a cotton cooperative. “Dearest Ruby,” it began, “so tomorrow’s your birthday and the night when you took me for better or worse 25 years ago. Well, I guess it’s been worse for you, but if I had it all to go thru again my pick of all the women would be the same. You have been a wonderful mother and a very patient woman to put up with me. You could probably have done much better, as your life with me has been one continued hardship. About the only good thing I can think of, is you have never actually gone hungry, even tho for six months your only meat was rabbit. I am enclosing a little plain ring. [Olive Ann added: “Her original wedding band wore so thin it broke. For years she had only had the engagement ring and looked divorced.”] It’s not what I wanted for you,” Arnold apologized; “it should be filled with diamonds and made of the finest platinum, but with so much to buy and the war on I’ll have to put off just what I wanted to get you until later. You have four diamonds around you and after seeing other people’s children I am satisfied they are the finest in the world. You deserve all the credit. I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow and Wednesday, and of the vow I took 25 years ago, ‘Until death do us part,’ and I’ll make the same vow again.”
Ruby and Arnold did indeed stay together until death intervened, but they were sorely tested. Olive Ann had figured out how she would test Will and Sanna, too, from the influenza epidemic of 1918 to the grinding poverty of the Depression. She also knew that she would take Will and Sanna to the brink of divorce.
In her notes for the novel, Olive Ann refers to two women who were to enter Will’s life at a time when his foundering marriage had made him particularly vulnerable. One of them is his college love, Trulu Philpot, who is living nearby, unhappily married, with no money. Although Will assures Sanna that their affair means nothing, that it was only bad judgment on his part, Sanna is devastated. “Sanna finds out,” Olive Ann writes in her notes, “breaks it up, decides divorce is better than living like that.” In time, though, Sanna informs Will that if he gives his word that the affair is over, she will stay with him, having concluded that she will probably be “happier in an imperfect marriage than most divorcees are.”
Ruby Burns had come to the same conclusion. In the family history, Olive Ann recalls an extraordinary afternoon she spent with her mother shortly before her death. One of Ruby’s grandchildren was there, with a young friend, and everyone was sitting around the dining room table. Ruby said that she wished young people wouldn’t give up so easily. “There was a time when your granddaddy and I just couldn’t get along,” she admitted. “It was as much my fault as his, and it started with the Depression. Before that, nobody could have been happier than we were. Plenty of things happened that I resented, and I??
?m sure he didn’t like everything I did, but we were so in love it didn’t affect our relationship. But then we lost everything we had and his father went bankrupt—you see, in his family there had always been money, and the family pride was based on what they had as well as their prominence in the life of the town....To lose everything humiliated Arnold. We owed everybody in Commerce when we left, MONEY became the cross of our lives. When he was upset over bills he fussed at me and I fussed back, until finally I lost my spirit.”
Ruby believed that Arnold would be better off with a different kind of person. “I told him that we had to either change or separate,” she said, “and that’s when he made his decision. He didn’t become an angel overnight and he’s still not an easy person to live with, and I’m certainly not easy for him to live with. We are just as different as we ever were. I’m such an awful perfectionist, and he really doesn’t care whether a job is perfect or not, just so it’s done. He still is totally concentrated on whatever he’s busy at, whether it’s a drive to sell more debentures at the office or getting ready for a fishing trip, so that I still don’t get the attention I need to really feel secure. But when I have needed him most, since I’ve been sick, it is me he has been concentrated on.”
Olive Ann was moved by her mother’s reflections, and she never forgot that afternoon; it prompted her to look at her parents’ marriage in a new light, and to feel that the pain they had endured had not been for nothing. Not only had they survived it, but, toward the end of their lives, they rediscovered the best in each other and fell in love all over again.
According to Olive Ann, Ruby finished telling her story “with the most beautiful glow on her face.” At last, she felt the love and security she had been seeking all her life. “So I’ve gone from thinking I couldn’t possibly keep living with him to knowing, now, that he is the one thing I don’t want to live without—can’t live without. He is my whole reason for living. He always has been, of course. I’ve never stopped being in love with him. When he would be sweet and affectionate to me the whole world seemed mine. When he ignored me or was irritable I was shattered. That’s why it mattered so much. I couldn’t ignore him. So don’t give up too quickly when you marry and things aren’t right. I wish long ago I could have accepted your granddaddy as he is, not as I wanted him to be. I might have made him happier too. I was not the person he needed, I know that, but I thank God we have lived long enough to love each other again.”
Arnold felt the same way. He had never stopped loving Ruby, and when he finally realized that she felt her life had become intolerable, he did everything in his power to win her back. He tried to find ways to show her, every day, that he was thinking of her, that her happiness was the most important thing in the world to him. When he was sixty-two, he wrote her, “I am looking forward now, not to 63 or 64 but to 65. Then I’ll quit this job and fish and piddle and sit and watch you. You are just as sweet, pretty, and lovable as you were in 1918...I don’t know of one thing I would want changed in my life and the only thing in yours I would change would be from a pessimist sometimes to an optimist. Just think, if it’s raining today, the sun will be shining tomorrow, and just remember that I’ll be loving you every day until that day when there’s no tomorrow for either of us.”
Olive Ann adored her father and shared with him a sense of humor and a love of storytelling that led her to write the novel that changed her life. And she knew that there was nothing she couldn’t share with her mother. With her talent for listening and for drawing people out, Olive Ann felt she had come to know and understand both of her parents even better than they knew each other. Their marriage shaped her, and in the end, it astonished her. Watching her father, sick himself, care for her mother during the last year of her life, Olive Ann felt a new respect for both of them, and for the amazing power of love. “And all the time there was Daddy,” Olive Ann wrote. “Always there at the hospital, bringing her cantaloupe, which she could eat, and wine, and making jokes that made her laugh. There were times, of course, in their life together when he had failed her, as she had him, but no woman ever felt more loved and secure and supported than she did when it mattered most. She said one day, ‘I couldn’t have stood it if it hadn’t been for all of you. I’ve felt as if the arms of God and everybody I love have been around me, holding me, and your daddy most of all.”
This was the story Olive Ann wanted to tell in Time, Dirt, and Money, and she worked hard on it because she was determined to do it justice. “I want to write this book because it can say something,” she wrote from the Hambidge Center. “I don’t need any more fame or fortune than I have and have never craved it. But when I thought about NOT writing this book, I knew it would haunt me. I think I’ve been writing it all my life—Sanna and Will, I mean. I think it can say something to all these people who have problems or are mismatched and just give up and get divorces.”
***
Back in Atlanta in October, Olive Ann was still saying no to speaking invitations at least once a day; now, though, it was easier, because she was genuinely eager to keep writing. But she also wanted to make time to enjoy life, the great gift that had been handed back to her. She would work steadily, she decided, but not let herself feel guilty about taking time off for naps, for friends and family, or for the occasional Cold Sassy Tree appearance. Bookstores were already gearing up for Christmas. Olive Ann agreed to do a round of holiday autographings and publicity, and Cold Sassy Tree jumped right back onto the Atlanta best-seller list. This time, most of the people who appeared at her signing parties were already loyal fans, out buying more copies of their favorite book. Olive Ann wrote about meeting a mother and her fifteen-year-old son, who were buying two books as gifts. “We already own six,” the mother explained. “We lend them out.”
Over a year after publication, Cold Sassy Tree had taken on a life of its own. It seemed that publicity, or even appearances by Olive Ann herself, had little to do with it. The word simply traveled. Nearly everyone who read Cold Sassy Tree passed it on to someone else; teachers used it in their classrooms; ministers preached it from the pulpit. After selling the hardcover for a year, Faith Brunson reported that Cold Sassy Tree had sold more copies at Rich’s than any other fiction except Gone with the Wind, which had a forty-five-year head start. The actress Faye Dunaway bought the movie rights to the novel, in January 1986, and announced her plans to play Miss Love in a film version. After the Atlanta Journal quoted Olive Ann’s agent as saying that the deal had been in the six figures, the author reported that everyone in Atlanta now thought she was rich. She also began getting telephone calls from stage mothers wanting her to arrange auditions for their children.
Any notion Olive Ann may have had in the fall about sticking to a regular writing schedule became moot that winter, when she found herself seduced by a whole new batch of invitations. “Yesterday I got a call to teach at a writers’ conference for a week on a horse farm in Kentucky, which I turned down,” she wrote to me in February, “and then an invitation to go to New York for lunch, which I accepted.” She couldn’t imagine why the Georgia Department of Industry and Trade was willing to send a bunch of Southern writers all the way to Manhattan for lunch at the Russian Tea Room, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “I don’t personally see how we are famous enough outside of Georgia to interest a bunch of Yankees, even if they’re hungry,” she said, “unless they’re just mad to hear Southern accents.” The tourism board would put them up for two days. Olive Ann conceded, “Now conscientious fiction writers would let it go at that and come on home and get to work. Being me, and like my father, I can’t imagine not extending the trip, hoping that this time I will be in action instead of in bed....After being a hermit so many years, what with doctor’s orders not to go anywhere and then really trying to finish the book, it’s as if I’m starved to go places.”
That year, there were lots of places to go. She and Andy contemplated another trip to Europe, and they made plans to attend the American Booksellers Association co
nvention in New Orleans in May. The paperback edition of Cold Sassy Tree was due out that summer, and the publisher, Dell, was launching it at the ABA with a special luncheon for booksellers. Olive Ann hadn’t been to New Orleans since 1952, on a trip with her parents; this time, Andy would be her escort and she would be a guest of honor. “I’m sure you understand why, for me, going is more delightful with him than without him,” she wrote. “I am not a helpless female who can’t carry my own bag or weight, but with him even a simple trip is sprinkled with starlight.”
Happy as she was visiting all of us in New York and being wined and dined by booksellers and publishers in New Orleans, these two trips were also sobering for Olive Ann; they made her realize that she didn’t have the strength to do everything she wanted. She already had had to cancel a couple of appearances and talks that spring because of the mumps, of all things. (“But just on one side,” as Andy kept reminding her.) Mysterious fevers continued to come and go. And five days of bookstores, Broadway shows, galleries, and socializing in New York landed her in bed on the last day.
“I am finally facing the fact that I need an afternoon nap just as much in New York or New Orleans as at home,” she wrote me when she got back to Atlanta. “New York made me sick.” After a week of bed rest she felt better, but knew that a trip to Europe was out of the question. That summer, Cold Sassy Tree was once again climbing the best-seller lists—now as a paperback—and Olive Ann Burns was as much in demand as ever. A fifth-grade student wrote her a fan letter, after reading the book for school, and begged for a reply: “Please answer this letter. If you do, I’ll get extra credit, and I need all the help I can get.” (“I answered the letter,” Olive Ann reported.) On Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, a huge Cold Sassy Tree billboard advised California drivers to “leave the fast lane for a country road.” Olive Ann was pleased that Cold Sassy Tree was suddenly being read by thousands more people, and she would have loved to be out and about, meeting some of her new fans, but in December she confessed that she didn’t feel well enough to write or do publicity. It was one of the few times I ever heard her sound discouraged about her health.