[In the following essay, Gretlund explores Porter's treatment of racism in her unfinished story “The Man in the Tree.”]

Katherine Anne Porter's manuscript “The Man in the Tree” focuses on the racism of her native region at the turn of the century.¹ The notes for this story read like a contribution to later debates on integration, and I always felt that it was unfortunate that she chose not to finish it. Her strong opinions on racial issues, as expressed in this manuscript, deserve to be remembered. Porter seems to have worked on the story in 1933 and 1934, as Joan Givner reports,² but the state of the manuscript and the use of different typewriters show that she returned to it over the years. The manuscript is also valuable for what it shows about Porter's compassion at a time in her life when she did not yet take the preponderance of evil for granted.³ These pages are a treat for lovers of the stories collected in The Old Order for the information they add to our knowledge about white and black lives in mythologized Kyle, Texas. Porter enthusiasts will stir to the sound of names such as Gay, Maria, Miranda, Uncle Gabriel, Uncle Squire and Old Nannie. And there is some excellent writing in “The Man in the Tree.”

For the Porter critic the manuscript offers pleasures that a published story could not hope to equal. In the writing process the author addresses herself in her notes and creates an intimacy with the reader of the manuscript. As Porter never intended to publish her comments to herself, the manner of her metafiction is less formalized than Virginia Woolf's experiment in talking to herself and to her reader in her story called “An Unwritten Novel” (1921), but it is equally brilliant.⁴ Porter reminds herself of the existence of a character, advises herself of what to concentrate on, asks herself questions on whether she should use biographical material based on her father's relationship with black people and on her grandmother's “boast that no negro had ever been formally whipped on the place,” and she uses “etc” as if she knew exactly what she would add to a conversation. Porter's advice to herself includes: “put in here” (a dramatic incident at a fruit stand), “let it be the woman instead” (who cheats a black boy), “let this be the real reason for the attack and the accusation,” “with the crux—maybe being in old Nany [sic] sending word she'd come and work out the ten dollars” (to pay for the boy's funeral), “the scene—rather slimy” (with Brigadier-General Angus Kirkendall), “describe the sweet dark country” (the Louisiana swamps), “change her name” (the black cook's), “have the scene when they go to the jail,” “express this better” (Gabriela's reaction to the lynching) and “for the lynching story.” The most intimate moment is on a page marked “written in Paris,” where Porter seems to be well aware that someday her manuscript would have a reader:

Just stopped to roll and light a new cigarette, and this smell of Scaferlati is astounding … Like new mown clover mixed equally with very high class barn yard fertiliser, … Hayfield and ill kept stables recur to me, country life and good weather. But think of smoking it!

One title Porter considered for this material was “The Southern Story.” It is an account of a lynching and its aftermath, and the focus is on pride and shame within one household. It is embarrassing for the white family the Gays, or Townsends or Beauregards, that the lynched boy is the grandson of their respected black mammy, called Nannie Bunton (corrected by hand to Bunting), named for Maria Gay's grandfather; so, “the lynching had practically occurred in the family.” Porter anticipates that “the crux” of the story will be Nannie's proud refusal to accept money and mourning clothes from “the white folks.” Hasty, really Hastings, Bunton, “named for old Madam Hastings who owned his grandfather,” is described as a decent, hard-working field Negro, who ran perpetual errands with “a wide never fading smile.” Porter does not want any suspense about why Hastings was lynched:

The fat woman with oily light brown hair, who ran the fruit and soda water stand etc, accused him. She ran screaming into the street in a thin pink silk nightgown, she screamed until she drew a crowd of men from all over, and standing there before them, tossing her wild head from one of her hands to the other as if it were a football, she accused the negro boy, Hasty Bunting, of an attempt on her virtue and life.

This woman, later named Tarleton, lives on the edge of town, and as her husband works on the railroad, she is often alone. Porter calls her “a sluttish poor white woman.” She is described twice as being mostly in a “prostrated” position; this fact is probably without any religious connotations. What really happened between this woman and the boy is explained on a page and a half of the manuscript. The woman runs a fruit stand, Hasty bought an orange for a quarter, paid with a fifty-cent piece and did not receive any change. This is the reason for his “attack,” which is not defined. On a later page Porter lets Maria observe the Tarleton woman in some detail, and Maria is close enough to overhear the argument about the quarter. On still another page Porter tries to understand the psychology of this woman that any white man can have for a dollar. The woman knew she could count on the mob to believe her, but “believe” is perhaps the wrong word. They simply needed a pretext to indulge in a need, Porter explains, and the woman senses that the accusation would be believed because it is “consecrated by a tradition equally false.” But Porter also writes about another element of the public mind that the Tarleton woman has forgotten in the heat of her anger. Afterwards, when the moral hangover is in effect, they will turn on her. She will be ostracized, for nobody in this community will go near a woman who has been “handled by a nigger.” They will blame her for her having the power that made them lynch an innocent young man. So the Tarleton woman will become a victim of the racism she herself set in motion.

The incident at the fruit stand and Maria's final encounter with old Nannie are two dramatic scenes Porter returns to throughout the sixty-three unnumbered pages of this manuscript.⁵ But of even greater import is another visual scene that is also mentioned on what appears to be the first page: every morning Maria Gay sends her girl of four (or five) called Gabrielle (or Gabriela) to school accompanied by Loute (or Lute), a black girl of thirteen. Porter describes the daily scene:

They flew out of the gate the instant it was opened like two escaping birds, Lute flapping her flat black bare feet, her little bur of a [h]ead thrust forward between her shoulders as she ran, Gabrielle, in her pink organdy sun bonnet and thin dress, streaming out at the end of Lute's long dry black arm like an afterthought.

Porter then imagines the fright of Loute who literally bumps into Hasty's body hanging from a tree in the center of the square. And it was such a “pleasant green square with the live oaks and magnolias and Spanish moss and the cape jessamine bushes and the bandstand.” On another page, where the title “The Man in the Tree” is used, Porter describes the scene after the lynching:

He hangs there, dark among the dark branches, a reproach and a witness, not only against his murderers, but to the shame of those who believed they were his friends.

Beside the “blood guilt” of the lynching, Maria is also worried about Gabrielle's and Loute's reactions to what they saw. And as if this were not enough, Marty, a young black girl, brings a postcard of Hasty hanging from the tree; he is in his work-day overalls. The souvenir photos are already being sold in the square at a quarter each. Maria feels the grief, she feels a responsibility for what has happened to “the culled branch of the fambly,” as Hasty used to say, but she feels helpless. On another page she says to herself: “It is something I know well and remember with shame as if I had done it.” Severely she tells Marty always to pay the exact amount.

Another fragment is called “Courtney and Maria.” Porter describes Maria's state of mind. She longs for peace and hates having to manage people. This includes managing her husband Courtney (or Richey) who is county attorney, i.e. prosecuting attorney, which is important to one contemplated variation of the plot. When Courtney tries to talk to her, Maria is so troubled that she turns her husband away with “forbidding coldness.” The general situation also makes it a trying time for their marriage. (Caroline, the presiding cook, knows it and warns her child that Maria will have a fit “if theys a blow struck or a voice raised in this house today.”) Their financial situation is such that they should sell the farm, but Maria cannot imagine her life “without its foundation in this piece of land.” The place is the family tradition, her great-grandfather had brought up eleven children and supported sixteen blacks on that land.

Maria, who is described as “the flower of southern womanhood from her head to her foot,” tries to talk about the lynching to old Brigadier-General Angus Kirkendall, a representative of the old ways. The only result is a rebuke: a southern lady should not even mention such a topic. To make it worse, the general is obviously getting sexually excited by talking about the lynching to her, “a pure and high bred lady.” Maria gets no help from “the filthy old buzzard,” which is her outraged opinion of Angus Kirkendall. On a page with a title she was to use years later, “The Never-Ending Wrong,” Porter speculates on the nature of lynching:

Any one reading the newspaper stories about it would have said it was an entirely stupid and ordinary lynching like any other; the stupid kind of cruel thing that must happen now and again when men, needing to remind themselves of their power, wanting terribly the smell of blood and the sight of pain more intimate and understandable to them than the kind they can cause by torturing animals, seize a human being,—and it is necessary this creature should be helpless and in the wrong about something or it would be dangerous,—and murder him. It is not ordinary murder, but has religion and morality on its side, by some fearful perversion of fact, and a special tang to it for the killers.

Another scene focuses on Gabrielle, who is described as being “sleek and grey-eyed and peach colored.” She is seen in her relationship with Loute, the black girl who looks after her.⁶ (Porter introduces a page on everyday black-white relations as comic relief here. Loute has worms and is unable to stay on a bed at night; she rolls all over the house in her sleep. Maria worms her and the girl calls her “Miss Kathin Ann.”) In her fear of white people, Loute becomes hysterical, which has its effect on Gabrielle. On what is probably the day after the lynching, Gabrielle does not want to be washed and combed for “convent school” (later, “kindergarten”), she throws a tantrum and Anna (also, Caroline) slaps her. Porter notes that Gabrielle will not admit that she has been slapped by a Negro (is this an example of racism bred in the bone?). Maria decides to take the terrified Loute to the next parish so she can stay on their rice farm, a family asset that is not doing too well. Maria realizes that Loute, with the image in her mind of Hasty in the tree, now believes that white people are capable of any cruelty against her.

The tension in the community is reflected in a scene where two black women (Lillie and Mamie) talk about keeping their sons (whom Porter describes as “pot bellies of chronic undernourishment”) clear out of town to keep them safe. They make sure Maria overhears their conversation. The tension is also brought out in a verse sung by Skid (possibly Hasty's younger brother) who is mowing a lawn:

You gointa git sumthin you don' expeck
It aint no money and it aint no check
And you're going home all wropped up in
A wooden kimona trimmed with tin.

When Loute absolutely refuses to stay with strange white people at the farm, the Gays take her back home. Porter makes it a point to show that Gabrielle and Loute are delighted to see one another again. Maria later hears them talking about the lynching. In one version the children saw

a knot of men collected around a big tree. There was a ladder and a black wagon standing by, and a big man in a black hat and a pistol at his belt, and they were scrambling around up in the tree and on the ground, and they were terribly quiet, like people in a moving picture.

In another scene, Loute has not actually seen Hasty's body, but the child has. Porter brilliantly dramatizes Maria's worries when Gabrielle shocks her mother by pointing out the hanging tree:

“Look, Mama, there's where they had the man in the tree this morning!” “I suppose they're getting ready to cut off some of those big branches,” she said. “No Mama,” said Gabrielle, “there was a man climbing in the tree, but there was another man there too; he was tied on.” She put her hands up to her neck. [The last sentence was added in ink.]

In one fragment Porter imagines Hasty on the run, there's a mob gathering and she introduces us to a black woman who hides Hasty in a cow shed. The black woman comes fully and wonderfully alive in just two short paragraphs. In the most moving fragment of the manuscript, Hasty gives her the infamous orange, and she persuades him to wait while she makes coffee for him.

In the middle of the night I warmed up the coffee and took a cup out to him. He drunk it up, and I brung another. But he said he had to get on, he didn't feel safe there, and I begged him to jes try and drink one mo' cup cawfy. I kep tellin him, go on, drink that cawfy. You gonn want it this time tomorrow and I'm gonna wish you had it … You gonna be sorry you didn't drink it while you had the chance, I kep tellin him. So he said, “I'll try to drink it latah on.” So I lef the pot there, and when I went back in the mawnin, he was gone and the cawfy still standing there jes like I lef it …

I know now he ought nevah to a stopped a tall … he jes lost time hidin out in that barn. He jes los the time he needed to git across the swamp where the dawgs couldn't take up the trail. I knows that now. I oughta tole him to run, instid of tryin to make him drink cawfy. I knows it now [Porter's ellipses throughout].

On the same page “All the Evidence?” is suggested as a possible title for the story. The word “evidence” seems to have brought the law to Porter's mind for another fragment of this text features Sheriff Carleton in a conversation with Richey (or Courtney) Gay, the prosecuting attorney. The sheriff, whom Porter brings to life through language and attitude, tells Gay how he and his posse tracked down Hasty just in time:

Me and my possy was just one lope ahead of that mob all the way. They never had a chance't. Say, that nigger was glad to see us. I says “Come on out, Hasty, it's the sheriff,” I says, “if you know what's good for you.” And he sure did crawl right outa the brush with his eyes big as saucers, and says, small like, “here I am, Mister Carlton.” So we've got him all jailed up and he's sure one relieved looking nigger. He'd be a mess of skin and bones by now if that crowd had got him.

On this page it is implied that Hasty is guilty and the accusation is murder rather than attempted rape. And on a stray half page titled “airless jail,” there is a description of how Hasty, upon being arrested, “stopped feeling sick at his stomach for the first time since he had killed the woman.” The sheriff and the attorney decide to transfer Hasty to Waco so there will not be a lynching in their town. This is the first indication of location in these notes; on another page of the manuscript the setting is Louisiana. Porter seems to have given up on the transfer to Waco. Instead she tells how Hasty is pursued with dogs, captured in a deep gulch and brought back to town.

Here they hanged him to a fine branch of the live oak in the center of the public square, near the band stand, and they left him hanging, as an example, no doubt, until about eleven o'clock the next morning. They did not shoot at the body, or mutilate it, nor had they beaten him extraordinarily; they simply hanged him, and left him there, in a strangely cold blooded and methodical way: and dispersed … it almost appeared that they had got no real enjoyment of it.

At another point Porter experimented with a description of bullet holes in the body and dried blood on Hasty's feet. She lined this out, probably because the type of cruelty suggested would only obscure the point of the story.

Maria, the main character, interestingly named Miranda on this particular page, reveals her furious anger in a conversation with her sister, also named Gabrielle (here, Gabriela). She refuses to be a passive witness to the lack of justice in the town: “I—I—I'm going to leave … get as far away as I—I can … I w-won't stay in this filthy country. … I won't s-stay here and—and—and be murdered too!” Maria considers how white people are enslaved by their relationship with blacks; she feels that she herself is a victim and an “unwilling propagator of a state of affairs she did not believe in.” Maria remembers that her grandparents did not believe in slavery, but is pointedly reminded that they had slaves just the same (her last name here is Beauregard). And this idea of mutual victimization of the races seems to be Porter's main theme. She advises herself to write of “the emotional aftermath of such a crime, about the poisoned feeling that comes after excess.” Maria is genuinely scared, not of the blacks, but of the whites “who go mad periodically with blood lust.”

In the manuscript there are four pages called “newspaper comment.” They serve as comic relief. The newspaper editor could have been created by Mark Twain. These pages show a side of Porter's genius that she did not often allow into her fiction, for this is humor in the tradition of antebellum southern humorists. The plot is brought forward by the information that Courtney and a small group of men cut Hasty's body down, give it burial and protest to the sheriff. The latter is the most serious provocation and starts a hilarious and sad newspaper row. Porter obviously enjoyed writing these pages and reminded herself to add more letters to “the most fearless editor” in the South. She uses these pages to illustrate the division in the white community, where the Angus Kirkendalls are decidedly the majority.

As the story continues, Maria knows she must go and see old Nannie Bunton who took to her bed after the lynching. Maria had offered her some food, a black dress and ten dollars to pay for the funeral. The old woman refuses the offer but later is ready to accept the money and the clothes on condition that she make it up in work. Maria is shocked by Nannie's sudden display of hatred for all whites because she has only seen her as mammy and granny over the years. Maria's feelings are hurt when Nannie's reaction to her offer is reported to her, and she dreads the meeting; she knows she will be held responsible for all actions by whites. Maria cannot face Nannie alone and wants to bring Hector, a great Dane, on the visit to Nannie's cabin. Hector is a kindred spirit, not quite the dog he seems to be. The point is that Maria has always refused to discipline any beast or child, and as a result has permanent problems with her servants, her children, the horses and Hector. But the accepted violence in the families around her is so dominating that it frightens her. This is especially true of the black families where the children are beaten “unmercifully at all hours.” Maria wonders “why southern people, even the best of them, beat their children so much.” Porter sees the parallels between the private and the public violence and makes the point that to the common everyday accepted violence will finally “justify” even lynching as an act of necessary discipline. Maria, therefore, enjoys the company of the timid dog, especially on this trip.

With these five pages dealing with the dog and violence, Porter may have realized that with these themes she was really working on a longer story, maybe even a novel. Perhaps this was the main reason she never finished it as a short story.

Maria finally faces old Nannie, who is on the bed with a Whig Rose quilt covering her. If she could, Nannie would have refused to see even Maria, but she is trying to get Hasty buried. She is finished accepting money from white people for “they turn on you, they say you stole it.” Porter remarks to herself: “try to explain the burden on the soul of any decent person in this situation.” Trying to invoke the past, Maria says, “Why Nanny, my Uncle Bill and your Charlie were foster brothers, don't you remember?” But Nannie wants to die, and when she does speak it is to “some invisible presence in the comer nearest the fireplace.” This reference most likely is to Maria's grandmother, which brings us once again close to the old order stories. Nannie sums up her life's experience with these words: the “cullud branch of the fambly always git de worst of it.”

There are six pages titled “after scene with the old woman.” The boy called Skid has been fired from his job because he is related to Hasty. Maria and Courtney try to persuade him not to run away and tell him he can sleep in the garage. Courtney complains: “So help me there simply isn't enough to go round, another mouth'll ruin us … Oh, damn that whore!” And he adds, “all this for a quarter!” The Gays decide to keep Skid and plan to persuade Mr. Runge, his employer, to take him back. The wrong never seems to end, and Maria and Courtney are still paying for the sins of their ancestors. Courtney thinks to himself: “It had been going on for five generations, and what was he going to hand on to his son? [A baby called Stuffins.] The same hellish insufferable endless load to carry.” At times Maria regrets that they did not choose New Orleans, where they could have lived in the Vieux Carré and Courtney could have worked in “Uncle Gabriel's law office.” They mourn with Nannie and ponder the existence of the “buzzardly poor white trash” who had lynched her harmless grandson.

They both lay there quietly, not talking or moving any more, but filled with a dark confused sense of grief too great even for the present event, as if it was something half-remembered, brought over from another life, a bequeathed memory of wrong done.

They are shocked into awareness of the present by Skid's blood-curdling screams from the garage where he is convulsed by a nightmare, or as Porter puts it, “in a death struggle with an invisible enemy.” That night Nannie dies in her sleep.

In what looks like the end of the manuscript Loute is seen leading Gabrielle across the bridge once again, Skid is working in the garage, Courtney goes off to the rice farm and everything seems to be back to normal. Maria is in the garden with her scissors cutting flowers for Nannie's funeral. The old woman had helped grow all the flowers in the garden and raise all the children in the household. What I take to be the planned end of the story reads: “Maria quietly and hopelessly wondered what bargain she could make with what Power to have Nannie and Bud [here probably Hasty] off her conscience.” And Porter wrote this story to bear “witness, not only against his murderers, but to the shame of those who believed they were his friends.”

There are many reasons why “The Man in the Tree” is not a publishable manuscript. The very title I use is my choice among the several possibilities Porter suggests to herself on these pages. If these notes were to be published as an old order or Miranda story by Porter, violence would have to be done to them. The problem is of the kind that faced the editor of the Hemingway manuscript that became The Garden of Eden. First of all the manuscript was not finished by the writer, i.e. we do not know what revisions would have brought in the way of perhaps drastic changes. Secondly, and perhaps even more seriously, Porter's pages are unnumbered, so the very structure cannot be determined. It would not be enough to list the events as before, during and after the lynching, for much of the story is seen through Maria's mind, and she does not see the lynching. In most versions she has to find out what happened from the children and the servants. And there is the further complication that Porter seems to have planned to start with Maria's going to old Nannie, which is also the final scene of the story. If we are honest, there is no reason to try to edit and publish this manuscript. But its existence should not be forgotten, and scholars should be allowed to quote readily from this text so full of hideous images of racism, especially from the passages that dispel any accusation of racism against Katherine Anne Porter.

Notes

1. In February 1915, W. E. B. DuBois published an editorial in The Crisis which numbered at 2,732 the registered lynchings in the USA from 1885–1914. During Porter's childhood years in Kyle from 1892 to 1901, the national total of lynchings was 1,157. See Phyllis R. Klotman, “‘Tearing a Hole in History’: Lynching as Theme and Motif,” Black American Literature Forum 19 (Summer 1985) 55–63.

2. Joan Givner mentions this manuscript briefly in Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York, 1982) 288–89. Givner does not fully grasp Porter's experimentation with different names for the same character, so some of her information on this manuscript is misleading.

3. Cp. Porter's letter to Andrew Lytle of 15 September 1947. Porter Collection.

4. I am obliged to Noel Polk of the University of Southern Mississippi for mentioning Virginia Woolf's story to me.

5. Individual passages are numbered. The passage Porter thought of as “Newspaper Row” is numbered pages 1 to 4. Whereas the passage about Hector, a great Dane, has four pages marked “1,” a fact that reflects Porter's work on this part of the manuscript.

6. The parallels between these characters and members of the Porter family and servants are obvious. See Katherine Anne Porter's letters in the Porter Collection to her older sister Gay Porter Holloway of 30 July 1919 and 21 July 1924. Loute was a black girl of fourteen of that name who took care of Katherine Anne Porter when the writer fell ill during a visit to her sister in Dubach, Louisiana.

   Gay visited Katherine Anne in Shreveport in 1916 and brought her three-year-old daughter, Mary Alice, who was named for her grandmother. The girl died early in 1919. The correspondence implies that she was the inspiration for the character of Gabrielle in this manuscript. See also Porter's letter to Glenway Wescott of 30 July 1956 in which she wrote: “imagine having the Negro Question bounce back into my life after I left my native land to get away from it!”