Never a Dearer Friend: a Conversation with Dot Jackson Dot Jackson kept the manuscript of her novel, Refuge, under her bed for fifteen years. However, she had kept the “family secret” that inspired the story for much longer. After a career of writing for newspapers throughout the South, Dot Jackson began to piece together the story of Mary Seneca Steele, who leaves a life of privilege in Charleston society for a life of love, tragedy, and redemption in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In anticipation of her Jan. 15, 2007, reading hosted by Hub City Writers Project, Ms. Jackson and I recently discussed writing, the South, and her interesting cousins.

Dot Jackson: Fiction does not come naturally for me; my life has been spent as a reporter writing facts that give a pretty firm framework. Not that it's always easy to do that well -- but there is satisfaction in it, in digging up truth and getting word out to people on something they want or need to know.

There's a whole different set of "muscles" involved in reporting than in writing fiction. I love writing fiction about the way I love childbirth, or getting an aching tooth pulled. Sometimes, for some reason, you just have to do it. Something you just have to tell. And if it works, it feels a whole lot better when it's over! But the process can be painful. It can be obsessive; it can be jubilant. If it's really good it has probably taken 30-hour days and some exposed nerves to get it there.

And -- it may tell a lot more about the writer than we like bragging around. An awful lot of tears may get shed over a serious novelist's keyboard -- along with a lot of insane laughing sometimes, too. I guess it just takes living the characters' lives with a sort of fast-forward intensity, whatever those lives may bring.

Is this, like, crazy? Yeah.

Jeremy Jones: You were born in Florida to Appalachian parents. The South seems to have had a significant impact on you and your work.

Dot Jackson: Oh, Lordy yes! "Place" is where a lot of writing starts. It may be our first major character. I was blessed as a child when my father worked on the dams in the Tennessee River basin, back in the FDR era. It was near impossible sometimes to find anywhere to live, which meant that in one place (the very best) we shared a generous old couple's big farmhouse, on about a thousand acres in the mountains of Hothouse Township, Cherokee County, NC.

The way that old house worked, the way it looked and smelled and sheltered and nurtured, never left me. Nor did the rich bottoms, and cornfields, and mysterious woods, and the barn, with the cow and pigs, and mules and wagon that took us most anywhere we had to go. In some of my best dreams I am back there now. And then later, when I was grown, I owned a place not far from there with an incredible grove of yellow birches on it, and a big swift creek with banks of fern and wildflowers like the gardens of heaven. It's not mine anymore but I still go back and look at it, and always come away much more alive.

Jeremy Jones: Was the culture of your childhood supportive of reading?

Dot Jackson:  It didn't hurt that I was born in the worst part of the Depression. We were RICH -- we had a radio! And radio then was nearly all stories. There were the soaps during the day, while women cooked and ironed and sewed, and adventures like "The Lone Ranger", and "The Green Hornet" and "Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy!" later in the day when the older kids were home from school. And at night, scary stuff like "Lights Out!" and "I Love a Mystery", and classy stuff like "Lux Radio Theater". Nothing at all like the canned crap we get now.

My mother was very educated, for her day. She and my daddy both were readers. Some poor soul was always at the door selling magazines. So we subscribed to Colliers and Look and Life and Liberty and the Saturday Evening Post, and the Geographic.

An interesting thing -- the Depression was a golden time in American publishing -- people couldn't afford to go anywhere much, so they would read for adventure. And publishers couldn't afford to publish trash -- so they gave us Thomas Wolfe and Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings -- some of the greatest stuff ever to come out of literary America. Kids could buy Big Little Books -- mostly Westerns -- for a nickel. And we did.

Jeremy Jones: Was there a particular family member or friend who influenced you significantly in terms of reading and writing?

Dot Jackson: We had, in our family, one of the best writers of our time. Ben Robertson, who was a war correspondent and was killed in World War II, was one of the most beloved of innumerable cousins. In 1942, just before his death, he brought out a book about his Upcountry home and kin, called Red Hills and Cotton. It made the New York best-seller lists, and it's still in print today. Stephen Vincent Benet reviewed it, said it was the most beautiful book about the South ever written. I think he was right.

At night we would lie up in bed and listen to Ben talk, on Edward R. Murrow's radio reports from Europe, and be so thrilled.

He was a generation ahead of me, and I never knew him, except from what the family said. But when I began writing for a living, by default (it was something I kind of could do to survive), I needed Ben terribly. When I was working in Charlotte I used to come over here, to Liberty, and sit on his grave, and tell him what I was up against, in reporting a tough story. I won't say he answered me directly -- I don't want to be carted off to the asylum -- but there was some kind of charm in talking it out, and it never failed to help.
We had all kinds of stories in this family. We were not exactly a passive sort of people, so something was always happening.

Jeremy Jones: You spent a lot of years digging up stories, writing stories, hearing and living stories.  What made this story--the story of Mary Seneca Steele--stand out from all the rest?

Dot Jackson: The inspiration for Refuge was a doomed romance between two of our cousins that happened about 1900. Once I heard it, I grew kind of obsessed with telling it. I knew the girl very well -- when she was an old lady. But the secrecy with which it had to be written -- that is, never identify the lovers, or let anything creep in that could identify them -- really tied my hands for years, until Mary Sen stepped up and just took over. I do not know where she came from or who she was (or had been), but she'd had that same tragic experience and she wanted to tell it. And did. Once she came forth, I was no more than her stenographer for the next fifteen years or so. We did fine together because I knew and treasured the sort of places and people she was talking about. And though I never set eyes on her, I have never had a dearer friend.  

Yeah, that's crazy, too. But it's just the way it was.

Jeremy Jones: How did Ben Robertson's death affect you?

Dot Jackson: At the time of Ben Robertson's death (1943), I was eleven years old and the older boys of the family, and the neighborhood, were all in service and getting killed off. Just one club on the head after another, to the folks at home. Ben was the darling of our Pickens County family. He was in a plane crash in Lisbon Harbor and was among the missing, for several days, until his body floated up, and the Portuguese government went all out to make his arrival home as nice as possible. He came in a carved casket worthy of royalty. We were in Florida when this happened, so weren't here, but of course it was in the news, and the whole of the county went to that funeral, it seems. Huge event, at Clemson.

In death, he became sort of an icon. This was true of all the boys who were killed, my brother among them, but Ben to an exaggerated degree. But it wasn't until I was grown, and reading, myself, the things he had written, that he became so much a moving force in my own life. When I read his versions of the same stories I had heard all my life, he was very much alive, to me, and remains so. Red Hills is what we were, and, the best of what we were, I hope we will always be.

Jeremy Jones: Did her emphasis on not telling certain details give you a strong sense of the power of specific, concrete details?

Dot Jackson: The real cousin who was the female "perp" in the family scandal never knew I was writing anything about it. I couldn't have dared let her, she would have had a fit. She never even knew I knew that part of her past. However -- in her last days, when I had actually already finished Refuge -- some things that she told me were aha! moments that brought me to tears. The end of her life, at ninety-two, and the end of Sen's, had something so much in common that I nearly dissolved in grief -- and recognition.  Both of them had loved the man of their downfall, for all the rest of their lives, dead though he was, and were looking for him to come for them, at the end -- and, in both cases, he did.

Jeremy Jones: It sounds like, then, that you had to tell the story in a fictionalized form, that you needed the distance but also the freedom to tell it that fictionalizing the secrets allowed.

Dot Jackson: Of course when I wrote that story it had to be fictionalized. That was what was so hard. Only the slimmest frame of the real thing could survive, but it was enough to hold it together, though cut back enough to allow all kinds of development within -- which in large part was Sen's contribution. The "secrets" had to be hers, as I knew or could use too few of the real couple's.

Jeremy Jones: Would you agree that encountering multiple versions of the same story lends a particular vitality to the story?  It also has a way of both boiling down the essential tale and of lending a new-magical?-significance to each new details.

Dot Jackson: Your perceptions are right on. One of the most fascinating tales of many tellings is the Frankie Silver legend, from Yancey Co., NC. Frankie is the one who, in 1832, was convicted of chopping up her husband Charlie, in a fit over his drinking, wandering, whatever. The result of this lovers' tiff was that Charlie lies buried in three places in Kona Baptist Churchyard, and little Frankie, not much more than a child, was the first woman hanged in North Carolina. Or, supposedly so.

What has made this such a remarkable tale is that it has been polished by hostile retelling (by his family -- and hers) like a gem in a creekbed. No two versions are ever quite the same. This is obvious in two rival books that appeared at the same time, in recent years, when -- strangely -- Frankie had never been seriously written about before.

There is an element of magic in these things. Is there much of anything really fit to read without it? I cannot imagine writing fiction without, as William James loved to say, some "incursion from the Other Side." How sterile and how lonely that would be!

Jeremy Jones: Could you tell me a little bit about your work with the Birchwood Center for Arts and Folklife?

Dot Jackson: Birchwood is a very early 1800s farmstead, probably the earliest hostelry for tourists coming up an old stage road to Table Rock. I have known and loved the place all my life; when it came up for sale, in 1999, after it had been long abandoned, four of us from the S.C. Academy of Authors went together and bought it with our pensions. We set about to clean it up (it was a mess from vandals) and cut the woods that were growing in the windows.

Though we still can't use the house for programs, we have been very active in community affairs since 2003. We do things like school programs and book fairs and art shows and non-partisan political stump-rallies and archaeology "Identify the Artifact" days -- something going on somewhere most of the time. Until we can get the house restored and staff quarters built, I live here in an old trailer and manage the site. That means I try to keep "antique collectors" from walking off with the house, board by board. I love it.

Jeremy Jones:  Do you ever feel that your job as a novelist -- as a Southern novelist, an Appalachian novelist - is  to prevent the "antique collectors" from walking off with the South you knew in your younger years?

Dot Jackson: Your reference to the "antique collectors" walking off with our past is right on. We have gone through a phase -- one of several hideous affectations from which I perceive we are emerging -- where it was considered gauche, or ignorant, or not pc, or something -- to use precise language in dialogue. One of my dearest editor friends tried to tell me that I had to go back and remove the regional speech from Refuge -- when in fact it was his native language, also, and he knew better, and should have been cheering it on. Well, for once I said he was wrong, and proceeded. If that book has a major strength I believe it is the language. I cannot bear for succeeding generations to all talk like TV -- there is no speech so inventive, so dependably dead-on-the-money as the older Appalachian dialect. Yeah, we said "ain't" -- a perfectly legitimate usage -- but not one of us ever said, "aren't I?" -- or "for he and I."

I squirmed with Charles Frazier on his walk toward Cold Mountain. It appeared that he was not comfortable with his own native speech or had been told not to use it. So except for Ruby and her daddy and -- to best effect of all -- Junior, frightful though he might otherwise have been -- everybody sounded pretty much alike. That's not a complaint -- to each his own, and it was the book of its age.

Well, enough of all that. It does rattle my cage, every time.

Jeremy Jones: You've done a good bit of oral history over the year. Oral history can be so labor intensify, though, that most folks shy away from it.  So much is lost when we no longer have time for the wisdom passed by word of mouth.

Dot Jackson:  Recording (worse, transcribing) oral history is a tough, time-consuming, anonymous job. It bears no resemblance to "writing," as so many "writers" find -- to their dismay. No room for ego in it! I have taught it, and taught it, with varying success, starting back in the early "Foxfire" days.

I hear self-proclaimed historians bleat that there is "no value" in it -- some will smugly say that if it wasn't written down and archived somewhere, it is useless. For them we have to go back to the Book of Genesis and ask who was there, getting God on tape. One of the most gorgeous references that I now quote all the time to students is that device Cormac McCarthy uses in The Road--if you have not read it, do--where the nameless father is walking his child a thousand or more miles to what he hopes is safety--where, we might figure, this allegorical little boy will be Adam to a whole new race and civilization. All along the miserable and perilous road the two keep saying to one another, "We are carrying the fire." I tell the school kids, as they embark on recording history, "You are carrying the fire."  And I believe some of 'em actually get it.

Jeremy Jones: What do you plan to do at the reading?

Dot Jackson: I usually tell a little bit about how the book came about -- since it was done so long ago, and lay under the bed so long. And I'll read a little bit --suggestions about what to read are always welcome -- and then people are welcome to say or ask what they will. The discussions are usually very helpful and enlightening to me, as I have also only recently read the book, for the first time. Had never read it, once it was assembled, until Novello began the editing process, and when I did read it, it was full of surprises, as I had only written and read it in pieces and put it aside.

Jeremy Jones: What plans do you have for fiction in the future?

Dot Jackson: As for writing fiction, I am not sure I ever will again, at least anything serious. It's not my medium, I don't do it easily, I get terribly involved in the lives of people I am writing about, and the going back and forth between worlds is wrenching. And -- most to the point, I may have nothing left to say. I wish New York publishers would understand that sometimes the writer has nothing left to say, and let well enough alone, instead of inflicting so much crap on readers who have paid before they know what they are getting. Which is often excremental!

Jeremy Jones: How has Refuge changed your life?

Dot Jackson: The effect on me, personally, of Refuge getting published is in a sense profound. (Yaasss, Navin R. Johnson is a verrry complex individual!) Really, after it was so abusively dismissed in New York, and I put it away, I thought someday it might be found and published, maybe after I was dead. And then I thought, Naaaah -- it will go to the landfill with all the rest of my working life. And then I thought -- well -- never underestimate Sen -- if she decides to get her story out there, she always did have her way.

Actually, it is a huge relief. There were fifteen years of life and a lot of actual money (lost wages for time I just had to take off) involved in it. More to the point, I consider that I had three children of the flesh, who grew up and went their own ways. But there was still this child of the spirit who lived so long under the bed and then in my friend Louis Henry's refrigerator. And -- the last to leave the nest --now SHE also has a life. My happiness in this is a mother's, pure and simple. Sen is loose in the world, at last.