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Katherine Anne Porter Remembered
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1667-9
Chapter One
Texas and Colorado, 1890-1919
Although for many years not much was known publicly about the first three decades of Katherine Anne Porter's life-years of loss, vagabondage, illness, bad marriages, poverty, and struggles to gain an artistic foothold-reminiscences by her sister Gay, neighbors at Indian Creek, and her friend Erna Schlemmer Johns unveil her childhood years. Kitty Barry Crawford pulls back the curtain on Porter's battles with tuberculosis and nearly fatal influenza in 1918. Beniti McElwee and Rosalind Gardner (who shared their recollections with Pauline Naylor), unnamed persons who recalled Porter to Paul Crume, and former Rocky Mountain News colleagues who shared their memories with Kathryn Adams Sexton reveal Porter's important writing apprenticeship in Fort Worth, Dallas, and Denver. Insights into Porter's complex personality and sources of some of her most significant stories and short novels are discovered in the process.
1 / Anna Gay Porter Holloway
Anna Gay Porter Holloway (1885-1969) was the first child of Mary Alice Jones Porter (1859-92) and Harrison Boone Porter (1857-1942). Married to Thomas J. Holloway in a double wedding with Katherine Anne and John Henry Koontz in 1906, she lived most of her life in Texas and Louisiana, working as a bookkeeper in later years. Because Gay was the only one of Harrison and Alice's surviving four children who had memories of the family's years at Indian Creek, when Porter began to mine her own early life for her fiction, she pressed Gay for information about their mother and their childhood. Many of Gay's letters over the years contain passages that re-create scenes from the past.
Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 14 December 1955, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.
I carry so many pictures, some of them quite beautiful, that the rest of you know nothing of-one is of that place in Indian Creek, which was a place of beauty, as I remember. Between the house (not the one there now-ours was torn down when you were there) and Indian Creek was one of the most beautiful vineyards I ever saw, with great clusters of purple and white grapes. While you were being born, little fat brother and sister Gay were out there filling up on grapes which were just turning, and I remember to this day how deliciously cool and sweet they were. When they called us to come see the new baby (you) we hated to leave the grapes, but we went in-Mother smiled, turned back the cover and said-"Do you want to see my little tad" and there you were, like a new born little black puppy, your little black curls sticking to your head in damp waves and curls.
Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 25 July 1954, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.
And I remember you on a little foot stool showing off before Cousin David Porter (the old Baptist minister) singing your little made up songs, and making your little speeches, and all the old Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians were fully convinced you were possessed of the devil and would come to no good end. And dear Grandmother was so proud of you and always showed you off-and did you love it.
Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 3 November 1962, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.
I have always loved you so, never remember being angry with [you] except when you were a little girl you read in a beauty column that if you ate an onion every night, it would make you beautiful; you got it in your curly little black head that it had to be eaten in bed, and as you were my bedfellow, I could have kicked you to Jericho.
Oh, and I was just receiving beaus, you and the baby would walk in boldly and confiscate the box of candy that all young beaus brought when they called, and ate it every bit, sometimes right there and I was too self-conscious to say a word.
Oh, Gawd! If looks could have killed!!!!!
Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 26 February 1956, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.
One time Daddy took you on a train somewhere, and you had a little new white pull on cap which you thought so much of-and Dad would pull it off to show those beautiful little black curls of which he was so proud, and you would pop your little new cap on and pull it down to your ears, and after a few times of this, you went into one of your famous tantrums. Mary Alice and I went laughing the other day just thinking of them. You would get on your back and spin like a top and kicking like mad, and Miss Babb, our governess, could find no place to spank, the spankable place was gone from there to some other side.
Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 18 October 1961, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.
I don't want a letter in response, a card now and then is enough to bring up a little picture of you, perhaps burying a pet chicken or bird when you were a little girl, with songs, prayers, flowers and a little headstone,8 or perhaps just one of your cussed little grins, when you were putting something particularly diabolic over-as you usually were.
Source: Gay Porter Holloway to Katherine Anne Porter, 22 January 1962, TLS, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries.
Getting back to the family skeletons-put this in your little pipe. All the outlaws (especially if they were good looking and rode a fine horse), the horse thieves, card sharps, etc. I liked much better than I did those Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and so brothers that came every Sunday and ate all the fried chicken up. (You remember those days, my little gal, when you were a raving beauty with black curls, a skin like peaches and bits of Italian blue sky for eyes with black lashes that laid on your cheeks when you finally condescended to go to sleep, durn you). I can see you yet chewing away on a chicken neck. You were a good grabber though, and may have done a bit better when we didn't see you.
2 / Donald Stalling
Donald Langhorne Stalling (1928-89) was born in Garrison, Texas, and received an M.A. from Texas Christian University in 1951 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. He later taught at schools in the United States and Japan. While he was writing his master's thesis, he corresponded with and interviewed persons who had known the Porter family in Texas and who recalled Katherine Anne when she was an infant christened "Callie Porter." He also wrote to Porter asking her to provide biographical information. She replied in a long letter, essentially declining his request and warning him against examining her fiction for clues to her life. In 1956 the biographical chapter in his thesis was sent to her by her sister Gay Porter Holloway, who had received it from Cora Posey, an old friend of the Porter family at Indian Creek. Although there were factual errors in the chapter, there also was considerable accurate detail.
Source: Donald L. Stalling, "Katherine Anne Porter: Life and the Literary Mirror," unpublished M.A. thesis, Texas Christian U, 1951, 23, 28-29, 35, 36.
A trip to Indian Creek, Texas, Miss Porter's birthplace, was rewarding in the search for information about Miss Porter's early childhood and family background. Living in Indian Creek are two elderly ladies [Mary McAden and Cora Posey] who have excellent memories, and who were gracious enough to share their personal reminiscences with the present writer. Miss Mary [McAden], whose father was a close friend of Miss Porter's father, lives in the house where the writer's parents came as newlyweds, and in which Miss Porter was born. Miss McAden was a few years older than the oldest Porter child [Gay] and has memories connected with each of the children.
In the Methodist church at Indian Creek the Porters' third [sic] child, destined to be known far beyond the boundaries of Brown County, Texas, and even of the United States as a literary artist, was christened Callie Porter. Callie was a beautiful child, but even when she left Indian Creek at the age of four, [according to Miss McAden] she was still a "big baby."
"I wouldn't say she was spoiled, but when she wanted something, she wouldn't give an inch until she got it. And if she wanted something, she would keep working until she got it."
Mrs. J. P. Kercheville relates that on many occasions as she walked past the town house of Aunt Cat, the yard would be full of children watching or participating in a drama directed by the granddaughter Callie. Aunt Cat's bedspreads would be draped over the goods' boxes to serve as properties for one of the earlier experiments in theater in the round. The porch was curtained off, not as a stage, but as a dressing room and cave of emergent wonders. Callie would invite the passers-by to come in and see the show. Once she charged admission and gave the proceeds to charity.
When Miss Posey was a patient in a hospital in San Antonio in 1906, Harrison Porter and his daughters Callie and Mary Alice [Baby] were living in a small apartment in that city. [...] Miss Posey had the following to say about Miss Porter's life of that time:
After Mr. Porter's mother's death the family broke up, and to tell the truth, Mr. Porter and the two [three] younger girls lived a gypsy existence, moving from place to place, and never having what could really be called a home. From what my mother and father told me, they also lived in a rather Bohemian manner. In 1906 in San Antonio Calie was a girl in her 'teens who had a great urge to go on the stage. She was studying dramatics in some school there in San Antonio.
3 / Willene Hendrick
Willene Hendrick (1928-) is an independent scholar who earned a B.S. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and worked as a nurse in Texas, Colorado, and Illinois before beginning a collaboration with her husband, George Hendrick, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in writing and editing books, including Katherine Anne Porter (1988), Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg (1996), Fleeing for Freedom: Stories of the Underground Railroad (2004), and Why Not Every Man? African Americans, Civil Disobedience, and the Quest for the Dream (2005).
Source: Willene Hendrick, "Indian Creek: A Sketch from Memory," Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship, ed. Clinton Machann and William Bedford Clark (College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1990), 3-12.
Late in August, 1962, my husband and I set out from the hamlet of Santo, between Mineral Wells and Stephenville, where we had been visiting, to find the obscure town of Indian Creek, where a certain well-known writer had been born in a log cabin. Indian Creek was not on our road map, but the Texas Almanac showed it as a tiny dot south of Brownwood. When we neared Brownwood, we stopped at a truck stop to have some coffee and ask directions. As we paid, we asked the waitress. She thought for a time, then asked a construction worker who was just coming in.
"Let's see now," he said. "Indian Creek. Well, it's off that way," and he pointed to the south. "Best way to get there is to go to that new school up there on top of the hill, turn down that new highway they're puttin' in up there, go two, three mile and then turn right again on a little paved road. You'll see signs from there on."
They looked at us curiously, as if nobody in recent times had asked directions for the Indian Creek settlement. We didn't explain that we were on a literary excursion.
"You can't miss it," he called as we headed for our car.
But we did, easily. The paved farm road forked often. There were no signs. Finally, we were on a dusty, washed, bumpy road. We took each turn with new uncertainty, gazing down the dwindling tracks leading through the fenced farmland, nowhere.
When the sign came, it was a battered wooden one, home-made-looking, saying "Indian Creek Baptist Church" and pointing to a large peeling white frame building, which looked like a barn. We took the blind road left and soon found a red-brick structure, looking like a schoolhouse but saying "Indian Creek Methodist Church" in large concrete letters across the front. We looked around for a likely house where someone might live who would know something about the Methodist church records, for we knew Harrison Porter, the author's father, had been the Methodist Sunday school superintendent, and we thought it likely that there were still several people around who knew where Katherine Anne was born and remembered the Porter family. Some years earlier Donald Stalling, working on a master's thesis on Porter at Texas Christian University, had found such locals.
From the road in front of the Methodist church, we could see a small two-story frame house, a battered, abandoned general store, a brick and stone gymnasium with its roof now gone, a prosperous-looking large frame house, and, down a side road, a small brick house and a metal shack.
It was in the last building made of tin and iron that we found the church secretary, a lady of about seventy. She had never heard of the Porter family, and she said that even if any records of births and deaths had been kept seventy years before, they had all been destroyed, because something had happened to the church before her time: a fire or a storm had destroyed it. She sent us into the country to see two elderly ladies she thought might remember the Porter family.
Her directions were clear, and within a few minutes we arrived at the McBride house. We walked across a sandy yard and were met at the front door by Mrs. McBride's daughter. We explained that my husband was writing a book about Katherine Anne Porter and that the Methodist church secretary had sent us to see Mrs. McBride.
"Oh, yes," she replied, "she knew them, the Porters. She's out in the fields now. Went for a little walk, out to see my husband and take him some water. She ought to be back any time now. She'll come back for her dinner."
We asked if Mrs. McBride would mind talking about the Porters. No, the daughter didn't think she'd mind; she did have some papers and things. The daughter left us to see if she could find those papers, and in a few minutes she returned to the front porch, where we were seated in the swing, not with papers but with a medium-sized woman whom she introduced as Mrs. McBride. We explained our mission again.
"I didn't really know the Porters too well," Mrs. McBride began. "Mostly I remember when they left here. There was an auction. They sold all their things. I was there. I remember we bought the churn. Somebody bought the high chair. With the baby sitting in it. But it wasn't the baby you wanted to know about. Katherine Anne was a little girl. Pretty little girl, I remember, running around all over everywhere, with little black curls."
"Can you tell us anything about her? Or the Porter family?" we asked.
Mrs. McBride paused to think about the distant past, and her daughter broke in.
"That Miss Porter; she came not long ago, with her father. They were looking for her mother's grave. Went up to the cemetery to see it. Took Mrs. Porter's picture from the tombstone. The picture was sealed in glass and stuck to the stone. I guess they did it. It's gone now." (It was sometime later that we learned that the visit of the Porters characterized as "not long ago" had actually taken place in May 1936.)
Mrs. McBride remembered something in a dresser drawer, went into the house, and returned with a photograph, a picture of the Porter children. We saw immediately that the smallest, the baby sitting on a woman's lap, was Katherine Anne. The eyes were hers, and the mouth, and the defiant look. The mother's face had been omitted by the photographer. Was Mrs. Porter already too ravaged by illness to allow her face to be shown? Or was she removing her face to emphasize the children? Or was there some other reason?
"The picture was with my mother's things. Mrs. Porter must have given it to her," Mrs. McBride said. We gazed at the picture, trying to read its messages. On the front, stamped across the bottom, we read "Cheapest Gallery, Brownwood, Texas."
"You can have it, that picture, if you want it," Mrs. McBride said.
"But wouldn't you like to keep it?" I said, startled by the offer.
"No, I don't want it. I didn't even know them, not really. They moved away when I wasn't any bigger than that oldest girl there," and she pointed to the picture of Annie Gay Porter, then about five or six. "No, I don't want it. They warn't no kin to us. Yes, you take it. Send it to Katherine Anne if you don't want it. I understand she writes books now."
There was a pause. "You are writing a book," she said to my husband. She sounded tired, as if she had nothing more to say to us. "Miss McAden can tell you a whole lot more than I can. She was older when the Porters left."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Katherine Anne Porter Remembered Copyright © 2010 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
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