The Plum Thicket

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1996 The Plum Thicket Janice Holt Giles Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Giles, Janice Holt, "The Plum Thicket" (1996). Literature in English, North America. 66. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/66 DL <Pbm O&icLi Janice Holt Giles Foreword by Dianne Watkins THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1954 by Janice Holt Giles Reprinted by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company Published in 1996 by The University Press of Kentucky Foreword copyright © 1996 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Saks Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky, 40508-4008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giles, Janice Holt. The plum thicket / Janice Holt Giles; foreword by Dianne Watkins. p. cm. ISBN 0-8131-1947-2 (cloth : alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8131-0859-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Country life—Arkansas—Fiction. 2. Violence—Arkansas—Fiction. 3. Family—Arkansas—Fiction. 4. Girls—Arkansas—Fiction. I. Title. PS3513.I4628P58 1996 813'.54-dc20 95-50630 Foreword In late summer 1953, Janice Holt Giles sat down to write her second historical novel. But instead of imagining a sturdy pioneer woman in Ken- tucky in 1780, the author kept seeing a little girl in western Arkansas in 1913. Rather than Indian wars and settlers' forts, she saw an old man in a bat- tered gray uniform hoisting the Confederate flag to lead a reunion parade. Earlier that summer, two events combined to stimulate the writer's creativity toward the second story. On their way to visit her mother in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Janice and Henry Giles decided to detour through the small town of Charleston, Arkansas, where Janice's father had been reared. They drove out to the old home place, only to find a new school built exactly where her grandparents' house had once stood. "The only thing I found that was familiar was a gnarled old mulberry tree which was in the front yard and which I used to climb as a child and sit, hidden in the upper branches to read. I was sent to my grandparents for part of each summer and their great old square farmhouse, with its four massive fieldstone chimneys has always been, emotionally, home to me," Giles wrote to Houghton Mifflin editor Paul Brooks. That visit, Giles explained, began "a chain of reactions" which she "did not realize were going so deep" until she went to New York a few weeks later for a conference with her publisher and literary agent. While she was in New York, memories of childhood stories about a beloved aunt who had studied music there stirred in the creative mind of the novelist. As Giles continued in her letter to Brooks, "On the flight back, the whole book began to shape up. I kept seeing the old house, the cotton fields, the barns, the mulberry tree and the old well, the plum thicket out back and the little child's grave, and Choctaw Bill. The plot is entirely fictitious, but the props are very real." Those memories evolved into The Plum Thicket, one of Giles's most compelling novels and a psychologically penetrating portrait of her childhood. Giles constructed a fictive world from the people, places, and events VI of her youthful years. Reading The Kinta Years (1973), an autobiography of the author from ages four to ten, alongside The Plum Thicket, one can readily discern a bounty of factual elements in the novel. Reality and fiction merge to tell a compelling story. The factual background began when following their marriage in 1901, Janice Holt Giles's parents, Lucy Elizabeth McGraw and John Albert Holt, made their first home in the crude frontier where John began teaching school in the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Two years later Lucy Holt almost lost her life when her first baby, a boy, was stillborn. Heeding her mother's advice, she asked her husband to take her back home to Altus, Arkansas, for the birth of their second child, Janice Meredith Holt, born March 28, 1905. After the births of Mary Catherine in 1907 and John Albert Jr. in 1910, Lucy also began teaching school. Both parents were excellent musicians; Lucy played the piano and John Holt the violin. Janice fondly recalled the evenings they played duets until she, her sister, and her brother fell asleep. Learning to read at age four, Janice had read David Copperfield from her Grandmother McGraw's library by age eight. Reading was her favorite subject in school and an obsessive pastime at home. Just as she portrayed in the fictive character Katie Rogers, Janice often hid from her family when she was engrossed in a book. Pretend games and paper dolls were other activities Janice enjoyed with her siblings and best friend, Corinne Moore, who lived across the street from the Holt house in Kinta, Oklahoma, and whose grandfather was Governor Green McCurtain, the last Principal Chief of the Choctaw Nation and governor of his people. At the end of a school year, John and Lucy McGraw Holt usually took their children to visit their grandparents in Charleston and Altus. One summer John Holt rented a team and wagon with a canvas top for an adventurous journey to Charleston that provided indelible experiences Janice transformed into The Plum Thicket. During a night of the return trip to Kinta, a pack of prairie wolves circled their wagon from a distance and were kept at bay by a glowing campfire. The horses were tied tightly to the wagon. When the wolves crept closer, John and Lucy persistently flung burning clubs of wood at them to frighten the dangerous creatures. Throughout the night, the wolves would creep back, only to be scared away once more by the anxious parents. But most visits to grandparents were made by train, as was Janice's 1913 trip to Charleston for a month's stay. During this visit, when Janice was eight, excitement reigned as Aunt Verna Darr, a postal clerk, made summer wedding plans. Amidst busy adult activities, Janice dreamily played with Vll her cousin Jessie K. in the plum thicket sheltering a child's mysterious grave that haunted Janice's subconscious into adulthood. The countless memories stirred by her return visit in 1953 stimulated the author's creativity and at last "had to come out." "Much of the book is so real that writing it was at once a joy and a grief," Giles explained in the autobiographical book Around Our House (1971). "The grandfather is my own beloved Grandfather Holt and the little girl Katie is all too much myself. I was just as nosy, full of curiosity, just as eager, earnest, timid, fearful as she. The father and mother are much like my own parents. But there reality ends and fiction begins." Continuing her explanation for writing The Plum Thicket, Giles stated, "There was certainly no warped and bitter grandmother and I hope my own fat, jolly Grandmother Holt, no longer living even when the book was written, would have forgiven me the invention of this hateful woman. The plot, woven as it is into the reality of the setting, is pure fiction, but always the dank, dense darkness of the plum thicket and its small mysterious grave hangs over it. The plum thicket hung over me as a child. I wondered about it, why it was allowed to be so dense, who the small child was, buried there in that darkness." In The Plum Thicket, Giles develops images of pastoral paradise and darkness to reflect the theme of loss of innocence. As many literary histori- ans have noted, pastoral themes are persistently favored by American novel- ists. Critic Frederick Karl, in American Fictions 1940-1980, observes that the "vision of innocence is the key ingredient in American tragedy," citing Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding (1945) as an example. Karl describes one familiar pattern that appears in Welty's novel: "A small child watches all manner of behavior in the adult world, which does not quite register be- cause she is too young." The child experiences a halcyon summer but "with tragic elements intermixed." The Plum Thicket is strikingly similar in theme to Delta Wedding. In Giles's novel, Katie Rogers is eight years old when she travels to Stanwick, Arkansas, to visit her grandparents. The trip is recounted by Katie as a middle-aged woman looking back with wisdom and compassion to recall an eventful summer. The adult voice reflects the child's innocence but openly recognizes that one cannot re-enter childhood, a once "Edenic existence." Katie describes her realization best when she returns to Stanwick years later: "I flung my arms about the [mulberry] tree and leaned my forehead against it and wept . wept for the place and the people gone, for the Vlll happiness and the way of life gone, for the peace and the innocence gone .

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