A MELROSE PLANTATION "WRITER IN RESIDENCE"

This morning I received an email from my good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, English professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Mary Ann told me that she's presently teaching a class in Louisiana History in which students are studying Children of Strangers by the Louisiana author Lyle Saxon. I was prompted to rummage in a cardboard box that contains the books I've published, searching for the volume entitled Their Adventurous Will, Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women. This volume contains an essay featuring Miss Cammie Henry, former owner of Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana, that tells of her friendship with Lyle Saxon. After re-reading the essay, I was inspired to write a few lines about Saxon, based on excerpts from Their Adventurous Will.

Lyle Saxon was a "writer in residence" at Melrose Plantation for many years in the first half of the 20th century when Miss Cammie Henry invited writers and artists to live on the premises of her plantation, issuing one requirement for permanent residence: they must produce works of art. In appreciation for Miss Cammie's patronage, which lasted many years, Saxon donated his personal library, manuscripts, and papers to her. This treasure trove comprised one tenth of the library at Melrose!

Miss Cammie had confessed to Saxon during his first visit to Melrose that she "always had her nose in a book," handing him book after book for his inspection. "So few people are interested in these old things," she said. "Why man alive, they are the most interesting things in the world to me. I love them all!" In the ensuing years following that first visit from Saxon, the books that he wrote gained a place on the Melrose Plantation bookshelves among volumes by Roark Bradford, Rachel Field, Kate Chopin, Caroline Dormon, and many others. Actually, historians believe that books by Lyle Saxon and Kate Chopin were pilfered from Miss Cammie's extensive personal library.

Miss Cammie invited Saxon to live at Melrose Plantation in 1927, and he readily gave up his New Orleans apartment to establish residence at Yucca House on the grounds of Melrose. Yucca House was one of several structures built by Augustin Metoyer, descendant of Marie Therese Coin-Coin, an African slave woman who gained her freedom because of her connection with the Frenchman Thomas Pierre Metoyer. Metoyer and Marie Therese Coin-Coin had 14 children, and several of her sons received land grants after they and their mother were freed. In 1796, Marie Therese's son Louis obtained a large grant for the property that is now Melrose Plantation, and later Augustin built three houses of simple African design, constructed of bousillage (mud and deer hair) placed between massive timbers, on the property then called Yucca Plantation. After Miss Cammie's husband, John Henry, acquired Yucca Plantation he renamed it Melrose after Melrose Abbey in Scotland, home of Sr. Walter Scott, his favorite author.

When Miss Cammie restored the distinctive buildings and showed them to Lyle Saxon, he became fascinated with Yucca House. He had once told Miss Cammie at a New Orleans dinner party, "I think I could write a book in that house." In "that house," Saxon wrote Father Mississippi, Lafitte the Pirate, Fabulous New Orleans, Friends of Joe Gilmore, Old Louisiana, and Children of Strangers. Children of Strangers, his only full-length novel, was set at Melrose, and Saxon featured people who lived on and around the plantation as models for the characters. He actually used many of the books and scrapbooks containing Louisiana articles that Miss Cammie had collected to fuel his writings and acknowledged her in dedications for Old Louisiana and Fabulous New Orleans.

Miss Caroline Dormon, famous Louisiana naturalist and botanist, was a frequent visitor to Melrose Plantation and appears in another essay of Their Adventurous Will. She believed that Lyle Saxon had a gift greater than William Faulkner and described the Nobel Prize winner as "pompous with bags and bags of tricks." She told Saxon that he (Saxon) was restrained and should turn loose in his writing, which would release "tremendous, mysterious power." In a letter to Saxon she exclaimed "one of these days, I will read a novel by Lyle Saxon which will fairly quiver with power and which will curl up the thin sheets of bright metal (probably tin) that glitter on Faulkner, Anderson, Lewis, and these other poseurs..."

Lyle Saxon paid the ultimate tribute to Miss Cammie in a letter extolling the plantation life of Louisiana—particularly Melrose: "When I die and go to Heaven (pause here for the jeering to die down)... and I go to that place where one is allowed to spend eternity in doing the things he enjoyed most on this earth, I shall pass by the halos, the harps, the wings and all the rest of the celestial grandeur—and I shall ask for just one thing. Just let me spend the rest of my time in visiting the places on earth that pleased me when I was alive...and if I get this wish of mine, one of the first places to which my ghost will return will be Melrose, the home of the Henry family, some twenty miles out of Natchitoches..."

The above excerpts from this essay in Their Adventurous Will were based on research I did in the Cammie Henry Room of the Eugene P. Watson Memorial Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Archivists there graciously opened to me library collections of letters, photographs, periodical articles and memorabilia concerning Cammie Henry, Lyle Saxon, and many artists and writers who resided at Melrose Plantation during the 20th century.

Brava, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, for recognizing one of Louisiana's "undersung" authors who once enchanted the naturalist Caroline Dormon and whose book, Children of Strangers, "quiver[ed] with mysterious power."

TOUCH ME NOTS AND OTHER BLOOMS

Take a walk with a taxonomist and inevitably you'll find yourself identifying and classifying plants along the way. During the daily walk regime that I'm now following, I'm accompanied by a botanist who pinches leaves, lags behind to gaze lovingly into the cups of blooms, takes photographs, and calls out scientific names for plants about which I'm forced to ask their common names in order to keep up with the plant world.

Yesterday, I was enchanted when I spied the beautiful and succulent wildflower, jewelweed, also known as touch-me-not , or Impatiens capensis,  as it is known to taxonomists. The orange-yellow blooms spotted with brown looked like tiny jewels glistening in the shadowy light of the woods, and I couldn't resist asking about their identity. We were walking the Mountain Goat Trail again, and the jewelweed was one of the few wildflowers still blooming alongside the walking path. It's a plant especially adapted to hummingbird invasions, but a few butterflies fluttered through the little patch I spied. The trumpet-shaped flowers hang down from the plant, and my botanist friend plucked a pod of the plant to demonstrate how the seeds explode out of it when touched—thus, the name "touch me not."

Although I admire the aesthetic look of certain plants, true to my astrological sign of Taurus, I'm always asking about the practical applications of flowers and leaves. In fact, I've written several young adult books in which the hero boy traiteur (healer) uses plants to treat diseases and perform miraculous healings. I didn't realize until yesterday that the spotted jewelweed has medicinal properties, and the leaves and juice from the stem of this plant are used to treat poison ivy, poison oak, and other types of dermatitis. Salves and poultices have been used to treat eczema, even warts and ringworm. Native Americans and herbalists have been treating those who suffer from serious cases of poison ivy and poison oak with jewelweed for centuries, and I wish I had known about its healing properties the three or four times I've suffered from this skin reaction.

Most of the time I'm more attuned to the beauty of plant life, and just yesterday I received copies of my latest book of poetry, Between Plants and People, which contains striking photographs taken by my botanist friend, Victoria Sullivan. It's a book that explores the interrelationships between humans and the plants around them, and here's a poem about the plant on the cover of the volume, a lovely plant that isn't a wildflower and has no medicinal qualities:

THE JAPANESE MAGNOLIA

Does she ever change her expression,

the open-faced resident in twisted vine

behind bars of an iron fleur de lis?

her cup, a candle-lit window

overlooking the black silence,

upright stakes soldered

to enclose female virtue.

She tells us she cannot stay

beyond the spring she launched,

her inner voice grand with birth

and sweet yearning for the sun,

inviting us to part the stakes,

promising wild happiness

to even the nearsighted

who might gaze upon

something familiar but enlarging,

a pink goddess shaped

like unexpected love.

A WALK IN THE WOODS

Lately, weighty problems that occupy too much of my thinking have forced my "writerly" body away from the computer and onto a walking trail called The Mountain Goat Trail, a hiking/biking trail that has gained national attention. The Mountain Goat Trail at Sewanee is an ideal walking path for those who prefer pavement to grass and want to enjoy the woods at the same time. I walk a portion of the paved trail as often as I can and complete a two-mile stint in the afternoons. When I first stepped onto this trail, I thought of Robert Frost's line, "the woods are lovely, dark, and deep," and the deeper onto the trail I walked, the deeper and lovelier the forest became.

During the first meandering hike I just surveyed the woods on either side of the road and didn't try to meditate on answers for the weighty problems I carried with me. Wet tulip poplar leaves blanketed the trail, and I almost stepped on the scat of some large animal, possibly a horse's droppings, and, hopefully, not a bear's offerings! The woods on either side contained oak, poplar, walnut, and red maple trees, to name a few, and farther down the trail, I peered into a deep ravine where slippery
elms grew in the bottomland. On a path into the ravine, someone had built a rock bridge that crossed a small run-off ditch, and I could have crossed this bridge and ascended a trail that led to a road on the other side of the forest. However, I stayed on track and took the one "most traveled by," (in contradiction to Frost's "less traveled by" line in the "Road Not Taken"), more sure of my footing on the flat grade of a railroad bed that had been paved over. The paved road is the result of the efforts of Ian Prunty, a high school student who obtained a grant from the Tennessee State government to launch the project in 1998, then raised more funds to solidify plans for the road.

The first phase of my walk ended at Lake O'Donnell Road where three metal posts, waist high, were imbedded in the pavement, and I lightly tapped the top of the center post as if I had reached a "personal best" goal. When I turned to retrace my steps, I met a woman pushing a baby carriage in which a round-faced infant dozed placidly, unmindful of the sound of locusts perched on tree trunks, whirring their monotonous songs. I felt poems stirring within me and wondered if I had achieved the "high" that runners feel when they've run long enough and far enough to energize the brain for a peak experience.

On that first walk, I didn't realize that Sewanee and surrounding environs were buzzing with the news that Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee had awarded a $600,000 grant to the non-profit organization, Mountain Goat Alliance, to extend the rail-to-trail outdoor recreation project called Mountain Goat Trail. This abandoned railroad right-of-way is being converted into a multi-purpose corridor (e.g., walking, biking) between Grundy and Franklin Counties of middle Tennessee. This week when we traveled to Monteagle, we passed giant road machines that were creating a trail linking Monteagle and Sewanee on a five-mile stretch of Mountain Goat Trail.

From 1856-1985 the Mountain Goat Railroad transported coal and passengers between Palmer and Cowan, Tennessee. It carried coal from mines of The Mountain, beginning at Sewanee and going through Tracy City, Coalmont, Gruetli-Laager, and Palmer, and was dubbed the Mountain Goat Line because the climb on the Cumberland Plateau was one of the steepest ascents in the world at that time. Once mining ceased, the tracks of the Mountain Goat Railroad were taken up.

I haven't solved any of the weighty problems I mentioned at the beginning of this blog by walking the Mountain Goat Trail, but in the company of wildflowers, fern, and old stands of trees, I kept thinking of the end line to one of my poems: "Let the trees answer." So far, most of these old friends have been mute, but they seem to approve of the fact that my "writerly" body is becoming more fit. Twice, I've heard a lone bird singing, waiting out a human invasion in the understory of these trees, and have felt hopeful.

Trees inevitably "people" my poetry, and here's a poem that mentions them in my book, Alchemy, published in 2011:

PRAYER WHEN APPROACHING OLD AGE

God help me to know

you are now being fulfilled

in the moment of my writing.

How many dense woods

I've traveled through—

magnificent silent creations

reflecting your good will.

When I see the leaves fall,

brighter in color before dying,

the blood red of still-alive,

I realize that in their blaze

you are being fulfilled

in a final act of ecstasy.

In my seventh decade, I ponder this,

realizing that these late years of poetry,

my own forests of good will,

are acts of co-creation slowly culminating,

becoming a fulfillment

measured by your time

and guided by this light...

evanescent among the trees.