William Bradford Huie’s first novel, Mud on the Stars, is largely autobiographical and is set in the years 1929-1942. As in many of his later books, the theme here is of the education of the inexperienced youth, which is, after all, the quintessential American story. Drawing on his own boyhood, Huie gives the reader a detailed account of rural life and race relations in the Tennessee Valley in the early years of this century, including a vivid picture of college life at The University of Alabama during the Great Depression. Through a careful weaving of characters and events, fact and fiction, Huie’s novel captures the tumultuous times before World War II in the urban South, times of social unrest and testing of new political ideologies. The book’s publication in 1942 was a huge financial success, by the economic standards of the day, and not only brought Huie the acclaim his talent warranted but also focused an approving national spotlight on this prolific Alabama writer.
William Bradford Huie’s first novel, Mud on the Stars, is largely autobiographical and is set in the years 1929-1942. As in many of his later books, the theme here is of the education of the inexperienced youth, which is, after all, the quintessential American story. Drawing on his own boyhood, Huie gives the reader a detailed account of rural life and race relations in the Tennessee Valley in the early years of this century, including a vivid picture of college life at The University of Alabama during the Great Depression. Through a careful weaving of characters and events, fact and fiction, Huie’s novel captures the tumultuous times before World War II in the urban South, times of social unrest and testing of new political ideologies. The book’s publication in 1942 was a huge financial success, by the economic standards of the day, and not only brought Huie the acclaim his talent warranted but also focused an approving national spotlight on this prolific Alabama writer.
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Overview
William Bradford Huie’s first novel, Mud on the Stars, is largely autobiographical and is set in the years 1929-1942. As in many of his later books, the theme here is of the education of the inexperienced youth, which is, after all, the quintessential American story. Drawing on his own boyhood, Huie gives the reader a detailed account of rural life and race relations in the Tennessee Valley in the early years of this century, including a vivid picture of college life at The University of Alabama during the Great Depression. Through a careful weaving of characters and events, fact and fiction, Huie’s novel captures the tumultuous times before World War II in the urban South, times of social unrest and testing of new political ideologies. The book’s publication in 1942 was a huge financial success, by the economic standards of the day, and not only brought Huie the acclaim his talent warranted but also focused an approving national spotlight on this prolific Alabama writer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389345 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2015 |
| Series: | Library of Alabama Classics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
William Bradford Huie (1910-1986) was the author of hundreds of essays, articles, short stories, and 21 books, including his best known The Execution of Private Slovik, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, and The Americanization of Emily. Donald R. Noble is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama.
Read an Excerpt
Mud on the Stars
By William Bradford Huie
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1996 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8934-5
CHAPTER 1
1929
"THE GOOD LIVERS"
On a may morning in 1929 my shell had not yet begun to form. I was sitting on the stage in the auditorium of Morgan County High School in Hartselle, Alabama. Back of the stage hung the American flag presented to the school by The Literary Digest for using that publication in our current events class. From the walls the dusty countenances of Washington and Lincoln and Lee gazed austerely down. Before me sat a crowd of soap-scrubbed, god-fearin', prayin' 'n' propagatin' Tennessee Valley folks. There were dirt farmers and their wives and their uncounted broods in boiled overalls and starched gingham with flour smeared on their faces to take off the soap-sheen. Some had come in wagons with grown-ups a-settin' in cane-bottomed chairs and the young-uns a-settin' on quilts and a-fightin' to see which-uns could hang their feet out the hind-gate. Their boy or girl who had walked six or eight miles a day to school was a-graduatin' in town. There, too, were the town folks, one to twenty years removed from the farms, parents of the better dressed graduates-to-be, differing from the dirt farmers only in the texture of the soap they used or in the texture of their clothes. With me on the stage sat my thirty-seven classmates of the graduating class.
We were a crowd of six hundred Scots-Irish folks, not one of whom had ever seen an orchid or heard a symphony. Not one of us had ever seen a fur coat or a copy of Vogue or a tile bath. Not one of us had ever seen an atheist, and few of us had ever seen a Catholic. Outside of the teachers and a lawyer and a doctor, not one of us had ever seen a college or a library, and not one of us had a remote idea what the best-selling book of the day was. We were the mud-bound multitude of the South. We were the people who explore the dust and never know there are stars in the sky. The people whose hearts scrape daily against the jagged rocks of reality. Who live close to mud and sweat and dung and all the soul-shriveling slimes of life. We were the people whose women's bellies are over-teeming with progeny which the Good Lord has willed. We were the people whose men struggle against patched patches on the seats of their britches, and whose women struggle against having to make their chemises out of flour sacks. We were the people who are often duped by leaders who despise us.
And yet we were the people who believed in the majesty of man. We were the people who believed a United States senator was great and honest because he was a senator. We were the people who sang of Zion and who hipped and hollered and wept when the band played "Dixie" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." And we were the people who supplied the greatest percentage of volunteers for democracy's army in 1917.
It was a proud day for these people; and it was an uncommonly proud day for the Garths. For I was the son of Mary Garth Lafavor, and I was graduating with the highest average in the twenty-year history of the school. I was going to make a speech. The mayor was going to present me with a medal and a ten-dollar gold piece. So from Garth's Island and from up and down river the Garths and our kin-folks had come to share this proud occasion. They all sat together—forty or more of them in their starched and mended bests—all clustered around Old Mis' Ella and Mary Garth Lafavor. Great-uncle Watts Garth was wearing his wedding suit, the one he stood up in thirty years ago when he got back from the Spanish-American War. It was the only suit he owned except his overalls and jumpers. Great-uncle Crazy Tom Garth was wearing one of Grandfather Crawford Garth's old coats. They were all proud of me—proud because they know'd I was a-goin' to amount to something.
This uncommon pride extending beyond the immediate family may puzzle you. But you must realize that we Garths still clung to a conception almost dead in America. We considered ourselves a Family. All the others considered me not merely the son of John and Mary Garth Lafavor, but a son of The Family. That my name was Lafavor meant nothing; for when the Garth women married they remained Garths, and they reared their children to think of themselves as Garths.
I wish you could have been sitting on the stage with me that morning where you could have looked into the faces of those four generations of Garths. You would have seen a one-hundred-sixty-year-old American family still struggling to remain an entity; still fighting to fill the gullies in its eroded fields and to cover with a tattered cloak of family dignity its eroded characters. As if by a magnet your eyes would have been drawn to two faces. For Old Mis' Ella Garth and Mary Garth Lafavor were the drive-wheels of a family which since Appomattox had depended much on its women for both motive power and stability. The Garth men since Appomattox had been a mercurial lot, given to drinking, wenching, and fighting. But the women were of a stern stuff. Old Mis' Ella was eighty-nine and calico empress of the clan. She was my great-grandmother and in her fierce old eyes still burned that blue flame before which raiding Yankees and marauding Tories had quailed on another day. All the Garth women had that eye-flame. Mary Lafavor was Old Mis' Ella's grand-daughter and natural heir. Though uneducated and of the soil, she was one of those little, round-faced, high-breasted, ambitious women who drive hardest those whom they love most.
Around these two you could have picked out the Garth women by the eye-flame and the dominated, submissive husbands seated next to them. You would have noted the Garth men by their sensual, sun-and-windburned faces, and by an air which at first you might have mistaken for arrogance but which, on closer examination, you would have recognized as but the prideful self-assurance of men who live by and close to the land.
These were my people. We were the "good livers" of the Tennessee Valley. We were not aristocrats. We had no money. We had come from no English dukes or Scottish earls. We were of peasant stock. Irish and Scottish, with a pinch of French picked up in the Carolinas. But we were a proud and fiercely independent people by virtue of our land and our history. We were the sons of a Scots-Irish peasant, one Peter Garth, who came to South Carolina in 1765 and dreamed and sweated and prayed and propagated and fought a war to win land for himself; and who came to Alabama in 1785 to claim as his reward, for having fought in the Revolution, those two thousand good acres on Garth's Island and a thousand more good acres in the bottomlands alongside it.
I was a Lord of Creation as I sat on the stage waiting to deliver my climactic speech. Sixteen, with a childhood made bookish in Morgan County by Horatio Alger, Youth's Companion, and The Literary Digest, I suppose I already had the too-mature gray eyes of the lad who has carried the burden of ambition from infancy. Since my father was French, I was smaller than the Garths usually are at my age, but I had the strong Garth teeth and high cheeks, and my hair—now graying—was even then tinged in the temples. I had on a new pair of "English" shoes with pointed toes and a $27.50 tan suit which Hartselle's largest store had sent off for. So you can well imagine that I was exuding self-confidence.
When the exercises had run down to the line of the printed program marked: "Valedictory.... Ever Onward.... By Peter Garth Lafavor," the superintendent's introduction was brief. "This year," he said, "we are particularly proud of our Valedictorian. He is a member of the oldest family in the county. His ancestors settled at Garth's Island in 1785. Each school day for four years he has ridden horseback the sixteen miles from the Island to this school and back. He is graduating with the highest average in the history of our school. So I take pleasure in presenting Garth Lafavor, who will deliver the valedictory."
I knew the whole county was looking at me. I could see the Garths lean forward in their seats as I strode up to the speaker's stand. I cleared my throat and began:
"Mr. Superintendent, parents, friends, and undergraduates, we of the class of 1929 at Morgan County High School believe that we are the most fortunate generation of young men and women ever to breathe the free air of America. Ours is the rich heritage of all the ages. So at the outset we want to thank you, our parents, for what you have contributed to make this moment possible for us. Today we can tell you that we appreciate your sacrifices, and ten years from today we believe our lives will have justified them. For today is a day of opportunity. This nation was built as a byproduct of the energies expended by young men tugging at their own bootstraps. And today, more than at any time in human history, we can be whatever we want to be; we can have whatever we have the strength and the courage and the will to have."
Sirs, I was off. Gray heads born twenty to forty years too soon for that day's lush opportunities began nodding in assent. As I pranced up and down that platform, I Lincolned and Jeffersoned. I captained souls and mastered fates. I drew the opportunity canvas so broad that even in Alabama I dared recall that the current occupant of the White House had once pitched hay on an Iowa farm.
"There was a time," I exclaimed, "when young Americans had to seek out and make jobs for themselves. Wars had to be fought, new lands had to be conquered and new frontiers defended before work could be begun. But today, war, like smallpox, is disappearing from the face of the earth, and ready-made jobs are waiting for every one of us who wants to start work. Every business, every profession is seeking the energy and ambition of youth."
I plunged into my picture of the American way of life.
"The American way of life is to me like a great crosscountry race. At intervals we young men from the high schools and colleges leap from the starting lines. Spaced along this great race-course are all the prizes for which men strive. The farther and faster you run, the richer the prizes become. The weak are outstripped by the strong, but there is enough reward scattered along the way even for the losers. Division of the winnings is neither necessary nor desirable. Except for taxes to provide for protection and maintenance of the course, every man is entitled to keep all he can fairly win. And this is as it should be."
I pointed to that big flag and every eye turned to it. I almost choked down with emotion as I described what Old Glory meant to me and to my classmates.
"That flag," I said, "flies as our eternal assurance of equal justice and equal opportunity in the Great Race. We shall never fail to look to it when we despair. For its stars and its stripes guarantee to every American youth the right to stand in the mud and lift his face to the everlasting stars—and to achieve those stars if he can."
I'll never forget those faces looking up at me. Those poor, ignorant people believed every word I said. My mother was crying and my voice was so husky as I closed that the last of Emerson's words from "The American Scholar" were drowned in the applause:
"'Give me insight into Today, and you may have the antique and future worlds.'"
You'd think that would be at least a lifetime ago, wouldn't you? Yet it was only twelve years ago. I'm not an old man dictating my memoirs. I'm twenty-eight—still young enough to join armies and go on crusades.
When the applause and nodding had ceased, Mayor Jim Beasley, who was also president of the Bank of Hartselle, advanced to the stage. "Friends," he said, "for several years now I have been worrying about who we could get to make our Fourth of July speeches when old Colonel Tompkins passes on. After today I think you'll agree we don't have to worry any more. Garth Lafavor has shown us that he'll be ready to take up where the old Colonel leaves off. So, on behalf of the city and the Bank of Hartselle, I want to present this gold medal and this ten-dollar gold piece to our outstanding scholar of the year. And I want to predict here and now that he'll be President of the United States."
What is this element in the human stuff which gives to each new generation of Americans such colossal talent for self-delusion? How is it that in every one of a million schoolrooms one little man can stand each year and solemnly declare himself to be a Master of Fate and an Architect of Destiny?
There I stood that morning, talking to the only kind of folks I knew in the world. My folks. The Yellow-Dog Democrats who voted solidly against Al Smith because he was a Catholic. The folks who deny that Negroes have souls. The folks who worshipped Bryan for fighting Darrow and the God-haters. And the folks who, had they ever seen a New York Jew, would have readily consigned him to the category slightly below a "good niggah." And yet I spouted loftily about "equal justice and equal opportunity." I couldn't talk about the flag without tears coming to my eyes. The high school debate that year had been about the soldiers' bonus. I had eloquently opposed it as "an insult to the manhood of America." What else could I have done when all the Garths who fought in the Confederate armies went to their graves without accepting a dime of the pensions offered them? They would have starved first.
I wonder why some Voice of Reality could not have whispered from the walls that morning and said to me: "Keep your chin down, son. You don't know what-the-hell you're talking about. Don't be a damn fool. You live in one little scooped-out valley that's a pin-point on the world's surface. You think opportunity is spread out before you, but they'll be calling you the 'Lost Generation' in three years. You and your folks are already an Economic Problem. You, too, will be forced to fight a war. The most terrible war of all wars. You'll be confused. You'll be commanded to defend a goal, and you won't know which goal to defend. So keep your chin down and don't be a damn fool."
But no voice challenged me; and, of course, I wouldn't have paid any attention if one had. For I was Peter Garth Lafavor, the smart-aleck hope of the old Garths in May, 1929. We had been keeping cool with a little man in a big hat who believed that the best governed people were the least governed people. The Great Engineer had announced that poverty had been forever banished from these American shores. A gangling young fellow called Lucky Lindy was still the national hero. And when I walked out of the school building with my mother and Old Mis' Ella on my arms, I had never heard of Franklin Roosevelt. Nor did I know the name of the cartoon character who at that moment was probably sitting in a Munich beer cellar drawing maps of a New Ordered World.
2
The night after my speech I drove the eight miles from Garth's Island back to Hartselle to see my girl. She was Cherry Lanson. I couldn't remember the day when Cherry hadn't been part of my hopes and dreams. We were the same age; she was nine days older than I. And since we had been ten or eleven or whatever age it is that boys first begin having girls, Cherry Lanson had been my girl. To prove it there were carvings on many a tree where class picnics had been held and scrawlings on many a blackboard and back fence.
It seemed as if every great experience in my life until then had been shared by Cherry. The first time I ever played winkum at a party I winked first at Cherry. The first girl's hand I ever covertly held was Cherry's. And since the Garths were not a lip-kissing family, the only lips I had ever kissed were Cherry's.
We were fourteen when we first kissed, backstage one night practising a play. We had discussed its possibility for weeks while our hand clasps grew tighter and bolder. And on this night we both seemed to know it would happen. My breath was short as I spoke my lines and watched for the moment when Cherry and I would both be offstage and alone behind the scenery. When at last the moment came, I confessed I lacked courage for the final movement; Cherry set a precedent by helping me. She coyly held a red silk handkerchief with a black lace border over her lips, and I generated the audacity to place my lips against hers with the silk between. We could never agree who moved the handkerchief. But it was moved, and the gods must have stood at attention in Paradise while we clasped each other. For it was, indeed, a Tremendous Thing.
"Look, Garth," she whispered, "it's fifteen minutes till nine. We'll always remember the time, won't we?"
"Sure we will, Cherry."
"And if we're together you'll always kiss me at fifteen till nine every night, and if we aren't we'll think of one another."
"Yes, Cherry."
"And I'll always keep the handkerchief, and we'll give it to our children."
After that Cherry and I went out for all the school plays, because the practice nights provided luscious opportunities for backstage clinging. We suddenly became devout attendants of the Epworth League at the First Methodist Church. By going early to the Sunday night meetings we could steal many hot and precious moments in the shadowed church passageways.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mud on the Stars by William Bradford Huie. Copyright © 1996 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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