<i>Living Jackson</i> Magazine : Cold Sassy Tree

Cold Sassy Tree

A review by Susan Harper

Georgia journalist and writer Olive Ann Burns hesitantly sent the manuscript for her first novel, Cold Sassy Tree, to Ticknor & Fields in 1983 at the request of publisher Chester Kerr. “Boy howdy, ma’am,” came the immediate response, “you have sent us a fine book.” It was published a year later, and has been selling ever since.

Burns died six years later while working on the sequel her readers begged her to write, but her timeless story of the warp and woof of life in a Jackson County mill town at the turn of the last century lives on and on.

Call it a coming-of-age story about a boy and his grandpa; call it the tale of a May/December romance—a love story with a twist about a woman named Love. Or call it what Burns’s husband called it: “a funny book about death.” Whatever you call it, you must also call it a classic, for that’s what it has become.

The novel opens with a death and closes with the reading of a will, and between those two bookends of mortality, quite a lot of living goes on, beginning when a grief-stricken widower elopes with a Yankee suffragette half his age just three weeks after his wife’s funeral.

Cold Sassy Tree is where it all takes place—a setting modeled closely on Commerce, Georgia, where Burns grew up. Once known as Harmony Grove, the town was famous for its grove of “cold sassafras trees,” said to be the coolest and most refreshing place for miles around on a hot summer day.

Hot summer days seem to be a part of the fabric of the story; although young Will Tweedy, our narrator, is mostly oblivious of the heat, the writing holds it the way a moss-lined sieve holds water—or the way the air itself does.

The moss that lines this sieve is Burns’s perceptive accuracy. Her ear for the northeast Georgia dialect of a century past brings those days to life again with eerie perfection, giving readers a book whose words “almost float from the page, begging to be read aloud,” said reviewer Keith Graham of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For anyone who has spent time in the Jackson County of even a half-century ago, phrases like “juning around” (behaving like a June bug), “pea-turkey” (as in “She don’t ever say pea-turkey about them.”), “sure-dog” (“If you couldn’t say yes sir, you sure-dog didn’t say no sir.”), and “boy howdy” all sound place-specific. This funny book about death calls up those dear dead days as if they were still alive and going on somewhere just beyond our everyday vision.

The boy through whose eyes we see all this, young Will Tweedy, is a fictionalized version of William Arnold Burns, our novelist’s father, and much of the action centers around the general merchandise store owned by Arnold’s grandfather—a store which longtime Commerce residents still remember as Williford, Burns, & Rice. (It later became an overalls plant, and it is now the Commerce Civic Center.) This universal tale of life, love and death is firmly rooted in history, down to the details of the town center, where chicken coops sat “out on the board sidewalks in front of every store” until the ladies of the town petitioned for their removal.

Cold Sassy Tree is frequently compared with the work of Mark Twain, or with Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird, a list to which we could add The Member of the Wedding. After 22 consecutive years in print, the novel is still available in a hardcover edition. And although Olive Ann Burns was told by her publisher that the sale of 2,000 copies of a first novel was quite respectable, this first novel sold more than half a million copies during its author’s lifetime and is still going strong. A movie version starring Faye Dunaway and Richard Widmark debuted on television in 1989, and Carlisle Floyd’s grand opera, Cold Sassy Tree, had its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 2000.

Forget all that, though. Don’t worry about the paradox of an immortal book about mortality. Pick up Cold Sassy Tree at a Jackson County library some weekend and see for yourself how delicious it is, in this crazy old world, to get back to some home truths.

The first novel by Olive Anne Burns, a timeless story of the warp and woof of life in a Jackson County mill town at the turn of the last century modeled closely on Commerce, debuted in a movie version in 1989. More than half a million copies have been sold.