CHASING JACK: A NORTH MCNAIRY COUNTY LITERARY LEGACY

It was the mid-to-late 1930’s and a time when communities and family clans were tightly interwoven, strangers weren’t welcome and old ways died hard or not at all. In north McNairy County, on the fringes of the well known Hurst Nation, a stranger was roaming around. He was making notes, thinking and writing about as well as chronicling the customs, peculiarities and speech patterns of an isolated and often suspicious people. That man was Jack Happel Boone. The people were the folks of the Hurst Nation and its confines: portions of Chester, McNairy and Hardeman counties. Boone was an academic and writer. A native of Gibson County, Tennessee, he was raised and educated in Chester County, just to the north of McNairy County. He grew up in the shadow of the mysteries and stories of the Nation. He’d heard of bootleggers and moonshiners, eccentrics and backwoodsmen and a dark Civil War heritage of the Nation’s most famous patriarch, Colonel Fielding Hurst.

As a young man, Boone had the opportunity to soak up an environment that was tailor-made for the pen of a budding novelist. He curiously rambled around the backroads and paths of the Nation territory and other portions of West Tennessee. He frequented roadhouses, joints, local gatherings, the homes of interesting characters and learned the vices and virtues of the people in these deepest recesses of West Tennessee. He learned the ways of a people often viewed as simple but who were far more complex than met the naked eye. He learned of cultural aspects and phenomena that were often confined to rural outposts like the Nation. It was during this time that he was also acquiring an education at Memphis State College and Vanderbilt University. Still he gained an entirely different type of education in the hills of the Hurst Nation and the fringes roundabout.

Boone began to build a strong understanding and knowledge of concepts unknown to people in large towns and cities. He learned about such events as the traditional “sitting up” often called a “setting up” over the dead. Boone became fascinated with the practice and procedure of rural women who specialized in the preparation of corpses as well as the practice of mourners sitting up with the corpse through the night before the funeral. He absorbed knowledge from local moonshiners and bootleggers. He learned of the importance of the whisky still and the type of men who employed their talents in making bootleg whisky for sale as a way to feed their families. The budding novelist developed an appreciation for the elderly women of the region whom he viewed as the best reporters of news imagined and he gained a knowledge of interesting characters and peculiar stories. Boone’s lexicon was enlarged as he picked up the local vernacular, phrases and words that seemed largely confined to the Nation itself.

Throughout the 1930’s, Boone penned a number of short stories set in the area of the Nation and north McNairy County, among other places. In 1939, he published a novel set in the fictionalized version of the Hurst Nation, one he called the Tolby Nation. The novel, Dossie Bell Is Dead, told the story of an unmarried woman, Dossie Bell Holder, who lived with a rough backwoodsman, a half-Cherokee named Luster Holder. Although Dossie Bell shared Luster’s last name as well as his bed, the two were unwed. Many people in the Tolby Nation viewed Luster as a cold-eyed, cold-blooded killer. In fact, he seems to be given little credit in the novel for intelligence or decency but is given much credit for natural instinct. The novel opened with Luster discovering Dossie Bell dead in their cabin. The novel then goes on to tell the riveting story of several characters in blunt detail over a period of twenty- The novel tells the story of several very dubious characters, the Reverend Winnie Lazenby, Squire Heber Kiler, Birdie Kiler and Luke Tolby, among many others. There were also characters that are quite sympathetic including Dossie Bell herself. The novel, though often forgotten over the years, has stood as a historical record, a literary snapshot of the habits, language, practices and ways of a people as they were in the Hurst Nation and surrounding areas in the 1930’s. Perhaps the story isn’t always flattering but it is the writer’s interpretation of what he witnessed during his rambles as a young man that gives us important cultural clues to our area at that time.

Indeed, the novel is an interesting historical document as well as a literary work. Dossie Bell Is Dead was published by a major New York City publisher, Frederick A. Stokes Company, who also published works by Louis Bromfield, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Ellery Queen and Damon Runyon. It was reviewed very favorably by the New York Times and other major newspapers of the day. Boone documented attitudes and customs found in West Tennessee and especially north McNairy County and Chester County. The novel was not particularly well-received in the region in which it was set. However, it received critical acclaim and Boone did receive wide-spread attention for his efforts.

Then after the publication of the novel, it seemed Boone’s writing career and the portrayal of local culture and the story of Boone’s Tolby Nation was already past and not to yield further works. No further stories appeared and there were no further novels despite the once promising career and despite Boone’s contract with Frederick A. Stokes Company to write two more novels. Jack Boone was also an academic who taught at various universities and colleges, including Vanderbilt, Clemson, Mississippi State, Presbyterian College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Interestingly, Boone lived another 27 years after the publication of Dossie Bell Is Dead. His academic career largely ended after 1949-1950, still leaving another 16 to 17 years in his life and leaving a looming question mark for all.

Many have wondered for decades what Boone was doing during those years. I wondered personally. For some 25 years, I chased the specter of Jack Boone. He was elusive. He was mysterious. Most of all, he was frustratingly silent. His being dead didn’t assist me and neither did his lack of discernible colleagues and contemporaries after my first discovery of the man and his works or those which were known in 1994. I spent the next 25 years in search of those missing years. In all honesty, I had little luck. I pulled together scraps of information and had the good fortune to come into possession of a complete and original novel manuscript written by Boone in or around 1950. Unfortunately, that unpublished work had nothing to do with this region.

Then in 2019, the decision was made to publish an 80th anniversary edition of Dossie Bell Is Dead. That decision accompanied my appointment as the Administrator of the Estate of Jack Boone. I was determined to finally explore the true extent of the man’s literary legacy and its ties to north McNairy County and Chester County, among other places. In fact, 2019 would prove to be a watershed year for both chasing and truly discovering the life and career of Jack Boone. I learned that Boone had been under contract to write a sequel to Dossie Bell Is Dead but no trace of its existence seemed to be found. However, in August 2019, I visited Freed-Hardeman University, my undergraduate alma mater, which lies only a block from my law office. I had heard it rumored that the university’s library might hold a partial novel manuscript or a short story and so my expectations were low. What I found surprised me and left me feeling as if I had finally gotten closer to my goal of discovering Jack Boone. When I walked into the archives, I found eleven boxes of Boone’s papers including complete novels, short stories, correspondence and innumerable papers and notes. 25 years of searching, the answer had lain only a block away from me all of these years. Strangely enough, no one really seemed to know much about them but even that story slowly came into view and that story alone is worthy of an article all its own. In any event, after delving into this treasure trove of forgotten works and documents, I kept coming across pieces of a story. The notes, passages and fragments belonged to a story entitled Woods Girl. In my collection of original Boone papers (yes, I possess a large collection of Boone papers and manuscripts as well), I had found vague references and notes concerning a story entitled Woods Girl.

I slowly searched my collection and that of the university and pulled together myriad pieces of documentation, handwritten notes, typewritten and handwritten full manuscript pages, passages typed on the back of other manuscripts and bits and pieces of this story and piled them up in a large file containing some five hundred pages. After more than 400 hours of intensive labor and concentration, the long-awaited sequel to Dossie Bell Is Dead emerged from the dim and murky mist of Jack Boone’s past. As each chapter emerged from the fog, the story played out.

Now you may ask, what did emerge? I shall tell you. A story of intrigue, murder, hatred, revenge and redemption whose setting was largely in north McNairy County. Boone set the story in the Tolby Nation and some of its landmarks, Refuge Church, Sobby Church and Graveyard, the Firbank Settlement, and other local landmarks. He did the same in Dossie Bell Is Dead, mentioning Pilgrim Beauty, also called Pegram Beauty, Harmony, Sobby, Refuge and Sweetlips. All of these communities are either just over the border in Chester County or lie in McNairy County. In the case of both novels, many events occur in and around Refuge and Sobby. Both are real places. The Refuge community in McNairy County is centered around the Refuge Church of Christ and the Refuge Cemetery. In Boone’s novels, the Refuge Church is a holiness church. Sobby Church House was a historically black church but is the Nazarene congregation in the Nation in Boone’s writings. Indeed, Boone employed literary license to play with the scenery. He inserted the Forked Deer River into the Nation as a substitute for the tributaries of the Hatchie River. Boone’s fictionalized settlement of Firbank was most likely based on either Woodville or Masseyville, both located in the vicinity of the Chester-McNairy County line. All of the areas Boone used as settings in Chester County had once been a part of McNairy County. In Woods Girl, the long-lost sequel to his first novel, Boone tells the continuing story of the characters he first introduced to the world in Dossie Bell Is Dead. However, in this lost novel, he explores the characteristics of the people and habits of the Nation and tells the story of conflicts of several characters, all of which are flawed, some more full of vice than others and some possessing more virtues than for which they will receive credit.

The stories told and set in north McNairy County and Chester County in Dossie Bell Is Dead, published in 1939, 1951 and 2019, and Woods Girl, to be published in 2020, are not the end of the larger story. Jack Boone spent part of his years from 1939 until approximately 1954 writing both novels and short stories centered around the Hurst Nation. Ultimately, Boone penned some six novels and more twenty short stories about the Nation and areas set in or around north McNairy County, Chester County and eastern Hardeman County. Each of them added another prism of perspective to the times and circumstances of the region during a particularly difficult time, the period of the Great Depression. Each tells a compelling story about gritty, realistic characters, many of whom are actually based upon real individuals. Each adds to the literary history of the region, a history little known to exist until recently.

Boone tells of many characters. He created bootleggers, a trio of gossipy old women who were masters of the art of laying out bodies and cooking for the traditional sitting up over a corpse, women of loose moral fiber, murderous backwoodsmen, children matured far beyond their years and wily, treacherous folks looking for gain. He also tells of decent and virtuous men and women who seek to do right and seem to seek a higher path. He describes the pine hills of the Nation and the paths from backwoods cabins to the Firbank settlement. His descriptions are, at times, very vivid.

He employs phrases, lingo and vernacular that have long passed into history themselves. The language and the phraseology of Boone’s works is archaic in some cases. It is also quite frank and sometimes crude for the times. When reading Woods Girl itself, one must remember this work had its genesis in 1939. Given the time in which it was written, it would have been considered quite scandalous. The novel contained elements considered taboo in those days and times, perhaps even today.

All in all, Boone’s short stories fleshed out further characters and storylines, all plausible during the time in which they were written. It is clear from studying his writings that Boone was basically seeking to create a fictionalized version of our region, much like Faulkner did for north Mississippi. All of this begs a question. Why did it all fail to materialize for Boone and for this region? The answer is probably complex. Still there are some hints. It was a matter of the combination of personal habits, the literary market after the Second World War, social changes and a number of other factors including possibly Boone’s personal stability. In any event, Boone’s works were not in favor after the war as they had been in the 1930’s.

Regardless, we are extremely fortunate that his works survived in any form or any place. Yet, they do survive and they now provide a record, a literary record of a place no one else thought interesting enough to document. Yet it was interesting, full of characters and full of incidents that made for engaging short stories and novels. As this wealth of literary information continues to be mined and developed, it may be that a portion of McNairy County may find itself immortalized in literature. As these works were written between 1939 and 1954, their emergence is long overdue. Perhaps now, as they are slowly edited and published, these works will shine a light on our history and culture, our past and its correlation to our present. With proper evaluation and attention, they may provide the region with a wealth of attention that only a proud and fascinating heritage can yield. It is appropriate to close with a quote from each of these first two works, Dossie Bell Is Dead and Woods Girl:

“The cats had scented death. On the soft cushions of their feet they stalked the cabin.

“The rain burst from the blackish sky in flooding furry; the hotand-cold August wind lifted dust and leaves and sticks to mix and mingle with the continuous downpour.

“From the big-room their fine detecting noses felt out the corpse. On the tail of each flurry of wind came the scent of the stiffening body.

“The clock, its face now dim except when the sky split open in a moment of silvered fire, said eleven. Each flash cut out the dimmest features of the room: the four-poster bed; Dossie Bell’s white drawn face; gripping claws set fiercely, scraped desperately. At the door to the big-room came the grating of more claws, the mournful whines which ended in the same agonizing wails.”

- Dossie Bell Is Dead

“There had been over four years of peace in the Nation, dreary, monotonous peace, which was enough to make a body long for the clammy feel of Death’s cold hands. Then just as it seemed that Murdie Blackburn would have to go on to her grave without ever again experiencing the thrill of laying out another murdered corpse, fortune smiled on the cantankerous old soul. Only last year Tank Greeber, with his wife, six sons, one daughter and little Negro boy, had come to West Tennessee from Missouri and bought the Luke Tolby place on the edge of the Nation. Squire Heber Kiler, a brother-in-law of Luke Tolby’s, had sold Tank the old three-hundred acre farm, although it really belonged to Birdie through her mother, she being Luke’s sister. And after the Greebers got settled, Tank surprised Nationites by announcing that he was a first cousin of Luke Tolby and the last male descendent of the original Tolby clan. Yes, sir, Tank had big plans. He was going to run Luster Holder right out of the Nation and reclaim the thousand acres which John Holder had stolen…something Luke had had better sense than to even try.”

- Woods GirI

Indeed, the times and the adventures live on up in the Nation with the writings of Jack Boone. Yes, Dossie Bell may be dead but Jack’s legacy isn’t yet and neither is the literary legacy of McNairy County and surrounding areas.

Story Submited by John Talbott

JACK BOONE