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Summer 2008 Issue
$3.95 [ buy ] |
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I guess storytelling took, though it took a while for all of its manifestations to show themselves. I published my first novel in 2000, at which point I’d been a newspaper journalist and magazine freelancer for more than three decades. I’m far from the first newspaperman to try his hand at more “literary” pursuits. Hemingway and Twain both spent time on newspapers before winning worldwide adulation for their fiction. As a still relatively obscure Southern novelist, I don’t claim to share their prodigious gifts, or worldwide adulation. But we do have something in common: love of storytelling in all its forms and the realization that stories have the power to enlighten, entertain, move and transform.
I exonerated myself in college with an English degree and a master’s degree at the University of Missouri’s highly respected School of Journalism. This training was indispensable to my career. Yet if you put me under a hot light, I would have to concede the influence of my family, Grandpa Willie, and dad in particular, profoundly shaped and influenced my life as a storyteller. |
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It took me a while to understand what, exactly, they passed on to me. But I eventually came to realize it was their work ethic and their voice of authority. They told stories about what they knew. My dad and Grandpa Willie were men who worked very hard at honing their backwoods crafts, skills now of little interest or use to the modern world. They could talk about these things with a kind of spare eloquence because they understood them intimately and intricately. At some point, I began applying these principles to my writing. In the same way that a person becomes a master coon tracker or squirrel skinner, a storyteller’s success depends on their commitment to master the terrain, to ratchet up their powers of observation, to work very hard at their craft.
I don’t think my father had all this in mind when he moved us from town to a small bayouside farm in the country when I was 9 years old. He just wanted his sons to grow up in a place where we could roam the woods freely, learn to hunt, fish, handle a boat, set a trap and skin critters for pelts we could sell to the fur buyers, or edible ones that we could cook for supper. Back in 1957, Bayou Black was a narrow alluvial ridge stretching for about a dozen miles along the serpentine waterway that gave the community its name. It was essentially a Cajun sugarcane farming enclave, with most of the land–including thousands of acres of woodland, marsh and swamp just off the ridge–owned by the sugar company, where my dad worked as a payroll clerk. These were the days when anybody could hunt anywhere. If you loved to hunt, fish and swamp stomp, Bayou Black was the best spot for it on earth.
One of our near neighbors was a woman named Annie Miller, who would become regionally famous by starting the first-ever commercial swamp tour. She became known as Alligator Annie, thrilling tourists by calling 12-foot alligators up out of the swamp to her boat and feeding them raw chicken parts out of her hand. She was by far the most interesting person I’d yet met in my young life. She ran a reptile menagerie where she kept all manner of snakes, which she sold to zoos and biological research houses. The first time I recall seeing her, she was standing in her concrete-floored snake pens out behind her house with about a dozen serpents coiled around her neck. I could only stand there and gawk. My snake-phobic, deeply Catholic mother made the Sign of the Cross. Annie also kept a cussing myna bird for a pet and was training an otter for a Walt Disney movie.
My parents and Annie became fast friends and pretty soon Annie, whose snake business was somewhat constricted because she and her husband Ed had to do all the collecting themselves, had a brilliant idea. “Rex,” she told my dad, “you’ve got all those boys with all those hands. Why don’t y’all start collecting snakes for me?” For five or six years running, Rex and the Wells boys became the chief live snake wranglers for Annie Miller. She paid us 50 cents a pound for king snakes, chicken snakes and other nonpoisonous varieties, and 10 cents a piece for garter snakes. Once we caught 130 garter snakes in about two hours.
Another time, Annie wanted a cottonmouth and we delivered a whopper with the help of a long-handled contraption my dad had built in the sugar company’s machine shop.
My mother, of course, hated this sideline, considering every snake to be poisonous and a mortal danger to her sons. It didn’t take long for word to reach my mother’s big, extended, superstitious family that Rex had his sons… trafficking in serpents! One day, when Dad was away at the sugar mill, my Grandma Toups appeared at our farmhouse bearing a small jug of some secret liquid. We learned what it was when, conspiring with my mother, she lined all six of us boys up on the front porch and sprinkled us with Holy Water she’d brought from St. Joseph Catholic Church up in Thibodaux—all the while saying a prayer and declaring, in her Cajun accent, “dem snakes not gonna get you now, chers!”
Anyway, you see what I mean. When I started to write novels, I didn’t lack for material. I just had to tone down my childhood some, because nobody would really believe the truth.
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