THE YEAR IS TURNING PINK

In the comic strip, Peanuts Treasury, Lucy, Charlie Brown’s nemesis, laments the dawn of the new year, saying, “I hate this year. Everyone said things would be better but they’re not!” In the next frame, she tells Charlie that she doesn’t think this is a new year at all. “I think we’ve been stuck with a used year!” she exclaims. She goes home and tells Linus that there was a day back in 1935 (the year of my birth!) when a “used year” occurred. Not content with upsetting Charlie Brown and Linus, she moves to the outdoors where she finds Snoopy dancing happily and yells at him:”Don’t you worry about all the things that can happen?” and when his ears begin to droop and he sniffles, she declares: “That’s better…live in dread and fear…be sensible.” However, Snoopy suddenly turns his back on her and dances away, saying, “He he he he he he he.”

As always, Charles Schulz redeems situations that Lucy sets up to cause gloom and cynicism among her family and friends. Not to mention her readers! I sorta’ felt that kind of redemption this morning after the long siege of gray days and rain here in south Louisiana ended, and I stepped outdoors to find my backyard “in the pink.” A lone camellia bush in the backyard was covered with elegant variegated pink faces, just daring naysayers like Lucy to cast her spell of dread and fear over them. 

Variegated Camellia flower

This camellia bush has undergone at least 15 years of benign neglect — no fertilization, no watering during drouths, no bug killing compounds — and has survived. It was planted by my godfather Markham Peacock on the banks of a coulee bordering my backyard, and if I were to pay attention to the one-quarter Scots blood in my background, I’d say his spirit has reincarnated or at least kept the beautiful plant alive.

Pink isn’t my favorite color but that color challenges me to denigrate the radiance of a pink camellia. The camellia flower is my Alabama friends’ state flower, and here in Acadiana, gardeners favor it because it ignores gloomy winter days and blossoms despite gray skies and heavy rainfall. 

J. Lyle Bayless, Jr., who once owned and developed Live Oak Gardens of Jefferson Island, just a few miles away from New Iberia, was enchanted with the Jeanerette Pink Camellia growing in front of the Joseph Jefferson mansion on the Island when he bought the property. He observed the death of the beautiful pink blossoms of this camellia one bitter winter and its return to life only two weeks later and began to cultivate so many varieties that he had to house the 1,000 awards he won in camellia competitions in “The Camellia Room” of the Joseph Jefferson Mansion. Mike Richard, who now owns Live Oak Gardens, has continued to cultivate the legacy of Bayless.

Although the wind blows out of the north, and temps dipped to the 40s, we’re still “in the pink,” with our hardy camellia, and Lucy can’t cast her dark spell over the many colorful vistas throughout New Iberia, Louisiana this morning. As Snoopy says, “He he he he he he he.” 

Photograph of Camellia flower by Victoria Sullivan

FEBRUARY FLOWERS

Every February in south Louisiana, we're inspired to anticipate Spring when we see the camellias blooming everywhere. Camellias must be hardy plants because the lone bush in our backyard continues to thrive, despite the fact that we neglect to fertilize or spray it for leaf blight. It has been creating pink blooms for nigh on 25 years. My godfather, Markham Peacock, who lived in the apartment beside my home in New Iberia for a brief time, planted this triumphant bush. The day that he put his plant in the ground, I followed behind, planting two more small bushes near the coulee, and they died not long after his demise at age 99 1/2. He did not pass on his green thumb to me.

Each year I think about the planting and the harvest we make because of Markham's green thumb. I reach the conclusion that the camellia bush is godfather's way of telling us that he's still around, sharing his stories about growing up in the Delta of Mississippi and his Polaroid photographs of his travels as far afield as Africa and India. An Elizabethan scholar, he also shared his literary expertise and entertained us with a fount of jokes that sometimes bordered on the risqué but always amused us. An old-school gentleman, he believed in dressing for dinner and often appeared at my table in a three-piece suit, a white shirt and tie. We didn't respond in kind, but he took no notice of our jeans and sweat shirts, and if he appeared only in shirtsleeves, he'd put a scarf around his neck and tuck it into his shirt as if he were English royalty wearing an ascot.

Markham lived beside us for six months of the year, approximately thirteen years, before he decided to reside the full year in Virginia where he had spent most of his life teaching English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In an assisted living home, he became known as the "flower man," as his job was to deliver flowers to each resident on their birthdays, and he also invited people to dine with him at the Home's cafeteria table as if he were playing host in the grand style in which he had entertained while his wife, Dora, was alive.

When a VIP who represented Hollins College visited us one year, Markham used our living room to entertain her and referred to the apartment we had built for him as a "lean-to." The 600 square ft. apartment is actually a brick dwelling that I designed, and I cringed every time he referred to it as a "lean-to." I refrained from labeling him an equally disparaging name even though he often hung his aging, holey underwear on a line strung at the entrance to my carport for all the world to see!

In February, when the camellias bloom profusely, I especially miss Markham. However, I feel better after I've walked down to the coulee and stolen a few camellia blossoms from the bumblebees. Settled in a small vase, the blossoms bring forth his presence at my dinner table, sans the three-piece suit. Here's one of several poems I've written about Markham and the camellias. It's this year's salute to him:

WHY MARKHAM PLANTED CAMELLIAS AT AGE 94

They turn brown within a day

'though we think we're cutting them free,

removing them from crowded clusters.

But their tarnish reminds us

they belong on the bush,

can only make a short visit.

The pink camellias bloom despite their age,

their longing for nurture and water,

the large faces still showy after February frost,

bees in the nose cones,

leaves pocked with blight,

dark spots marking green boundaries

but leaving us showers of pink,

the way his age suddenly fell away

as he turned the soil of a better disposition...

those last days.

Pink camellias at the edge of the coulee

now confront us each day,

showing us something

we had not realized while he lived,

a story he could not tell:

he planted them deep

before he returned to the stiffening earth

so they could flower in wavering light,

so their beauty could prepare us

for the thing he could not name.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

SMALL PRESSES

The White Rhinoceros Press logo

Time was when the small press was a unique publishing house in the world of giant publishers, the most notable small press being, of course, the British-born Hogarth Press owned by Leonard Wolfe, Virginia Wolfe's husband. During the last twenty-five years or so, the small press, aided and abetted by book producers, has come into its own, and authors who'd otherwise never see the light of day, have emerged from the shadowy corners of the literary world to showcase their talents.

Back in the 80's, I frequently visited Blacksburg, Virginia where my godmother and godfather lived and was privileged to meet several notable professors who taught in the Virginia Polytechnic Institute's English Department, of which my godfather Markham Peacock was the administrator. One of those courtly gentlemen professors, now deceased, and later immortalized by VPI administrators who named the present Student Union building after him, was George Burke Johnston. "Burke," as I was asked to call him, was a beloved professor at this university, but few people in the contemporary publishing world know that he also owned a small press called The White Rhinoceros Press. This press made its debut in 1965 when Burke set type for Reflections by hand in ten-point Monotype Century type.

After sharing several meals at dinner parties where Burke was an honored guest, he and I exchanged poems, and I received copies of Burke's publications, including the original 1965 edition and a later edition of Reflections in which the text of the poems was the same as a 1978 format—it was an edition in which the first two signatures were expanded from a single signature in earlier printings and reset. The 1988 edition carried an ISBN, which was a step forward in the life of the White Rhinoceros Press.

Reflections contains what I believe is Burke's best poetry and features a section entitled "Brevities" with a succinct quote from Ben Jonson: "One alone verse sometimes maketh a [complete] poem." Burke's pithy brevities followed Jonson's quote; e.g., "Passing Generations:" "Resting my knuckles on the pew in front, /Startled, I see my dead grandfather's hand." Another reads, "From Menander:" "Peace feeds the farmer well on rocky height, /But War on fertile plain is fatal blight."

Burke's publications included such scholarly treatises as A Hundred Years After, an essay adapted from a lecture given on several occasions that appeared in the Phi Kappa Phi Journal and The Radford Review in 1966. Excerpts from the lecture also appeared in The Penn Hall Alumnae Pillar, and in these publications Burke critiques and salutes Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

However, I'm partial to Burke's poetry, particularly a compendium of his poems entitled Banked Fire that appeared in 1980. In this handmade, hard-backed edition, Burke reveals the reason for naming his press The White Rhinoceros Press in the last stanza of his poem, "White Rhinoceros:" "What symbol then? The raucous crow or harsh/Macaw or myna bird might do for most;/And for traditional bards not in the swim/Perhaps [what] would serve [is] the heavy horn-nosed beast, /The living fossil of a long-dead age."

The publication that Burke felt would be remembered as the White Rhinoceros Press's crowning achievement was a biography that he wrote about his grandfather entitled Thomas Chalmers McCorvey: Teacher, Poet, Historian, a professor at the University of Alabama for many years. In the introduction to this volume, Burke quotes William James: "Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by likes and disdains," and he emphasizes that his grandfather received from his colleagues, friends, and students abundant "sympathies and admirations." After reading the biography, I discerned that Thomas McCorvey had passed on his gifts as a teacher, poet, and historian to his first and only grandson, George Burke Johnston.

Burke may have thought of himself as a rhinoceros, but his work as a pioneer in the realm of the small presses and his renown as an English professor obviously eclipsed any notions he may have had about being the "heavy horn-nosed beast/the living fossil of a long dead age." I'm delighted to possess his seven books in my library and have enjoyed re-reading them this wintry morning in south Louisiana.