“A Christmas Memory”

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“A Christmas Memory”

by Truman Capote

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in Alabama during the Depression (early 1930s); published in 1956.

SYNOPSIS

A young man remembers the last Christmas he spent with his closest relative.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

The Short Story in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

For More Information

Truman Capote, virtually abandoned by his mother as a child, was raised during the Depression of the 1930s by distant cousins in a small Alabama town called Monroeville. He spent the bulk of his time with his favorite cousin, Sook Faulk. Sook exerted a formidable influence on Capote, and her eccentric mannerisms and childlike innocence inspired many of his short stories. Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” a short story so renowned that it has been published individually, pays homage to the pleasure and excitement Sook’s holiday rituals brought her young cousin.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

The South during the Depression

In “A Christmas Memory” the Great Depression has taken its toll; Buddy and his friend fantasize about giving each other the expensive presents that they are too poor to buy. The Depression was precipitated by the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, also referred to as “Black Monday.” Two weeks after the crash, the value of stocks declined by more than 37 percent. Soon afterward, banks all over the country collapsed like dominoes. Industry slowed to a standstill, and by 1933, about a third of the American work force was unemployed. In the South many mills and factories, which local townspeople depended on for jobs, closed down. Alabama was particularly hard hit, experiencing the largest decline in total nonfarm employment of all Southern states during the 1930s.

The tremendous poverty of many Southerners forced them to become creative in devising means of survival. As an example, for medicinal purposes they schooled themselves in both Native American and their own ancestral homeopathy, gaining a broad knowledge of herbs, barks, and roots that had healing powers. White Southerners, particularly poor whites, made liberal use of Indian medicine, some of them becoming highly proficient in the curative value of plants. In the short story, Buddy’s friend knows many old Indian cures. Southern woods and swamps contained enough medicinal plants to fill a pharmacy, and there existed an herb, root, or bark to alleviate practically any illness or injury:

Powdered alum stopped bleeding. Black elderberries cured constipation, and the flowers and bark, when made into a salve using lard, healed scalds and burns. A tea made from rhubarb stopped diarrhea. A poultice made from sheep sorel cured cancer. Alder-bark tea was good for chills. Wormwood tea cured cholera, red clover leaf took care of pimples, calamus root stopped cramps, papawroot tea cured gonorrhea.
(Flynt, p. 219)

When a holiday or special occasion required presents for friends or relatives, they baked homemade treats or crafted their gifts out of natural substances—like bark and straw—and throwaway objects found around the house. “They could not afford furniture or utensils. So they carved goblets and plates, made pottery and glazed it, built furniture from vines or wood … and designed toys from peach seeds, mountain laurel or pine bark” (Flynt, p. 211).

FDR and the New Deal

In the story Buddy’s prized possession is a letter on White House stationery thanking him for the fruitcake that he sent to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt, a Democrat, was elected in 1932 on the strength of his determination to end the Depression. Roosevelt called his solution “The New Deal,” a plan that provided jobs through agencies such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and federal monetary relief to the states to help the unemployed. Despite Roosevelt’s innovative efforts, however, it was not the New Deal but industrial mobilization for World War II that ended the Depression.

Prohibition: the “dry” years

In “A Christmas Memory,” the holiday fruitcake recipe includes a forbidden ingredient—whiskey. As Buddy explains in the story, state laws prohibited the sale of alcohol throughout the country. The passage in 1919 of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution had made the manufacture, sale, and transportation (but not the use) of alcoholic beverages illegal, instituting the Prohibition period, which lasted until 1933.

The Eighteenth Amendment was the culmination of years of successful campaigning by the Anti-Saloon League, also referred to as “the Drys.” Anti-alcohol sentiment grew during World War I, particularly against beer, since no red-blooded patriot wanted to drink alcohol brewed by German foes. Support for Prohibition was also connected to an increasing discomfort with urbanization in America. After the war, opportunity in urban, industrialized areas lured many Americans away from the rural heartland. The Anti-Saloon League’s strongest supporters came from the rural South. To many of these religious-minded country folk, drinking was associated with urban immorality. They conceived of the typical American city as a hotbed of sin, symbolized by the dark, sleazy, back-room bar.

Though passage of the Eighteenth Amendment may have been a success for the Drys, Prohibition itself was not. The fact that the Eighteenth Amendment refused to go so far as to prohibit the use of alcohol suggested that the majority of Americans were ambivalent about its regulation. This ambivalence led to uneven enforcement of the law. Prohibition failed to keep alcohol out of people’s hands; it simply forced them to work a little harder to get it. By 1928 gangsters who ran their “bootlegging” operations out of underground bars called “speakeasies” were reaping huge profits by selling liquor, and the country became disillusioned with Prohibition. After his election in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt spearheaded the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment repealing national Prohibition. Some states, however, held out and did not repeal their own prohibition laws until much later.

SOUTHERN CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS

American Christmas folk customs vary depending on the region in which they have originated. The common practices of lighting the Yule log, baking the fruitcake, and singing carols all hark back to England. Many uniquely Southern traditions derived from the Yuletide customs brought to the new world by some of the first colonists to the region, who were descendants of the English Cavaliers. Unlike the Puritan settlers, who prohibited Christmas festivities in New England until 1681, the Cavaliers merrily celebrated the season by singing, dancing, ringing bells, feasting, and lavishly decorating their homes. In the antebellum South, the celebration began weeks before Christmas day itself, just as it does in the postbellum years of the story.

Christmas memory

Even before Prohibition, a considerable number of Southerners earned a living by producing “moonshine” whiskey, which was made from corn and brewed in home stills. Southern states had passed local laws outlawing liquor before the Eighteenth Amendment, and when it was repealed in 1933, every Southern state, including Alabama, retained some form of official restraint on the manufacture and sale of liquor. At the same time the South saw the collapse in the 1920s and 1930s of industries on which many citizens depended for jobs and income, such as the mountain lumber and coal industries. A number of Southerners from these industries and on failing farms turned to moonshining and bootlegging for survival. Usually operating out of their own homes, as HaHa Jones does in the story, men became the primary makers and consumers of whiskey, although women as well as men often sold it. In the early 1930s, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama were the states with the greatest number of illegal stills—makeshift devices for vaporizing and condensing liquid from fermented produce into alcohol. Altogether the South held some 14,321 stills in 1931, 67.1 percent of the nation’s total (Kirby, p. 211). After the repeal of the antiliquor amendment, the number of Southern stills lessened, but the region still claimed a large share. Meanwhile, sheriffs and other government agents continued to hunt down moonshiners and bootleggers, the search often ending in bloodshed. During the Depression, these private battles took on a symbolic, public importance as rebellious moonshiners struggled to maintain what had become an independent way of life in the rural South and to preserve one of their few sources of income in a hunger-driven decade.

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

The narrator, known only as Buddy, is a young student recalling a childhood Christmas memory. In the flashback, he is seven years old and lives with relatives in a house in the rural South. Buddy’s parents are conspicuously absent; his cousin, a woman in her sixties whom he calls his “friend,” is the closest thing to a mother he has.

Buddy’s friend excitedly leads him in a series of traditional Christmas rituals, beginning on the cold November morning when she announces that it’s fruitcake weather. The ceremonial preparation of the fruitcakes assumes great importance. Buddy and his cousin spend an entire day foraging in the woods for pecans and scraping together every penny for their “Fruitcake Fund” to purchase the necessary ingredients. But the most difficult task is obtaining the whiskey to add to the recipe.

The sale of alcohol is illegal, so Buddy and his friend are forced to travel to a disreputable dive owned by an Indian named HaHa Jones. HaHa’s name is a misnomer; he is a large man with a giant scar on his face who, according to legend, never laughs—until the day the elderly hunchbacked woman and the delicate boy appear at his doorstep requesting a quart of his best whiskey. “Which one of you is a drinkin’ man?” he asks gleefully. When Buddy hands HaHa their money, he refuses it:

“Tell you what,” he proposes, pouring the money back into our bead purse, “just send me one of them fruitcakes instead.” ”Well,” my friend remarks on our way home, “There’s a lovely man. We’ll put an extra cup of raisins in his cake.”
(Capote, “A Christmas Memory,” p. 25)

A few days later, the fruitcakes are baked and shipped to friends, casual acquaintances, and famous people whom they have never met; even President Roosevelt receives his annual cake. The two cooks then dip into the leftover whiskey, and Buddy’s friend dreams about Eleanor Roosevelt serving the fruitcake at a White House dinner party. When relatives appear in the evening and find Buddy tipsy, they chastise his friend. She retreats to her room in distress, but Buddy comforts her with the promise that tomorrow they will find a wonderful Christmas tree.

The next morning they venture into the woods and cut down a majestic tree that they decorate with homemade ornaments and odds and ends found in the attic. Since they can’t afford to buy presents for their relatives, they spend the rest of the day creating gifts. Their poverty stings only when Buddy wishes he could give his friend a knife, a radio, and the chocolate-covered cherries she craves. His friend desperately wants to surprise Buddy with a brand new bicycle. Instead they construct elaborate kites for each other out of paper and old magazine photographs, just as they have done every year.

They spend Christmas day happily watching their homemade kites soar in the breeze. It is a perfect holiday that the contented pair relish, blissfully ignorant that unforeseen circumstances and the passing of time will soon separate them forever. “Those Who Know Best” (the adults in charge) send Buddy to military school. In his absence his friend continues to bake her fruitcakes alone until one November morning, “she cannot rouse herself to exclaim ‘Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!’” (“A Christmas Memory,” p. 45).

From the fictional to the real

In the story Buddy lives with a number of relatives but shares a special kinship only with the character he identifies as “his friend.”

Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.
(“A Christmas Memory,” p. 13)

The friend is based on Sook Faulk, Capote’s beloved elderly cousin and surrogate mother. Buddy’s friend in the story exhibits many of Sook’s peculiar personality traits and superstitions. For example, she is so fearful of the number thirteen that she spends the thirteenth of every month in bed. Buddy’s description of his friend lends insight into Sook’s simple lifestyle:

[S]he has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home … read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry. Here are a few thing she has done, does do: killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county … dip snuff … tame hummingbirds … talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the prettiest japonicas in town, know the recipe for every sort of old-time Indian cure.
(“A Christmas Memory,” pp. 19-20)

DIPPING SNUFF

In “A Christmas Memory” Buddy makes a point of mentioning “dipping snuff,” the process of inhaling or chewing tobacco, as one of the things his cousin does. For pre-colonial Southern Indian tribes, tobacco’s medicinal purposes made it a sacred crop. When Columbus arrived on North American shores, the welcoming natives presented him with golden tobacco leaves, and, not knowing what they were, he threw them away. Eventually, the American colonists learned the native techniques of inhaling tobacco’s powder and chewing or smoking the coarser sections of the plant. Approximately 90 percent of the tobacco produced in the United States came to be grown in the South, and the recreational practice of using the raw plant for dipping snuff appears to have been a uniquely Southern habit.

Sook could only be drawn outside the safe boundaries of home for two important annual rituals—the Christmas fruitcake preparation, and a trip to the woods to find herbs. Sook’s sole income came from an herbal remedy for dropsy, a common disease of the time that caused excess water in the tissues. According to a biography of Capote, Sook obtained the recipe from an Indian medicine man and collected pocket money by selling the medication for $2 a jar.

The epilogue in the Random House edition of “A Christmas Memory” claims that Sook Faulk died in 1938 while Capote was in military school, but biographer Gerald Clarke states that she died in 1946. If she died in 1946, it is possible that Truman spent at least one more Christmas with Sook on his occasional trips back home during the early 1940s. After her death, Capote memorialized her in many of his short stories, including “A Christmas Memory.”

Sources

Capote believed in merging fiction and nonfiction together in his writing, the two “coming into a conjunction like two big rivers” (Grobel, p. 89). Most of his short stories were drawn from his childhood experiences in Monroeville, Alabama.

IN A FOREST OF LINGERIE ADS

Some of the best fiction produced during the 1940s and 1950s appeared in women’s magazines—where “fine fiction found a nest in a forest of lingerie ads” (Clarke, p. 81). “A Christmas Memory” first appeared in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956, thanks to the efforts of George Davis, the editor who first published Truman Capote’s stories. Davis, an aspiring author sidelined by writer’s block, worked for both Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. During his stints as fiction editor, he boldly showcased many talents, including Capote, along with the work of Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Carson Mc-Cullers.

“A Christmas Memory” focuses primarily on the experiences of Truman and Sook. Truman Capote’s real mother, Lillie Mae Persons, was unhappy in her marriage and so left her son with relatives in Alabama. Although Truman’s estranged parents made sporadic attempts to involve themselves in Truman’s childhood, he never felt close to either of them. Sookie, as he affectionately called her, took him under her wing and won the affection that a child normally reserves for his parents. Innocent and guileless, Sook ranked low in the family’s pecking order. One Capote biographer referred to her as “so childlike, she was thought to be retarded by many people,” going on to explain that “in fact she was merely so shy and unworldly as sometimes to appear simpleminded” (Clarke, p. 16). The young Capote was meanwhile thought to be a delicate child with feminine features; worried that he was a “sissy,” his mother later sent him to military school in an attempt to graft more masculine traits on the boy (Clarke, p. 42). Capote and Sook were lonely outsiders and kindred spirits.

The two were constant companions from 1930 until 1932, when Capote’s mother returned to Alabama to collect her son. Remarried to a man she adored and now living in New York City, Lillie Mae decided she was finally ready to be a mother, so she spirited Truman away to New York, leaving Sook emotionally crushed.

Making brief appearances in the story are a few minor characters also based on people in Capote’s life. According to Capote’s aunt, an Apache Indian named Victorio from whom Sook purchased her contraband alcohol inspired the character of HaHa Jones. The relatives in the story who chastise Buddy’s friend for giving him alcohol are based on the unmarried cousins with whom young Capote lived. Jennie Faulk, a successful, iron-willed businesswoman, was the sole breadwinner of the household, and everyone deferred to her. Jennie’s parents were white sharecroppers, and she was determined to escape the backbreaking work of picking cotton that employed so many Southerners. Remembering the bloody hands and knees she had suffered as a child picking cotton, Jenny shared the aspirations of many a disgruntled sharecropper who moved to the city at the turn of the century seeking better pay in factory or mill jobs. Instead of entering a mill, however, she discovered that she had a talent for making hats. She started her own millinery business, which enabled her to support her sisters Callie and Sook, and her brother Bud. Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke describes their residence as “a strange household he entered in Monroeville, unique to the South, peculiar to the time: three quarrelsome sisters in late middle age, their reclusive older brother, and an atmosphere heavy with small secrets and ancient resentments” (Clarke, p. 15). Despite their differences, the Faulks always believed in the responsibilities and loyalties that familial bonds required. Thus, they felt no qualms about taking young Capote into their fold when his mother deposited him on their doorstep.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

The new South

By the 1940s, the decade in which “A Christmas Memory” was written, the arm of industrial wartime mobilization had stretched into the South. Sharecroppers and farmers—displaced by the new factories, plants, and military bases that the government constructed throughout the region—found higher-paying positions as unskilled laborers in the war industry. The South’s industrial boom was furthered by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. By the 1950s, production work had replaced farming as the predominant occupation in the area, and the total farm population had declined 25 percent.

In 1956, the year in which the short story was published, Congress passed an act funding the construction of an elaborate system of highways linking the entire nation. This National System of Interstate and Defense Highways replaced the South’s difficult muddy, dusty roads with easy-to-navigate freeways that linked many Southern backwoods to a growing metropolis. Along with rapid industrialization, this sophisticated highway network led to an increase in urbanization, and the South grew far more cosmopolitan throughout the 1950s and 1960s than it had been in the time recalled by Capote’s short story.

Southern society, like its economy, experienced dramatic changes during this era. Capote’s home state of Alabama, churning with turmoil, was the scene of many significant historical events. In 1955 the first organized, nonviolent civil rights protest occurred in the form of a public bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus. Lasting 381 days, the boycott ended in success in 1956 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on busses was unconstitutional. The federal government and civil rights activists were beginning to force the South into a new, more progressive era.

Reviews

“A Christmas Memory” prompted William Goyen in the New York Times Book Review to call Capote “that old Valentine maker” with a talent for “catching the off-beat nature of people” (Goyen, p. 5). Katherine Gauss-Jackson, writing in Harper’s Magazine (December 1966), favorably compared the story to Dylan Thomas’s classic “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” It became generally accepted as one of Capote’s finest short stories.

Truman Capote himself considered “A Christmas Memory” his most perfect work. His frequent public readings of the story left no dry eyes in the audience. The last words Capote spoke on his deathbed in 1984 were, “It’s me—it’s Buddy,” as if he were summoning Sook. Perhaps the greatest testimony to the power of the story was the place of honor it received at his burial—his good friend Joanne Carson read “A Christmas Memory” at his funeral.