Cold Sassy Tree

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Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in the fictional town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, in 1906; published in 1984.

SYNOPSIS

A boy’s recently widowed grandfather marries and, as a result, sets off a scandal in the tiny town of Cold Sassy, Georgia.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Olive Ann Burns was born in 1924 and grew up in Banks County, a rural area of Georgia. She attended school in the nearby town of Commerce, which served as the model for the fictional town of Cold Sassy. When she was a child, Burns’s father told her stories about his childhood in Georgia and specifically recounted the story of his grandfather, who, after his wife died, married a much younger woman. These characters served as the models for Grandpa Blakeslee and Miss Love Simpson in Cold Sassy Tree. In real life, their union caused an uproar in the small Southern town at a time when traditional notions of proper behavior bumped up against societal changes.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Progressive Era

The election of Teddy Roosevelt as U.S. president in 1900 marked the beginning of a period known as the Progressive Era, which lasted until the United States entered World War I in 1917. The Progressive Era started as a response to the panic of the 1890s, an economic depression in which many people lost their jobs and both urban and rural living conditions deteriorated. During this era, middleclass social workers, ministers, intellectuals, and writers voiced their concerns over the social conditions of American society and encouraged the government to enact laws to reform these short-comings. Middle-class women, in particular, played a large role in the reform movements of the Progressive Era. Progressive Era leaders hoped to improve the conditions of society through their efforts to end alcohol consumption, enact child labor laws, improve schools, and gain the right to vote for women.

One of the most significant legal actions taken during this period was the prohibition of alcohol. Progressive Era reformers believed that a ban on alcohol would reform society by removing the negative effects of alcohol consumption. In 1913 the Anti-Saloon League endorsed an amendment to the Constitution banning alcohol, an amendment that Congress adopted six years later in 1919. Many states, however, enforced prohibition laws prior to this amendment, becoming “dry” states much earlier. In 1907 Georgia passed a prohibition law, and before the passage of that law, 125 of the 145 counties in Georgia had already taken legal action on a local basis, declaring themselves dry. In Cold Sassy Tree, Grandpa Blakeslee ignores the prohibition law in his county, as demonstrated by his secret trips to the still in the closet at his daughter’s house, where he drinks his alcohol.

The Progressive Era was also a time when people worked to forbid the widespread employment of children in factories, citing the dangerous conditions and long hours as reasons for such a ban. The typical employer, in fact, liked to hire children because he could pay them less money than adult men or women.

In Cold Sassy Tree, a girl named Lightfoot, who is a friend of the main character, Will, works in a mill in order to earn money after both of her parents die. Lightfoot rarely attends school because she has to work to give money to her aunt, who raises her.

NATIONAL CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION

Progressive reformers worked to enact nationwide legislation to ban the employment of young children. The New York based National Child Labor Committee coordinated a child labor reform movement, and between 1905 and 1907 two-thirds of the states had passed some form of child labor legislation. The committee also supported a nationwide bill in 1906 to prevent the employment of children in mines and factories. Although the law was defeated. Congress did establish a children’s bureau in the Department of Labor in order to investigate child workers.

The large number of women involved in the reform movements of the Progressive Era eventually caused a resurrection of the question of why American women were not allowed to vote. They began once again to push for women’s suffrage by organizing meetings and appealing to the federal and local governments for the vote. Although the political movement for women’s suffrage originated in the mid-nineteenth century, it gained national attention during the first two decades of the twentieth century. One of the characters in Cold Sassy Tree, Miss Love, has attended suffrage meetings and worked to obtain the vote for women. Such efforts were not immediately fruitful, however. It took nearly twenty years for the suffrage movement to achieve success when American women finally gained the right to vote on June 4, 1919, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Industrialization

Before the Civil War, the South was a predominantly agricultural region particularly dependent on cotton exports. In the aftermath of the Civil War, however, the South turned its attention to the development of industry. While railroads were limited to the North and Northwest prior to the Civil War, they extended into the South in the postbellum period.

On the heels of railroads came the building of factories whose owners would now be able to transport their goods on the trains. Textiles— spun or woven materials—were the most prominent goods produced by factories in the South. These textile factories enjoyed great success and, by 1920, the Southern factories owned about one-half of the active cotton spindles in the country. The number of mills in the South rose from 161 in 1880 to 239 in 1890, and to 400 in 1900.

Mill work proved difficult. It required laborers to work in dim factories, their bodies bent over for long periods, checking the spindles. Mill workers were often described as pale, hunched over, and generally unhealthy. They often caught lung diseases because of the lint-filled air they breathed in the factories. Pitied, the mill workers occupied a lower position on the social ladder than other Southerners.

Mill work in the South was often a family affair, including the children. In 1900, as many as 30 percent of Southern textile workers were under the age of sixteen. Cold Sassy Tree features two mill children, Lightfoot and Hosie Roach, a boy the main character fights with at school. Children who worked in the mill often dropped out of school after two or three years so that they could work longer hours to earn extra money for their families.

Southern way of life

Southerners shared certain preferences and biases particular to their region of the nation. Many Southerners hated anything connected with the Northern states, a hatred that stemmed from the Confederate defeat in the Civil War. In Cold Sassy Tree, Grandpa Blakeslee leads the Fourth of July Confederate parade each year and tries to never visit Yankee states like New York. Interestingly, though, he marries Miss Love, a Yankee from Maryland. The anti-North bias carried over into politics during this period. Many Southerners hated the Republican party because of its role in the Civil War. The South showed a strong commitment to the Democratic party in its voting. In the novel, Will reflects this commitment in his excitement at hearing the Democratic president, Theodore Roosevelt, speak.

Southerners also had strong religious beliefs. Will’s family is Southern Presbyterian and follows many rules stemming from this faith. Expected, for example, to observe the Sabbath, Will is not allowed to read the comics on Sunday. Southerners also followed rituals such as mourning for a long period following the death of a loved one. The Blakeslee family mourns for weeks following Grandma Blakeslee’s death. This emphasis on mourning helps explain why the town is so surprised when Grandpa Blakeslee decides to marry so soon after the death of his wife.

Modern appliances in Southern towns

The early part of the twentieth century was a time of great technological change. One of the most significant inventions was the telephone, invented in 1876. By 1899 there were already a million telephones in use in America. In Cold Sassy Tree, Will says that his own house has a phone but that Grandfather Blakeslee still refuses to buy one, a reflection of the fact that some Americans continued to resist using this innovation in 1906.

In addition to the telephone, households were modernized in other ways during this period. Indoor plumbing replaced the outdoor toilets, or “privies,” of the nineteenth century. In Cold Sassy Tree, Will’s family has two indoor bathrooms. Grandpa Blakeslee, however, refuses to build an indoor bathroom, preferring instead to rely on the outhouse.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of technology’s impact on life was the automobile. The first automobile was manufactured in 1895, but it was the founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903 that led to the mass production of a reliable car easily affordable to the average American. The first Model T appeared in 1908 and sold for $850. Motor vehicle registration began to sky-rocket, jumping from 8,000 in 1900 to 78,800 in 1905. People living in rural towns such as Cold Sassy were often some of the first to purchase cars so that they could drive from one isolated area to another. In cities, on the other hand, people had access to trains and street cars. The increased use of the automobile sparked some basic changes, not the least of which was the construction of a system of roads enabling drivers easier access routes.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Will Tweedy is fourteen years old and lives with his parents in a small town in Georgia named Cold Sassy, so named because of the sassafras trees that western pioneers looked for in this cold region between the mountains and Augusta, Georgia. At the outset of the novel, Will’s grandmother dies, leaving her husband, Grandpa Blakeslee, a widower. Three weeks after Granny Blakeslee’s death, Grandpa Blakeslee tells his two daughters—Loma and Mary Willis (Mary is Will’s mother)—that he is going to marry a young woman in town named Love Simpson. They feel that their father’s marriage is inappropriate so soon after his wife’s death. Grandpa Blakeslee explains that he wants someone to help him take care of the home and prepare his meals. According to Grandpa Blakeslee, there is no reason to wait after his wife’s death because “she’s dead as she’ll ever be” (Burns, Cold Sassy Tree, p. 8). The family is afraid that people will think that Grandpa had loved Miss Love and had wanted to marry her before Grandma died, which would disgrace them all.

In spite of these fears, Grandpa Blakeslee elopes with the “Yankee” Love Simpson, and she moves into his house. Slowly Miss Love starts to influence Grandpa’s life. She suggests that he cut his beard, and she rearranges the furniture in the house. The relationship is morally upright—they sleep in separate rooms. Miss Love and Grandpa have made an agreement: she will stay in his house and take care of him, and in return when he dies, she will inherit the house. Neither of them believes this is a marriage for love.

MILL TOWNS

Southern mill owners purchased property surrounding the mills, where they constructed houses for their workers to live. Crude cabins, the structures were rundown, poorly built, and overcrowded. Mill owners also opened schools in their town in order to educate the children who worked in the factories. In Cold Sassy Tree, the nearby town of Cold Sassy allowed the mill children to attend the town school after the mill school shut down.

The couple decide to go to New York City to make a purchase for the store that Grandpa Blakeslee owns. On their trip, they unexpectedly fall in love. They return with news about a new car-selling business, which Miss Love has convinced Grandpa Blakeslee to begin, as well as the news that Miss Love is pregnant. Soon after their return, Grandpa grows sick and dies. His daughters inherit the store, and Miss Love inherits the house. She decides to stay in Cold Sassy in order to raise her child there.

Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy, the narrator of the story, has done some maturing of his own. He has been a confidant to his grandfather and continues to be one to Miss Love until the end of the novel. The teenager also survives two rather momentous events in his young life—being run over by a train and kissing a girl for the first time. The girl, Light-foot, comes from nearby Mill Town. Described with warmth and a dash of humor, the unexpected kiss is interrupted by someone who catches the pair in the act.

The Southern family

Reflected in Cold Sassy Tree are the strong ties of the Southern family. All of the members of the Blakeslee family live within walking distance of one another and see each other often. Grandpa Blakeslee stops by his daughter’s house every morning and then goes to work with his son-in-law at the store. Also, in order to keep the business within the family, Grandpa wills his store to his daughters. Typically the father made the decisions in a Southern family, and the children did not question those decisions. When Grandpa Blakeslee informs his daughters that he plans to marry Miss Love, they disapprove but do not share their opinion with him because he is the father. Similarly, Will does not question his father’s right to punish him for misbehaving. Another characteristic of the Southern family was a strong sense of honor. There were certain ways to behave and certain behaviors to avoid in order to preserve the good reputation of the family. The Blakeslees fear that the entire family’s name will be tarnished by Grandpa Blakeslee’s marriage to Miss Love.

Sources

Burns based the family in Cold Sassy Tree on the stories that her father told her about his family. Her great-grandfather, like Grandpa Blakeslee, married a younger woman soon after his wife died. Affecting the dialogue in her novel was Burns’s own personal experience. She spent her entire life in the South, attending college in North Carolina and working as a journalist there as well. When she fell ill with cancer, Burns turned her attention to novel writing.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

The South in the early 1980s

In some ways, the South of the early 1980s still resembled the South of the early 1900s. The region was still predominantly Democratic in its voting preferences, and religion remained a strong force there. Textile mills still employed many workers, and one early 1980s study showed that women workers in at least one Southern mill (Firestone Textiles of Gastonia) had changed little. None of these female mill workers graduated from high school (Dillman, p. 179); on the other hand, they showed a strong sense of connection to their own town and family.

In other ways, the South in general and Georgia in particular did undergo dramatic changes over the seventy-five year period. For example, in 1980 one-quarter of the eligible voters in Georgia were black. At the turn of the century, black men had often been dissuaded from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other such deterrents. The black voters of 1980 in Georgia, like the state’s larger population, generally supported the Democratic party. Over the years, though, the Republican Party had gained ground in the state. By the 1980s Democrats generally prevailed in Georgia’s local elections, while the Republicans tended to win the national contests. There were some changes in women’s behavior too. In the early 1980s some of Georgia’s females worked hard to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made gender discrimination illegal. However, they were unable to secure enough votes and it failed to pass. In 1983, however, the Georgia legislature did overturn a legal code that held that the father was the head of the family and that the wife was subject to him.

Reception

Response to Cold Sassy Tree was mostly positive. Readers and critics praised Burns’s depiction of her Southern characters and her portrayal of Southern life and vernacular. The New York Times Book Review took issue with the use of dialect in the novel, complaining that “Will says ‘would of’ endlessly” (Mooney, p. 227). But even this review admits that “the author effectively conveys the world view of an adolescent boy” and that her writing evokes an admirable portrait of the grandfather and his new wife. A review in the Library Journal, moreover, praises the novel’s use of dialect, saying that Burns “deftly captures the language of rural Georgia in her first novel” (Mooney, p. 227).

Burns began work on the sequel to Cold Sassy Tree entitled Leaving Cold Sassy Tree, which was to take up the story of Will as a twenty-five-year-old who faced the prospect of fighting in World War I as well as marrying a young school teacher. While working on the sequel, however, Burns died of heart failure on July 4, 1990.