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A John F. Blair,
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Here to Get Blair Edition,
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A Note from Louise Shivers: When I set out to write my first novel, I had several things I wanted to do. First, I wanted to attempt to capture rural eastern North Carolina people. My family—the Shingletons, Cooks, Barfields, and Vicks—goes back for years in that area of small farms. Secondly, I wanted to write about tobacco growing when the industry was at its peak. By the time I was writing the novel in the late seventies, the process was already changing quickly. I wanted to preserve a way of life that I observed when I was growing up in the forties. The other reason, a more personal one, was that I had a need to write about my father and his funeral home. After I married at age nineteen, I left North Carolina for many years. When I went back to my hometown of Wilson in 1970, my father was dead and the building had been torn down. I stood looking at the vacant lot remembering the comings and goings. I could hear the stories that were told by the old men who sat on the porch and rocked in the big rocking chairs. The feel of my father’s compassion and love of life and people still hung in the air. I thought, "That is too good to disappear…and if I don’t write it down, it will all be gone forever." So you see, I’m one of those writers who write out of place. The sights and sounds of my area came first, then the strong desire to bring my father, Will Shingleton, to life on the page followed. I started to write a novel. When I settled back into the writers’ group in Georgia, members pointed out a very important thing. The group known as "The Six" let me know that I needed a story. At that stage in my development as a writer, I was still writing little poems and sketches. They pointed out that no one really wants to hear another person tell about his hometown, or his family stories. That is like trying to get someone to sit still while you tell him or her about a dream you had, or the entire plot of a movie. Readers want to hear an interesting story. I began to see what crafting a plot is. Far back in my memory, I remember reading a newspaper account of a love-triangle murder. The real tragedy didn’t happen on a tobacco farm, and it didn’t happen in the thirties. I slowly took the skeleton of the facts that I remembered and put them into my setting. I isolated the girl, who I named Roxy, on the tobacco farm. I let the drifter walk onto the porch of Mr. Will’s funeral home in the town I named Tarbrough. As a Tar Heel I liked the word Tar. All the names that I chose were local names that I grew up hearing. Since I started out as a poet, it was important to me that every name be true to the tone of the story. In fact, after revising the book for five years, I started to think of it as a long poem. I felt that I could almost get up and recite or sing it. When I’m asked how much of the story of Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail is autobiographical, I answer by saying, "Well, I’ve been lucky enough not to have been caught up in a love affair and a murder." The truth is that much in the story is as real as I can make it. The town is my hometown of Wilson. The funeral home is based on my father’s funeral home, Hunt Funeral Home. The model I used for the tobacco farm is my aunt Dorothy’s tobacco farm in Greene County, where I spent many happy days in my childhood. I did what many young people from town did in those days, helped "put in" tobacco in the summer. I’ll never forget the wood fires that were kept going at the barns all night, so that the golden leaf tobacco would be cured just right. The characters came from my family and acquaintances. Mr. Will was, of course, my father. Ruth, the stepmother in the story, was based on my own mother. Georgeanna, the wise old storyteller, was my real grandmother. Many of the thoughts and emotions coming through Roxy are my sensibilities. I have no idea what the real girl was like. In fact, part of what kept me writing the story was to figure out how she survived. Could she have forgiven herself for what happened to the two young men? Did it happen because of her? But as many of my own places and people as there are in the book, it is a work of fiction. As I carefully told my mother at the time of the first publication, "It may look like I’ve written about our family, but I’ve made up a story." Books That Influenced Me While I Was Writing: A Long and Happy
Life by Reynolds Price Reynolds Price was my number-one influence, because his characters were my people also, and because he gracefully "gave me permission to write" when I studied with him at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. But I have others, too. When I sat down to write every morning, I always read William Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor deeply affected me. Thomas Hardy has always been my favorite author. Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy, Dashiel Hammett, and Erskine Caldwell, among others, continue to inspire me. Questions to Consider: 1. The title of the
novel is taken from an old bluegrass song. Why do you think the author
chose it? 10. At the end of the book, Roxy is attempting to find the strength to survive. Do you think she will succeed? About the Author: Louise Shivers was born in Stantonsburg and raised in Wilson, both small tobacco-farming communities in eastern North Carolina that are much like the fictitious Tarborough in Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail. Her father, Will Shingleton, like Roxy Walston’s father in the novel, was the director of the local funeral home in the 1930s. Julia Cooke Shingleton, Louise’s mother, was Will’s second wife. Louise was the oldest of five children born to Julia and Will. After studying one year at Meredith College in Raleigh, Louise married Quentin Shivers when she was nineteen. In the next four years, she gave birth to three children. When Quentin took a job with IBM, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia. Encouraged by her daughters, Louise signed up for a creative-writing class sponsored by the local YWCA when she was forty. In 1979, Louise submitted part of what would become Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail to the Sandhills Writers Conference at Augusta College. After reading the selection, visiting author Mary Gordon encouraged Louise to expand it. It was two years before Louise felt she was ready to show her novel to Gordon. After reading the manuscript, Gordon sent it to her agent, who in turn sent it to Random House. Anne Freegood , an editor at Random House, believed in the book and gave Louise an option to publish. But it took another two years of editing and changing the narrative from the third to the first person before the book was released in 1983. It garnered great critical acclaim, including being named Best First Novel of the Year by USA Today. It was published in England and France and was made into the film Summer Heat. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the book’s first publication, Louise still lives in Augusta, where she is writer-in-residence at Augusta State University. More information: |
