5.Harry Crews’s Hurricane Creek
Three hours south of Milledgeville, in the part of Georgia just seventy miles shy of the Florida line, is Bacon County, a rural patch of the state where novelist Harry Crews grew up. Crews was an acolyte of O’Connor; he considered her one of his greatest heroes. His fiction is full of the freaks that O’Connor loved, great-grandchildren of Hazel Motes and Manley Pointer. Crews was particularly fond of the dictum O’Connor set forth in “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” one he often quoted: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and to the near-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”
THERE IS NO MEMORIAL to Harry Crews in Bacon County, Georgia. No markers point out the patch of land where the tiny county’s most famous resident grew up; no street has been renamed in his honor; no bronze statue of Crews’s battle-worn figure adorns the bench of a local park. A mural in Alma, the largest city in Bacon County, includes portraits of dancing blueberries and a depiction of a red Viking raider, the high school’s mascot, but no trace of Crews. Where other Southern towns clutch at chances to promote themselves as tourist destinations for booklovers, Bacon County shrugs. Even the library in Alma, the natural place for the celebration of local writers, has little trace of Crews. A single shelf in the back holds an incomplete collection of Crews’s works; a manila folder in the cupboard-sized archives rooms preserves a few halfhearted reviews of his books and a smattering of announcements about Crews cutting a ribbon for a local ceremony or passing through to research. For a devotee of Crews’s fiction, it is odd to be met with such indifference at the source of his writing. After all, Crews’s entire life’s work is a monument to Bacon County.
If the residents of Bacon County, on the whole, don’t harbor as much affection for Crews as the population of Oxford does for Faulkner, it’s likely due to a combination of Crews’s cantankerousness, the graphically unpleasant nature of much of his fiction, and his unflinching, often unflattering description of the place where he grew up. In his dazzling memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Crews introduces himself as “a boy who was raised in the rickets-and-hookworm belt of South Georgia.” He begins his life’s story with an account of how his father contracted gonorrhea from a Seminole prostitute.
Crews’s fiction is full of the nastier underbelly of this rural life: dogfights and drunks, snake handlers and wife beaters, the cruelty of the land and the perversity of its inhabitants hopelessly intertwined with their generosity and beauty. Without fail his characters end up shredded, sometimes emotionally but most often physically: the failed high school football player Joe Lon in A Feast of Snakes torn apart by a writhing mess of serpents after opening fire on a rattlesnake festival; the faith healer of The Gospel Singer lynched by his former followers; the automobile obsessive in Car who destroys his digestive tract by attempting eat a whole Cadillac. All We Need of Hell begins with a man, mid-coitus, picturing stealing a potato from a fellow captive in Auschwitz. In A Feast of Snakes, a black woman driven into psychosis lops off the penis of the one-legged sheriff who raped her, believing it to be a rattlesnake. The worlds Crews constructs are hellish, populated by people with deep scars and quick tempers.
Shock is a tool that Crews mastered and employed with precision. There is joy in his shouting, a tabloidesque love for the sensational and the bizarre, and a need to shake his reader out of the lull of their perceptions, to jostle them loose of the air-conditioned confines of middle-class suburbia. His aim is to force his readers to confront their squeamishness, like a boy on the playground handing a pile of grubby worms to a little girl in a frilly dress. For Crews, this was a necessary function of fiction. It is through the challenges of violence and atrocity that the tenderness of human nature is exposed. Like O’Connor, Crews is preoccupied by physical deformity; his books are crowded with deaf-mutes, midgets, men with consuming skin diseases, the hideously obese. When interviewers questioned him about the freaks in his books, Crews would often give a nod to the photographer Diane Arbus, whom he admired for taking pictures of her unbeautiful subjects straight-on. Crews’s fondness for these characters, some of them inspired by time he spent working with a carnival freak show, stems from the belief that outer disfigurements are only expressions of the conflicts all people suffer made flesh. “I have never been able to forgive myself the grotesqueries and aberrations I am able to hide with such impunity in my own life,” Crews wrote, echoing Arbus’s conviction that freaks are simply born with the trauma everyone ultimately faces. At heart, we are all freaks. “I am convinced that you and I, all of us, are caught in the same kind of inexplicable, almost blind terror,” Crews told a French reporter. “Except that ours is not so apparent.”
Crews’s writing is unrelenting, intentionally disturbing, caustic, pitiless, and often awful in its honesty. At its best, it is also beautiful, and wickedly funny. It is an open rebuke to the romance of the rural South, a splattering of turpentine on the meticulously painted gloss of the place. But it is still not the kind of fiction discussed at most family dinner tables. Even Crews’s older brother Hoyett refused to read any of Crews’s writing, declaring it “pornographic.” When I mentioned Crews’s writing to a waitress at a restaurant I had stopped into for lunch in Alma, she raised her eyebrows in mock alarm. “You read those books? Oo—ee!” she exclaimed. Little wonder that the politicians of Alma aren’t keen to rename their town square after him.
HARRY CREWS DIED IN 2012, after spending most of his life a little less than three hours south of Alma, teaching creative writing at the University of Florida and churning out fiction with an awe-inspiring combination of fervor and discipline. He first came to Gainesville after a three-year stint in the Marine Corps allowed him to enroll in the University of Florida in 1956 on the GI Bill, and settled there after a meandering motorcycle trip across the country and a year teaching junior high English in Jacksonville. There the renowned Tennessee writer and teacher Andrew Lytle took him under his wing and shaped Crews as a writer and a teacher. It’s Gainesville where Crews became town legend, where he picked fights in pool halls and woke up with new scars, where he pounded out a voluminous number of books, articles, and syllabi. It’s Gainesville where Crews had two sons with his college sweetheart, Sally, whom he married twice and divorced twice, and where he found his four-year-old firstborn, Patrick, drowned in his neighbor’s pool.
In Gainesville, Crews garnered fame as a roughneck poet and deep-fried weirdo, the commander of a new wave of gritty Southern writing that depicted the harshness of rural Georgia without the cushion of metaphor. There, Crews worked to transform the swamps and red clay tracts of his childhood into fictional worlds peppered with humor and horror. You can still find bartenders in town who will gladly tell you tales of Crews’s drunken exploits. His former devoted students, who dubbed themselves “Crews’s Crew,” will recount his pearls of wisdom and standoffs with school officials. One of Crews’s former pupils, Jay Atkinson, wrote in his book Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man an account about his first day under the writer’s instruction, in which Crews casually challenged him to a fistfight after Atkinson slighted his speaking style. The matter was settled after Atkinson submitted a piece of fiction that his professor approved of.
Crews was never a household name, but he gained some measure of fame as a literary wild man, a cult writer with moxie. Most of this reputation stemmed from the nonfiction he wrote, rambling first-person accounts of dogfights and bar brawls. He wrote a column for Esquire and competed for Playboy assignments with Norman Mailer, once traveling to Valdez, Alaska, to write about the construction of an oil pipeline, only to wake up hungover in a rental car with a cabinet hinge tattooed in the crook of his right elbow. (He expensed the ink. “Hugh Hefner paid $60 for that tattoo,” Crews liked to joke.) Crews befriended Sean Penn, and went on to make a cameo as a bereaved father named Mr. Baker in Penn’s directorial debut The Indian Runner before dedicating his novel Scar Lover to the star. Elvis Presley was rumored to be considering playing the title role in a screen adaptation of The Gospel Singer. Crews took Rip Torn on a Florida alligator hunt, and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Teenage Jesus and the Jerk’s Lydia Lunch named a side project after him (the album they released in 1989, Naked in Garden Hills, was named after Crews’s second novel). But outside of urban literary circles and a certain Hollywood set, Crews’s fame remained localized to Florida and Georgia, and he was largely content to keep it that way, laboring on his writing while maintaining a reputation as an author better not messed with.
Still, Crews had the kind of personality that invited trouble, and a macho reputation that often eclipsed his body of writing. Interviewers would often include a reference to a recent night Crews had spent in jail and an inventory of the damage he had suffered from late night vodka-fueled scraps: a row of teeth knocked out, a crisscross pattern of razor-blade wounds across his chest, a broken nose, a broken neck, a cheekbone flattened by a pool cue. Crews often landed in tangles, it seemed, but rarely won them. In pictures, Crews looks grim and intimidating, his head shaved on either side and styled into a Mohawk, a thick mustache claiming his upper lip. (When Crews appeared on Dennis Miller’s show, the host described the look, accurately, as a “G.-Gordon-Liddy-meets-Vanilla-Ice type thing.”) His torso was muscled and solid-looking, thanks to dabbling in bodybuilding, karate, and boxing. On his arm, Crews sported a skull tattoo with a scrap of e.e. cummings poetry referenced menacingly underneath: “How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy, Mr. Death?” Crews crafted this persona—or as he termed his hairdo and tattoo, the “’do and ’too” combination—with the same confrontational spirit as his fiction. “It’s a psychological truth that before you can make a judgment about somebody else, you have to make a judgment about yourself,” Crews explained to the University of Florida alumni magazine in 1992. “People who can’t get past my haircut are people who have already decided what can be done with hair and what cannot be done with hair. I designed this haircut myself, and I did it with malice and forethought.” The effect obviously pleased Crews. “Not many people laugh when I’m around,” he told another interviewer from Southern Quarterly. “I walk into the bank and all the guards put their hands on their guns.”
ON A SOJOURN to Gainesville, I met Ted Geltner, Crews’s biographer and friend, for a beer at Lillian’s Music Store, one of the dive bars Crews used to frequent in the college town. It’s the kind of place that it’s easy to imagine Crews in: a popcorn machine lurks in the corner, the bartenders wear suspenders with musical notation printed on them, and the décor looks like it was lifted from a church auction. During a lull in our conversation, Geltner pointed to a corner across the street from where we were sitting. “That’s where Harry got stabbed,” he said, with all the gravity of noting his favorite coffee spot. In Geltner’s telling, a fan had come up to Crews and asked who he was. Once confirming the writer’s identity, he produced a knife and cut Crews, as a kind of souvenir interaction. The wound wasn’t that serious, Geltner assured me. Some fans ask for autographs, but Crews’s fans demanded blood—perhaps because blood is the currency Crews most valued. These are the kind of Crews stories that Gainesville is rife with, the ones where he is a cross between Hunter S. Thompson, Lord Byron, and Popeye. Crews mythology floats over Gainesville like a thin fog. He is part of the climate.
But if the fable of Crews belongs to Gainesville, it is Bacon County that has his spirit. Crews’s most indelible characters come from that region or just nearby, a place that clearly haunted him long after he had moved across the Florida state line. “I come from people who believe the home place is as vital and necessary as the beating of your own heart,” Crews wrote in Childhood. “Bacon County is my home place, and I’ve had to make do with it.”
WHICH IS HOW I found myself driving on a hot July day up to Bacon County, in search of the places Crews wrote about. On the drive from northern Florida to southern Georgia, the verdant swamp transforms to a black-water one, the highway occasionally giving glimpses at its shimmering, brown-green depths. As you close in on Bacon County, the landscape grows thick with straight-backed longleaf pine trees, tracts of forest so evenly spaced and unyielding they give the impression of a vast platoon of arboreal soldiers, frozen middrill. The highway gives way to country roads dotted with signs for taxidermists and advertisements for lodgings near the Okefenokee Swamp, locally deemed to be an excellent site for train watching. Crews had hunted in the swamp as a boy, before the expanse of it had been declared a wildlife preserve. Battered electronic shops sported staggering antennas, signs of the bustling CB radio traffic in these parts. Church signs boast of full gospel choirs, and proclaim biblical wisdom to motorists in aphorisms: FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES MANY JAMS, and LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS. YOU CANNOT WIN WITHOUT SERVING.
Childhood is the biography of Bacon County, but it is also a paean for parts of the place as it once was. The span that Childhood covers is from 1935, when Crews was born, until the early 1940s. In the seventy years since, most of the structures Crews wrote about disappeared, along with a good chunk of the tobacco, peanut, and cotton farming that had sustained the county. Out of respect for the relatives he wrote about, many of them still living when he published the memoir, Crews left many details about his early years vague.
Though Childhood leaves few locations easily identifiable to someone unfamiliar with the community, there are hints. Orienting myself by a stretch of Big Hurricane Creek and Crews’s memoir, I sketched a rough map of the places Crews wrote about—one that turned out to be mostly wrong. I drove around in circles, getting out to squint at the creek bed and swat mosquitoes, consulting Crews’s book like an outdated star map. The only landmark I successfully located was Ten Mile Missionary Baptist Church, where Crews’s mother and father were married, next to the creek where his mother was baptized. The small graveyard out back held the tiny body of Crews’s eldest brother, dead shortly after being born, and buried in an unmarked grave. The church had clearly gotten a facelift or two since then. It now featured its own barbecue smoker tucked in the back and a plastic replica of Noah’s Ark for children to play on. On the porch of a well-kept house across the street, a squirrel in a wrought-iron cage squeaked furiously.
Likely that frantic squirrel would have marked the end of my hunt if it weren’t for a traveling preacher and furniture salesman named Tom Davis, who had grown up with Crews. Though Davis couldn’t be my tour guide—his schedule kept him away from Alma—he offered me an introduction to Don Haselden, Crews’s younger cousin and the son of Alton Haselden, the man who helped raise Crews after his father died.
Haselden invited me to his house after Sunday supper, directing me to a brick home off the highway, “settin’ in the pecan trees.” An affable retired farmer with a deep South Georgia drawl that transformed “hurricane” to “harrikin,” Haselden has the same gray hair and weather-beaten skin as Crews did. He wore purpletinted glasses and a red plaid shirt with an array of pens and small hand tools tucked into the breast pocket, a pair of sharp-toed cowboy boots peeking out from under the cuffs of his blue jeans. Haselden had his own collection of scars. His time training horses and mules had left him with a litany of injuries, including a row of metal pins down his neck. Haselden walked hesitantly, with a cane, and occasionally winced midsentence thanks to stinging pain in his back. “I’ve had fourteen surgeries since eleventh grade of school. I turned sixty-nine this year,” Haselden told me. “Or what’s left of me.”
For a fan of Crews’s writing, meeting Haselden is like finally making the acquaintance of someone whose exploits have been recounted to you many times. Haselden doesn’t appear in Childhood except for the final scene in a tobacco field, where an older Crews, fresh from the Marines, stews with four of his cousins under the Georgia sun. According to Haselden, Crews misremembered the moment: It was Don and not his other cousin Jones who was there with him. “But everyone knows it was me,” Haselden said, showing a place in Childhood where he had crossed out “Jones” and written “Don,” reading aloud the corrected passage proudly. I recognized Haselden through mannerisms and phrases Crews had plucked from his family to garnish his characters, a sensation both reassuring and startling.
Haselden was used to interest in his famous cousin, inquiries from local reporters and the occasional documentary filmmaker. Crews’s writing was not for him, he explained, but he was proud of his cousin nonetheless. “I just wasn’t raised with that language,” Haselden said. “But I admire what he did. He served his country. He educated himself. I admire Harry for what he came from—nothing, like the rest of us.” Haselden was happy to burnish the memory of his cousin, and his skill at training mules had earned him some media attention of his own, including a story in the Tallahassee Democrat, where a columnist celebrated a particularly ornery mule named Mr. Carter—so vicious that he used to break the necks of goats and eat chickens. Haselden had adopted Mr. Carter and taught him to sit, roll over, and wiggle his ears on command. Haselden presented me, chuckling, with a copy of the column, underlined in several passages. “I’ve always been a cowboy,” he said. He still had Mr. Carter, along with a couple of horses, in the barn out back. Later he would stage a demonstration of Mr. Carter’s talents, he promised.
In the living room, Haselden pulled out a box of family photos, pointing out Crews’s grinning face alongside a group of cousins: Aurex (pronounced “Ey-roo”), Eugenia, Edward, Roger, and Jones. “Harry was like me, a Georgia bulldog,” Haselden said. Crews was ten years older than Haselden, but the two were close. Haselden’s father, Alton, was Crews’s mother Myrtice’s older brother. Myrtice married her first husband, Ray, when she was sixteen and he twenty-three. Ray died when Crews was a few months shy of two years old, and Myrtice married Ray’s brother, Pascal, whom Crews believed to be his father for most of his childhood. After Pascal’s bouts of drunken violence intensified and Myrtice left him, Alton and his wife, Eva, helped Myrtice raise Crews. “He was like Mom and Daddy’s other young’un,” Haselden said.
In Childhood, Crews describes Alton teaching Crews how to slice open the craw of an ailing rooster, how to set a rabbit trap and noodle for catfish with his bare hands. Crews spent almost every summer at his uncle’s house until he enlisted, helping tend the hogs and hunting squirrels in the woods with his cousins. “Harry was a good shot with a .22 rifle,” Haselden remembered. “He was good enough he could light a match with it. Once I dared him shoot the curly tail off a black sow. Next you know, she’s squealin’ down the road, no tail.”
As Haselden flipped through the photos, he landed upon one of Crews’s mother at age fifteen, shortly before she was married. It was a picture Crews described in Childhood, a black-and-white photograph of his mother looking “round and pink and pretty.” I recognized it, almost remembered this photo I had never seen before, the same way I felt already acquainted with Don Haselden. I realized that I was learning about Crews’s family the same way he did, from ragged-edged photographs and legends well worn as luck charms. While researching Childhood, Crews relied on scraps of lore about his father, stories he was too young to witness firsthand. “I have lived with the stories of him so long that they are as true as anything that ever happened to me,” Crews wrote. “Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.”
It is a testament to Crews’s prose that he brings his family this close, acquaints his reader well enough that a perfect stranger like me might feel faintly that these are figures of my own memories. The thick crust of Crews’s persona, the blackness of his humor, sometimes obscures the beating heart of his writing. But I felt it there, gazing at each document Haselden passed me.
Haselden listened, amused, when I told him of my previous attempt to triangulate where Crews had grown up. “Well, you weren’t ever going to find it that way,” he told me. “We’ll take my truck.” We clambered into the cab of an imposing white pickup truck. Rain pattered on the windshield in fits and starts, softening the dirt road we headed down into watery putty that sucked at the tires. As Haselden drove, he pointed out the way the landscape had shifted, recounted how his father used to gather up his neighbors in a dinged-up school bus and make the trip into Alma whenever they needed groceries. A wave of cholera had killed the family’s hogs in the 1950s; Haselden pointed out the spot where they had to burn the bodies, unable to use the precious, diseased meat. He stopped at a clearing next to a small blue house, slung low amid a clearing. “See that oak tree?” Haselden asked, gesturing toward an imposing specimen in the yard. I nodded. He nodded back: “That was where the boiler was.”
The boiler represents the most harrowing of the near-death experiences Crews recounts in his memoir. It was hog-killing day in 1941, and the boiler, an enormous cast-iron vat heated by a wood fire underneath, was heated so the water was just shy of boiling. Crews’s family slipped slaughtered pigs into the water to loosen the coarse bristles from their skin, after which they’d be scraped and butchered, each piece allotted to a different dish. Crews, his brother, and his cousins were playing a game of pop the whip, each of the children all holding hands as the leader sprints and turns suddenly, popping the last link of the human chain loose and sending him flying. Crews, the final link in the chain, lost hold of his cousins and went careening straight into the vat of scalding water. Though rescued from the boiler, Crews was badly burned. “I reached over and touched my right hand with my left, and the whole thing came off like a wet glove,” Crews recalls in his memoir. “When my overalls were pulled down, my cooked and glowing skin came down.”
Alton and Myrtice rushed Crews to the doctor in town. Though the burns covered almost all of his body, Crews would survive with little treatment. The doctor prescribed a long period of bed rest while the outer layers of skin grew back. Alton built a frame around Crews’s bed to keep the covers off him during his recovery, and rigged an electric light to burn over his red-raw body, so the skin would dry out and scab. “Daddy covered the frame in cheesecloth, to keep the flies off,” Haselden said. “I still don’t know how Harry survived it.”
It wasn’t the first time Crews had been confined to a sickbed in his short life. Childhood is a map of traumas survived, untimely ends barely escaped. As a toddler, Crews put a lump of raw lye in his mouth, causing his tongue and mouth to bleed profusely. When he was five, Crews suffered through a mysterious illness that temporarily paralyzed his legs, one that he later speculated was polio. Crews was helpless for six weeks, his legs locked in a kneeling position. He recovered gradually, training himself to walk again by ambling around the house as he steadied himself on the surrounding fence. His childhood injuries and illnesses drew people from around the county over to offer solutions, entertain Crews with stories, and behold his ravaged, tiny body. He learned to “accept the good-natured brutality and savagery in the eyes of those who came to wish me well.” A faith healer attempted to right Crews’s legs through prayer. Later, Crews would mark these times as the genesis for his sympathy for circus freaks, an understanding of how it felt to be gawped at.
These long stretches of rest also allowed Crews time to absorb gossip as his mother and her friends quilted by the fireplace, the life of the county recounted in quiet conversation. Crews would sit in the corner sucking on a “sugar tit”—a scrap of sacking with a lump of sugar or a dab of cloth soaked in syrup inside, distributed to pacify small children—and listening as the voices of the women kept time with the rhythmic click of their needles against thimbles. “It was always the women who scared me,” Crews wrote in Childhood. Though both men and women told stories, it was the ladies sitting with the quilting frame whose yarns were “unrelieved by humor and filled with apocalyptic vision.” Crews metabolized these stories, began crafting his own tales, thickened with details he took from eavesdropping on the quilting circle. Fantasy was survival, escape, a way to make peace with the claustrophobic confines of the sickbed. One of Crews’s favorite pastimes was making up stories about figures in the Sears Roebuck catalog, supplying the neatly outfitted models on the pages with haunted pasts and complicated backgrounds, assuming that the clothes disguised wounds and gnarled limbs.
I snapped a picture of the spot where the boiler had stood, and Haselden drove on. We pulled off the road to a patch of land where a large gray trailer squatted on cement bricks. He honked his horn, a long note echoing in the insistent drizzle that was still coming down. We walked to the door slowly, Haselden leaning on his cane. Mosquitoes clouded around, nipping at his bare arms. “I don’t know who lives here now, but I’ll find out,” he said. He knocked on the door, and a little girl peeked out curiously, her mother a step behind her. Haselden introduced himself. “This land is where my cousin was born,” he told them, pointing to the trees surrounding the trailer with his cane. “We’ll just be a little while.” The woman nodded her assent.
The land we were standing on was the old Cash Carter place, two hundred acres Crews’s father, Ray, had farmed until he died of a heart attack, worked to exhaustion. The house Crews was born in, a log home his father built by hand out of green pine for the total cost of $50, once stood within six miles of here. Ray and Myrtice had moved to the Cash Carter place when Crews was six months old. When they purchased the land, it was in bad shape, choked with weeds and lacking basic amenities like a mule lot, smokehouse, and tobacco barn. But Crews’s parents hoped they could transform the plot into a farm that would support their growing young family. Subsistence farmers like Crews’s father moved frequently, always in hopes that the next piece of land would be better, driven by the promise of a place where they could conjure enough income from the soil and buy a small measure of security. Crews’s childhood was one move after another, spurred by a string of catastrophes both crop- and family-related. Crews could never point to a single house that contained his childhood, and it plagued him. The absence of a single home place, Crews wrote, was a “rotten spot at the center of my life.” It made him feel anchorless, forever denied a place to moor his memories. Even here, in the place Crews identified with most strongly, claimed as his own, he never shook the sense of being an outsider. This feeling dogged him wherever he went, the conviction that he was doomed to be an interloper. It dripped, inevitably, into his fiction. After Childhood was published, an interviewer asked Crews why he wrote so often about alienated male characters. “I don’t suppose you could imagine a more alienated human being than a South Georgia sharecropper who must move every year from one leeched-out patch of soil to another,” Crews said. “Maybe if I write about alienated male characters, maybe this alienation comes just from my own life.”
Crews stayed in a tenant house on the Cash Carter farm until the next disaster struck. His father worked from before sunrise until dusk, fifteen-hour days, clearing and planting and harvesting and hoping. One April morning after a hard winter, Ray Crews failed to rise at his habitual pre-dawn hour. He died in his sleep of a heart attack, “so massive and so sudden that he didn’t move enough to wake his wife, who was sleeping with her head on his arm.” He was thirty-one years old. His corpse was laid out on the front door of the house, as was the custom, but rather than having members of the family prepare his body for burial, Myrtice called in an embalmer. The expense of the embalmer and the coffin she bought from a funeral home in Waycross, at $60, was more than the sum cost of the house Crews was born in. Ray’s body would be in a graveyard ten miles away, but when the embalmer drained Ray’s blood, it was buried next to an oak tree near the house. The family dog, Sam, sat on the spot where the blood was buried for three days and howled. It was this oak that Haselden was looking for, tapping through the brush at the corner of the lot the trailer stood on. We fought through a mess of waist-high scrub toward the gnarled limbs of the only real candidate nearby, an oak with the bark scraped off in chunks toward the bottom of its trunk. “Here,” Haselden said. We stopped and stood in silence for a couple of beats until the mosquitoes, swirling up from the damp ground, tormented us back into the truck.
WE CONTINUED ON, past the wreckage of the house where Crews and his mother had once fled his drunken father, and down the mud-encrusted road. Haselden paused the truck near a dirt path that cut its way through the pine trees, leading into the blue-black horizon. “There were three log houses down here, just shanties,” Haselden said. One of those houses, Crews wrote, belonged to the family of his childhood best friend Willalee Bookatee, a black boy about the same age as Crews who used to come over and help spin his Sears Roebuck fantasies.
Crews devoted a good chunk of Childhood to Bookatee and his family. He sits down to a meal with them, relishing a supper of baked possum stuffed with sweet potatoes, served with fried and steamed okra. After they eat, Auntie shows Crews how to bury the possum’s eyes in the back of the house to prevent the creature from looking for them in the afterlife. Bookatee is Crews’s constant companion, and the butt of his pranks. “Willalee was our friend, my brother’s and mine, but we sometimes used him like a toy,” Crews recounted. “How many afternoons would have been endless if we couldn’t have said to one another: ‘Let’s go get Willalee Bookatee and scare the shit out of him.’ ” (Bookatee gets back at Crews by filling an apple full of cow dung disguised with blackberry jam on top, convincing his friend that it’s a homemade treat.) Crews named a character in The Gospel Singer after Willalee—in the book, a man named Willalee Bookatee Hull gets lynched for the rape and murder of white debutante named MaryBell Carter—and one in A Feast of Snakes after Willalee’s sister Lottie Mae. In that book, Lottie Mae is the woman who butchers the one-legged sheriff’s privates after he assaults her.
“Funny thing is,” Haselden said as he peered down the path, “Willalee was fiction. Never was a little boy named Willalee Bookatee, not as far as we know. There were black people that lived here, but we never could remember Bookatee. Of course, that would have been before my time. This was the place here he was describing, but as far as we know . . .” Haselden shrugged.
None of the Crews scholars I spoke with had much of a lead on a real-life Bookatee. When I consulted Ted Geltner, he noted that Crews didn’t make any reference to Bookatee in his letters, though Haselden’s sister Eugenia mentioned Bookatee being one of the children playing pop the whip when Crews was flung into the boiler. (Crews’s other nonfiction pieces contained the occasional embellishment, but Geltner believes that Childhood doesn’t, more or less.) Erik Bledsoe, who edited several books about Crews, asked Crews about Bookatee in an interview, wondering why a close friend was the namesake of the character who met such an untimely end in The Gospel Singer. “He hemmed and hawed and said that he didn’t realize he had done that,” Bledsoe wrote in an e-mail. “I think he made him up. Or at best he’s a composite. But I don’t have any evidence either way.”
It’s possible that Haselden and his siblings just didn’t remember a little black boy who played with their sickly cousin, that he had escaped the net of family myth. No doubt there was enough to worry about without taking notice of which neighbors Crews was keeping company with when he recovered. Bookatee could have simply faded away, replaced with more pressing matters of sick children or sick animals, the never-ending cycle of crops, keeping people fed and clothed. Yet it seems unlikely that a figure that loomed so large in Crews’s young life escaped the attention of his kinfolk, that some story of Crews and Bookatee’s mischief wouldn’t have been banked in the vaults of treasured anecdotes passed on. Haselden could trace the outline of a wraparound porch from a house demolished more than fifty years ago, and recall the year that the road up to his house had been paved. If Bookatee had been around, or another Bacon County resident who fit his description, I doubt Haselden and his siblings would have forgotten him. These are not people who handle family history casually.
But it would also be odd for Crews to have inserted such a large piece of fiction into his memoir. Crews approached Childhood as a project of radical honesty, an exorcism of the nightmares he had lived through as a young boy. He had hoped committing his ordeals to the page would be a catharsis, a way of ridding himself of the ghosts of Bacon County. Instead, the agonies of his childhood burrowed still deeper. Writing the book nearly killed Crews. After Childhood was published in 1978, Crews descended deeper into alcohol and drugs, a period he told interviewers was exacerbated by the psychic trauma of digging through his past. “I was writing about people who had lived and many of whom are still alive, including my mother,” Crews told an interviewer from New Letters in 1989. “Many of the facts were terribly unlovely—worse than that, ugly—and I didn’t want to unnecessarily pain any of those people. That book hurt me the worst. It burnt me bad. I have never been quite right since I wrote that book.”
Recounting the facts of his life in Bacon County was so tough because it denied Crews the comforts of fiction, the usual distances he allowed through the imagination. If Crews did invent Bookatee, it might have been a small valve for the tremendous pressure he had put on himself to get Bacon County right. Rereading Childhood, I found clues that Bookatee might be fiction rather than flesh, an imaginary companion who helped Crews through his trials. One passage in particular seemed like a knowing wink from Crews:
Since where we lived and how we lived was almost hermetically sealed from everything and everybody else, fabrication became a way of life. Making up stories, it seems to me now, was not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but a defense against it. . . . And Willalee Bookatee and his family were always there with me in those first tentative steps.
A sign? Bookatee’s people—were they another Bacon County family or the denizens of Crews’s head, nourished by the time he spent in bed with his department-store catalogs? But then, clues are much easier to find once you think you have the solution to the puzzle.
I don’t think it matters. Bookatee, imaginary or not, was a function of Crews’s honesty, not a deviation from it. If he is a fabrication, he’s one Crews drew in service of the larger truth he was working to convey. Like the stories that Crews heard from his relatives about the father he never knew, the tale can’t be severed from the teller. It is real because we believe it to be, because we accept that Crews wrote with the intention of telling a story larger than the details it contains. “What apprentices don’t understand is the important thing is not the fucking story,” Crews said to one interviewer. “The important thing . . . is the writer’s vision of the world. It doesn’t matter what he writes about. My writing will have a certain taste and a certain smell and a certain sound.”
Crews’s years living in Bacon County were some of his most difficult, but they were also the ones that he kept circling back to in his writing. The ongoing crises of his time there never dampened his attachment: When Crews died in 2012, he left instructions for his ashes to be scattered on Hurricane Creek, so strong was the pull of his first home. His aim was to tell about the place he grew up, and the people he grew up with, in the fullest, most accurate way he could.