A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl
Margaret T. McGehee, Presbyterian College
Abstract:
Using murder mysteries to address what she saw
as destructive, rather than progressive, forces coming from the city
into the countryside of north Fulton County, Georgia, journalist and fiction
writer Celestine Sibley (1914-1999) attempted to present the city of
Atlanta
and the region beyond it as antithetical. Sibley's once beloved city
had come to represent the forces of greed and capitalism encroaching upon
what she viewed as the rural simplicity and goodness of country living.
However, these novels in effect reveal the two ideologically separate
spatial entities as connected within the broader economic processes
of
late-twentieth-century urban sprawl and within broader historical patterns
of race relations in the Atlanta metropolitan region.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City |
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
Introduction:
In her 1995 murder mystery, A Plague of Kinfolks, journalist and fiction writer Celestine
Sibley (1914-1999) made her feelings clear about Atlanta's sprawl into the area near Roswell,
Georgia, about twenty-five miles north of the city. When the book's protagonist, Kate Mulcay, attends a dinner party in the new neighboring subdivision named "Shining Waters," a fellow guest asks her opinion about paving nearby Loblolly Road. Kate explodes, launching into a diatribe about what the subdivision has done to the historical and natural area around her cabin: "'You are all new here,' she said, her voice carrying to the living room, bringing back those who had wandered that far. 'You mean well. I'm sure you are good people, but I think you are blind and misguided. You have taken so much, so damned much!'" (PK, 115). |
 |
Roswell development, 2008
|
Outraged by such intrusions of the city into her country, Kate adds that she will see the pro-paving residents of Shining Waters in hell before she allows them to destroy a road that had rich local significance (PK, 117). A Plague of Kinfolks's plot centers around Kate Mulcay's attempts to identify the person and the motivations behind an assault and two murders that occur near her home. By book's end, we have learned that the villains are none other than subdivision resident and dinner party host Bob Dunn and his mistress Charlene (who kills Dunn's wife with "a plain old lye-stained stick that was once used to beat the dirt out of work clothes on wash day") (PK, 198).
Here, as in two of her other books, Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991) and Spider in the Sink (1997), Sibley puts forth tropes of the bad developer and the turncoat local — more specifically, the avaricious white male entrepreneur, capitalizing on the phenomenon of sprawl, who will take whatever action is necessary to get what he wants (land and money) and the greedy, disloyal, longtime resident who will also do what is needed to turn his/her family land into a large, quick profit. Kate Mulcay emerges as the shero-sleuth in Sibley's mysteries. By the end of each, she has prevented these conspirators from succeeding, keeping out much of what she and other loyal residents see as destructive change. But, to take it a step further, Kate succeeds in maintaining a sense of the "country" as separate from, and antithetical to, the "city." That success can also be attributed to the interests of Sibley herself. Despite showing time and time again — in her newspaper columns and works of non-fiction from the 1960s to 80s, and in her mystery fiction in the 1990s — the interplay of country and city, especially in terms of land development and sprawl, Sibley generally conceived of the two as separate geographical and metaphorical entities. The values and ways of life of each stood in contrast to one another, with the country particularly representing a more traditional pastoral.1
While I discuss Sibley's use of the pastoral, this essay focuses on her mysteries set north of Atlanta and the critique of the "perils" of urban sprawl emerging from her fiction. Sibley seems unique as a southern writer in her choice of murder mysteries as the vehicle through which she could address what she saw as destructive, rather than progressive, forces coming from the city into the countryside of north Fulton County. Although not considered a "canonical woman writer" and rarely mentioned within literary discussions, Celestine Sibley was one of the most read writers in the southeastern U.S. during the last half of the twentieth century. Her columns — some ten-thousand during her career — appeared almost daily in the widely circulating Atlanta Constitution (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as of 2001), and she published twenty books, most under the guidance of her New York editor Larry Ashmead.2 But while Sibley was an urban reporter and columnist, whose career at the Constitution spanned fifty-eight years, she also lived for more than three decades in rural north Fulton County, in a log cabin she called Sweet Apple. After rearing her children in midtown Atlanta, she moved to Sweet Apple at age forty-nine, commuting daily to her work in downtown Atlanta from 1963 to 1999.
Celestine Sibley was by no means alone in her exodus from the city. From 1960 to 2000, the population of the metropolitan region grew from 1.5 to 4.5 million people, while the city's population declined from 487,000 to 416,000. The ring of suburbs just beyond the city increased in population during this time from 326,000 to just over one million people during that forty-year period, with the second ring of suburbs, including Sibley's area of north Fulton County, dramatically increasing from 334,000 to just over 2.2 million people.3 Such changes coincided with changes in the racial make-up of Atlanta as well and the phenomenon of white flight during the 1960s. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the white population of Atlanta decreased by 170,000 people with the city's population becoming majority black by 1970. Responding in part to the desegregation of public schools and facilities, white Atlantans fled to the city's suburban rings that came to comprise the metropolitan area. In recent decades, those suburban rings have seen significant growth in their black populations, though Sibley's area of north Fulton County remained predominately white.4
The nineteen boxes of "fan mail" in the Emory University archives — containing thousands of letters sent to Celestine Sibley throughout her career — attest to her popularity, especially among white readers as I will discuss later, in and beyond Atlanta. Readers' letters provide a strong sense of a changing Atlanta and Deep South since World War II, and examining them in greater detail would make for an interesting analysis of this time period. Here, however, I concentrate primarily on Sibley's thick descriptions of the area around Sweet Apple and the ways she inadvertently complicates her own city-country binary through a focus on sprawl and development, a process that in and of itself involves an infusion of city into country and vice versa. Sibley approaches the pastoral ideal of "the country" that emphasizes the "peace, innocence, and simple virtue" of rural life, in contrast to the city "as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition." Sibley imagines the city as "an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light," though she resists fully imagining the country "as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation." She nevertheless shows the country as removed from the capitalist forces in the city.5 But as Raymond Williams and contemporary feminist geographer Doreen Massey have argued, the dichotomy of country and city (local and global, for Massey) is false, as the two are always interconnected and mutually constituted— something that Sibley's writing demonstrates even as she appears to want to keep the two apart.
Here, as in two of her other books, Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991) and Spider in the Sink (1997), Sibley puts forth tropes of the bad developer and the turncoat local — more specifically, the avaricious white male entrepreneur, capitalizing on the phenomenon of sprawl, who will take whatever action is necessary to get what he wants (land and money) and the greedy, disloyal, longtime resident who will also do what is needed to turn his/her family land into a large, quick profit. Kate Mulcay emerges as the shero-sleuth in Sibley's mysteries. By the end of each, she has prevented these conspirators from succeeding, keeping out much of what she and other loyal residents see as destructive change. But, to take it a step further, Kate succeeds in maintaining a sense of the "country" as separate from, and antithetical to, the "city." That success can also be attributed to the interests of Sibley herself. Despite showing time and time again — in her newspaper columns and works of non-fiction from the 1960s to 80s, and in her mystery fiction in the 1990s — the interplay of country and city, especially in terms of land development and sprawl, Sibley generally conceived of the two as separate geographical and metaphorical entities. The values and ways of life of each stood in contrast to one another, with the country particularly representing a more traditional pastoral.1
 |
 |
While I discuss Sibley's use of the pastoral, this essay focuses on her mysteries set north of Atlanta and the critique of the "perils" of urban sprawl emerging from her fiction. Sibley seems unique as a southern writer in her choice of murder mysteries as the vehicle through which she could address what she saw as destructive, rather than progressive, forces coming from the city into the countryside of north Fulton County. Although not considered a "canonical woman writer" and rarely mentioned within literary discussions, Celestine Sibley was one of the most read writers in the southeastern U.S. during the last half of the twentieth century. Her columns — some ten-thousand during her career — appeared almost daily in the widely circulating Atlanta Constitution (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as of 2001), and she published twenty books, most under the guidance of her New York editor Larry Ashmead.2 But while Sibley was an urban reporter and columnist, whose career at the Constitution spanned fifty-eight years, she also lived for more than three decades in rural north Fulton County, in a log cabin she called Sweet Apple. After rearing her children in midtown Atlanta, she moved to Sweet Apple at age forty-nine, commuting daily to her work in downtown Atlanta from 1963 to 1999.
Celestine Sibley was by no means alone in her exodus from the city. From 1960 to 2000, the population of the metropolitan region grew from 1.5 to 4.5 million people, while the city's population declined from 487,000 to 416,000. The ring of suburbs just beyond the city increased in population during this time from 326,000 to just over one million people during that forty-year period, with the second ring of suburbs, including Sibley's area of north Fulton County, dramatically increasing from 334,000 to just over 2.2 million people.3 Such changes coincided with changes in the racial make-up of Atlanta as well and the phenomenon of white flight during the 1960s. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the white population of Atlanta decreased by 170,000 people with the city's population becoming majority black by 1970. Responding in part to the desegregation of public schools and facilities, white Atlantans fled to the city's suburban rings that came to comprise the metropolitan area. In recent decades, those suburban rings have seen significant growth in their black populations, though Sibley's area of north Fulton County remained predominately white.4
The nineteen boxes of "fan mail" in the Emory University archives — containing thousands of letters sent to Celestine Sibley throughout her career — attest to her popularity, especially among white readers as I will discuss later, in and beyond Atlanta. Readers' letters provide a strong sense of a changing Atlanta and Deep South since World War II, and examining them in greater detail would make for an interesting analysis of this time period. Here, however, I concentrate primarily on Sibley's thick descriptions of the area around Sweet Apple and the ways she inadvertently complicates her own city-country binary through a focus on sprawl and development, a process that in and of itself involves an infusion of city into country and vice versa. Sibley approaches the pastoral ideal of "the country" that emphasizes the "peace, innocence, and simple virtue" of rural life, in contrast to the city "as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition." Sibley imagines the city as "an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light," though she resists fully imagining the country "as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation." She nevertheless shows the country as removed from the capitalist forces in the city.5 But as Raymond Williams and contemporary feminist geographer Doreen Massey have argued, the dichotomy of country and city (local and global, for Massey) is false, as the two are always interconnected and mutually constituted— something that Sibley's writing demonstrates even as she appears to want to keep the two apart.
 |
Sibley's
pastoral is rooted in an older conception of place than the "anti-essentialist
construction" of place defined and claimed by cultural geographers.6 But
Massey's take on how place has traditionally been defined helps us better
understand what is at work in Sibley's literary construction of Sweet Apple.
Sibley's writing on her cabin involves a fixing of place that represents
an "attempt" to "stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes
of space-time." Sibley holds what Massey describes as a "view
of place as bounded, as in various ways a site of an authenticity, as singular,
fixed and unproblematic in its identity."7 That "sense
of place" can be understood "as an evasion; as a retreat from
the (actually unavoidable) dynamic and change of 'real life.'"8 |
Celestine
Sibley in the garden
at Sweet Apple, 1970 |
Massey's argument helps make sense of Sibley's imagined "country" as providing stability to white readers during a period of changing race relations — including desegregation of schools and public facilities in the 1960s, the growing Civil
Rights Movement (in large part spearheaded by Atlanta's Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.), and the shift of city leadership to an African American mayor in 1973 — and during the city's dramatic spatial expansion upward and outward. Letters from Sibley's readers make clear that her writing was appealing because it spoke to shared conceptions of place. During a period in which the countryside was becoming suburbanized, I believe her work stabilized place for white readers during a tumultuous period in Atlanta's history and stabilized place for herself during a time of her own difficult personal struggles.
Sibley's stabilizing work is reminiscent of late-nineteenth-century regional fiction. As Stephanie Foote contends in her discussion of local color fiction from 1870 to 1900, "regional writing developed strategies to transform rather than passively resist the meaning of the social and economic developments of late-nineteenth-century urban life." In effect, this "short-lived form," she argues, helped urban dwellers deal with their feelings toward the increase in immigration and imperialism at that time.9 One need only think of the late-nineteenth-century Atlanta Constitution writer Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus Tales and other works that in part painted a rosy picture of antebellum plantation days. Reminding readers of a seemingly "simpler" time when racial roles were clear and defined, Harris's works brought some nostalgic solace to white southerners anxious about the potential social changes that came with slaves' emancipation. In a somewhat similar fashion, Sibley's writing provided a suburban imaginary that comforted white readers as the Civil Rights Movement challenged white, southern social norms and as Atlanta underwent unprecedented growth. The places in the "country" north of Atlanta that Sibley imagines in her later fiction are populated exclusively by whites; African American characters rarely appear in these novels. When they do, their "place" appears to be within predominantly black neighborhoods near downtown Atlanta, even more specifically in areas that historically have housed the majority of African Americans, such as southwest Atlanta.10
It's not too difficult to determine Sibley's predominant readership or likely fan base. In letters, readers rarely identify by race — more often by age, location, or occupation. Of the hundreds of letters that I sampled, two writers in the 1950s identified as "colored," while I found no letter writers who openly identified as white. But it is abundantly clear that when Sibley wrote of "Atlanta," she almost always meant white Atlanta.11 As Massey reminds us, the search for "a place-called-home" is typically "a predominately white/First World take on things."12 Even if Sibley had a significant number of African American fans, her depiction of Atlanta and her search for what Massey calls "a place-called-home" during times of dramatic social change is that of a white southerner of her generation coping with racial change and, later, with the effects of a city's transformation into a metropolitan region. I do not doubt that her columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution attracted a diversity of readers: she was, after all, a fixture in that paper for half a century and appears to have been a counselor and benefactor for a number of Atlanta's downtrodden, black and white alike, even while dealing with her own personal and financial hardships. Even so, the places she constructs in her fiction, at least in her later work, are spaces of whiteness and white nostalgia.
Sibley constructs the pastoral in her earlier non-fiction through descriptions of her cabin — which she once described as her "little slant-roofed house with the rickety screen door that needs to be replaced, the grass that's a week past cutting, the window boxes that need watering" — and the quaint, simple locals who used to get their mail at the crossroads or who rarely went to the city because, according to a woman Sibley knew, "'Hit's too fur to walk and cars jiggle you so bad.'"13 But she later seems to acknowledge the interconnectedness between the country and the city, as suburban sprawl began to more pervasively disturb the idyll of her log-cabin lifestyle — specifically in the form of a new subdivision developed near her property. Her mystery novels also served to displace anger felt towards former "city" dwellers whose newly built homes encroached upon her protagonist's "country." In books such as A Plague of Kinfolks, urban sprawl enmeshes country and city within the same money-driven pattern. Still, Sibley seeks to maintain the separation, as the principal villains in her fiction turn out to be newly-arrived residents of the subdivision, greedy developers, or local accomplices who grew up in the previously "undeveloped" countryside. The latter turn out to be exceptional turncoats in an otherwise "loyal" and tight-knit rural community.
Sibley's stabilizing work is reminiscent of late-nineteenth-century regional fiction. As Stephanie Foote contends in her discussion of local color fiction from 1870 to 1900, "regional writing developed strategies to transform rather than passively resist the meaning of the social and economic developments of late-nineteenth-century urban life." In effect, this "short-lived form," she argues, helped urban dwellers deal with their feelings toward the increase in immigration and imperialism at that time.9 One need only think of the late-nineteenth-century Atlanta Constitution writer Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus Tales and other works that in part painted a rosy picture of antebellum plantation days. Reminding readers of a seemingly "simpler" time when racial roles were clear and defined, Harris's works brought some nostalgic solace to white southerners anxious about the potential social changes that came with slaves' emancipation. In a somewhat similar fashion, Sibley's writing provided a suburban imaginary that comforted white readers as the Civil Rights Movement challenged white, southern social norms and as Atlanta underwent unprecedented growth. The places in the "country" north of Atlanta that Sibley imagines in her later fiction are populated exclusively by whites; African American characters rarely appear in these novels. When they do, their "place" appears to be within predominantly black neighborhoods near downtown Atlanta, even more specifically in areas that historically have housed the majority of African Americans, such as southwest Atlanta.10
It's not too difficult to determine Sibley's predominant readership or likely fan base. In letters, readers rarely identify by race — more often by age, location, or occupation. Of the hundreds of letters that I sampled, two writers in the 1950s identified as "colored," while I found no letter writers who openly identified as white. But it is abundantly clear that when Sibley wrote of "Atlanta," she almost always meant white Atlanta.11 As Massey reminds us, the search for "a place-called-home" is typically "a predominately white/First World take on things."12 Even if Sibley had a significant number of African American fans, her depiction of Atlanta and her search for what Massey calls "a place-called-home" during times of dramatic social change is that of a white southerner of her generation coping with racial change and, later, with the effects of a city's transformation into a metropolitan region. I do not doubt that her columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution attracted a diversity of readers: she was, after all, a fixture in that paper for half a century and appears to have been a counselor and benefactor for a number of Atlanta's downtrodden, black and white alike, even while dealing with her own personal and financial hardships. Even so, the places she constructs in her fiction, at least in her later work, are spaces of whiteness and white nostalgia.
 |
Celestine Sibley's Sweet Apple cabin, 2008
|
Sibley constructs the pastoral in her earlier non-fiction through descriptions of her cabin — which she once described as her "little slant-roofed house with the rickety screen door that needs to be replaced, the grass that's a week past cutting, the window boxes that need watering" — and the quaint, simple locals who used to get their mail at the crossroads or who rarely went to the city because, according to a woman Sibley knew, "'Hit's too fur to walk and cars jiggle you so bad.'"13 But she later seems to acknowledge the interconnectedness between the country and the city, as suburban sprawl began to more pervasively disturb the idyll of her log-cabin lifestyle — specifically in the form of a new subdivision developed near her property. Her mystery novels also served to displace anger felt towards former "city" dwellers whose newly built homes encroached upon her protagonist's "country." In books such as A Plague of Kinfolks, urban sprawl enmeshes country and city within the same money-driven pattern. Still, Sibley seeks to maintain the separation, as the principal villains in her fiction turn out to be newly-arrived residents of the subdivision, greedy developers, or local accomplices who grew up in the previously "undeveloped" countryside. The latter turn out to be exceptional turncoats in an otherwise "loyal" and tight-knit rural community.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City |
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
