Peter Taylor

 This is about Peter Taylor’s story “What You Hear From ‘Em?” The only way I can tell you what I think would spoil it for you. So you might want to skip this note until you’ve had a chance to read it.

What I think: The subject of race relations in the South is so big and ugly, so monstrous, that it’s probably pointless to try to write about it. Or you could write about an old Black woman, Aunt Munsie, who keeps pigs in her backyard in the small town of Thornton, Tenn. Munsie, who was about 12 when the Civil War ended, has kept pigs for a long time. Because she does, she hauls a slop wagon through town, collecting table scraps from people who know her. Everyone knows Aunt Munsie.

Munsie hauls her wagon down the middle of the street. She’s so blind, people worry she’ll get hit. She’s so deaf she doesn’t hear high-school boys hollering at her to move over. She isn’t so deaf that she doesn’t move over when people ask her politely.

What do you do about that?

Munsie raised Dr. Tolliver’s white children after his wife died. Munsie wants her favorites, Thad and Will, to move back home permanently. But they’ve gone off to the big cities, Memphis and Nashville, to seek their fortune. They daydream about coming back. But their fortunes are elsewhere. Before they realize it, so are their hearts and lives.

The Tolliver boys can’t just tell Aunt Munsie she’s too old to haul her slop wagon down the street.

But there was a time, now gone, when it was like this: If you were the son of a squire you could prevail upon the city fathers to ban pigs in town. Since you had standing, you could quietly buy all the pigs from the few people who still kept them. You would pay a generous price. 

Then you would explain to Aunt Munsie that the law had changed — progress and all that. And she would accept the new order and would not feel that it was an affront to her or her age or her ways.

That’s not anything like a complete picture of the way the South once was. But the story suggests nuances in a way that people once understood themselves and each other. Those nuances are now lost — or rather are historical artifacts, not part of a living culture.

Peter Taylor was born in Trenton, Tenn., the Thornton of his fiction. I’m descended from another family of Taylors from Trenton. The two families were not related. They were separated by class. My family barely survived the Depression. Peter Taylor’s family had servants.

When I was a boy, I used to go by the big house that Peter Taylor’s grandfather R.Z. Taylor had built on College Street. I knew characters who were like the characters of his stories.

Peter Taylor looked at the culture he grew up in and tried to tell people what it was like. Her once told an interviewer:

 

That’s the world that I knew growing up, the world of the so-called upper-class people. I know everything that was wrong and wretched about them. But, on the other hand, they fascinate me.

 

I think all good writers, no matter their background, could say something like that.

• Sources: Peter Taylor’s “What You Hear From ‘Em?” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 327-42.

The quotation is from Hampton Sides, “A Conversation with Peter Taylor”; Memphis Magazine, February 1987. The interview appeared in the magazine’s newsletter here:

https://memphismagazine.com/features/longform/a-conversation-with-peter-taylor/

A moment with Sam Nunn

 The press party at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 was a big deal. Someone told me 2,200 people were there: politicians, lobbyists, pollsters and people with influence. The press was badly outnumbered.

My job required an appearance. I made it and fled. I was congratulating myself on finding a quiet place in a noisy convention center when I noticed I wasn’t alone.

Another lover of quiet had beaten me to the spot. He stuck out a hand and said, “I’m Sam Nunn.”

But everybody knew who he was.

American politicians do so many idiotic things it’s easy to forget that there are people in Washington who know what they’re doing. Nunn was then a U.S. senator from Georgia. He had a reputation for knowing the details and being patient enough to look for reasonable solutions to thorny problems. Even back then, people were urging him to run for president.

The memory of that brief conversation came back because Nunn was in the paper the other day. He’s 87 and was attending an event at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech.

The discussion of American foreign policy was typical of Nunn. He talked about details — why 60 percent is an important number when you’re talking about uranium enrichment and why it’s not a bad benchmark in considering when to go to war. But he also gave reasons why he thought the United States had better ways, using diplomacy, to get what it wanted.

His remarks were bipartisan. He said he could understand the sentiment for regime change. He knew how those in power in Tehran had handled protesters. But he cautioned that the world is full of bad leaders, and the United States simply can’t get rid of them all. He quietly, by example, helped us put our sentiments aside and do some thinking.

As he talked, you could get a sense of what a reasonable approach to Iran would have been. It’s quite a contrast to what this county did: try to form a plan after the bombing started.

Patricia Murphy, the newspaper’s senior political columnist, pointed out that every time the country got into trouble people would urge Nunn to run. She asked him why he never did. He replied:

 

I’ve never looked back and regretted it. I did think about it for a while, but I looked in the mirror several times and I did not see a president staring back.

 

Sadly, I think he’s right. The country should want someone like Nunn as president. But the country I know always looks for something else.

I hope one day it grows up.

• Source: Patricia Murphy, “Sam Nunn on Iran, Congress and why he never ran for president”;  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 18, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.ajc.com/politics/2026/03/president-sam-nunn-it-would-have-had-a-ring-to-it/

After the equinox

 On St. Patrick’s Day, we had a freeze, and the handyman called and said it was too cold to work. Three days later, the equinox, we were doing the delayed chore and sweating.

We’re in that part of spring that makes us think that it arrives all at once. The Wise Woman and I went for a hike in the woods at Tucker for a closer look.

The beeches are shedding last year’s leaves, while just about everything else is putting on new growth. Caterpillars and other insects are everywhere, feasting on the tender plants and providing feasts for birds.

The pollen is so heavy in the pines that the male cones look like yellow Christmas tree ornaments.

The buckeyes, in genus Aesculus, have complicated flowers the color of peaches. Violets are everywhere. But most of the blooms were from species that had escaped from the garden. I saw azalea blossoms and hoped they were wild. But they were in the Tsutsusi section of genus Rhododendron, evergreen azaleas from China and Japan.

Then there are the puzzles, the things I don’t know what to call. Leatherleaf mahonia, Berberis bealei, is putting out green fruit, while thorny olive, Elaeagnus pungens, putting out red. Leatherleaf mahonia has been here so long it’s considered naturalized, while thorny olive is still considered invasive. Both came from China.

A pileated woodpecker worked over a dead tree for insects. They’re enormous compared to the other woodpeckers. This one was oblivious to us, and we spent 10 minutes just watching.

Crows are usually wary, but we ran into one who perched on a limb 25 feet away and just watched. The Wise Woman feeds crows around our homestead. They like peanuts, and I wondered whether a walker in Tucker keeps peanuts in a pocket.

‘The Warrior Princess Ozimba’

 Reynolds Price’s story is about Aunt Zimby, who owes precious little to white folks. She is old — she has memories of General Lee. No one marked her birthday when she was born, so she chose the Fourth of July for herself. Her name was given to her by the narrator’s great-grandfather, who was reading a novel at the time.

By tradition, Zimby received a new pair of blue tennis shoes on her birthday. Blue because it was her favorite color. She asked about the color even after she lost her sight.

Grandfather Buddy brought the shoes to her, then father Phil, and then Ed, the narrator. Zimby sometimes confuses Ed for Phil, who died two years ago.

One of the patterns in Southern stories is a story within a story. A character, particularly a wise old character like Zimby, will tell a story about another character.

In a lot of Southern stories, a white character will tell a story about a Black character. The level of skill crossing cultures varies, which is why a lot of Southern literature is unreadable.

Zimby’s story about a little white boy named Phil is a wonder.

Some things about Southern culture don’t resolve into a reasonable explanation. There’s nothing reasonable about much of Southern culture. Price has the sense to state the case without trying to explain the inexplicable.

• Source: Reynolds Price’s “The Warrior Princess Ozimba” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 293-8.

The story close to home

 Maybe you can be too close to a story. Hunter Kay’s “The Fifth Generation” was set in East Texas.

The protagonist, a recent high school graduate named Charles, is from Palestine, a small town about 30 miles from my grandfather’s farm. A spectacular fight takes place in the pool hall in Jacksonville. The pool hall was about 3 miles from grandfather’s farm.

I read the story seeing places that I know. I’m not sure it would be the same for you.

Charles is a rich kid who doesn’t know what to do with his life and so he goes to a bar, where he gets gloriously drunk and falls in with Gary, a young worker on a drilling rig. The two become partners, hauling pipe for the rig operator, and doing things that young men do when they are just intent on living life, rather than thinking about it.

 

What has been bred out of us? “Takes five generations to make a gentleman,” my grandmother used to say.

 

Charles finds himself changing — in some ways for the good. But life on the rig is a vacation for him. It’s not for Gary.

It’s a troubling, haunting story. Kay wrote it when he was in his 20s, working on a master’s thesis at Vanderbilt. The story was admired and anthologized. I never saw another story from him, and I’d have liked to have read more.

He was the kind of fellow I tend to like. He did a bit of gardening and liked to talk about literature. I was glad to hear that had hadn’t stopped writing and was working on a book when he died. I hope someone publishes it.

• Sources: Hunter Kay’s “The Fifth Generation” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 183-206. The quotation is on p. 183.

E. Thomas Wood, “Hunter Kay, 1948-2020”; Medium, June 20, 2020. It’s here:

https://medium.com/@ethomaswood/hunter-kay-1948-2020-e3b833bbcdf2

John Aubrey, notetaker

 Peter Davidson reminds us that this month is the 400^th anniversary of John Aubrey’s birth.

In Davidson’s telling, Aubrey was a patron saint of observers, collectors and notetakers. If you’ve read Aubrey and visit a place he wrote about, you think about what he saw and how he saw it. Davidson says that Aubrey’s writings “enchant the township.”

A writer who does that is a good writer.

I’ve read little of Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Davidson convinced me that I’ve not read nearly enough.

I caught Aubrey’s love of gossip and anecdote. I missed his interest in archeology, antiquities and what we’d now call anthropology.

Davidson paints him as a fellow of endless curiosity. If Aubrey were alive today, he’d probably be collecting notes in notebooks and publishing a few online.

• Source: Peter Davidson, “Speaking Through the Ages: John Aubrey at four hundred”; The Literary Review, March 2026. It’s here:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/speaking-through-the-ages

Aubrey was born March 12, 1626, in Wiltshire. I don’t know him well as a writer and missed marking the day. The month will have to do.

A chronic state of mind

 Edith Wharton, describing American and British expatriates, said: 

they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely fatiguing to be truthful.

 

That’s from The Mother’s Recompense, published in 1925. Though it’s more than 100 years old, I think that “a chronic state of mental inaccuracy” is a phrase for our times.

• Source: I found the quotation when I stumbled across the engaging blog Old Geezer Re-Reading. It’s here: 

https://oldgeezerrereadingblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/reading-an-edith-wharton-from-1925/

You sometimes find astonishing things while looking for something else.