cite this page | printable version

Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources

Sibley's locating Sweet Apple within the pastoral was as much a personal maneuver as a public one. Real and imagined country living brought Sibley comfort following a tumultuous marriage and the sudden death of her husband, which left her the single parent of three children. With Sweet Apple came an idealized rustic simplicity and natural harmony that had been missing from her life. In her autobiography, Sibley candidly and unashamedly discusses her rocky marriage and recounts how the excessive drinking of her husband, Jim Little, cost him job after job.14 During this period of roughly fifteen years, Sibley worked full-time at the Atlanta Constitution, part-time for the Northside News, wrote anything she could get paid for (including "torrid adventures for confessional magazines"), and rented out rooms to help pay the mortgage on the house she had purchased on Thirteenth Street.15 The Constitution and Journal came under common ownership in 1950, and she was offered additional pay for writing pieces about Hollywood for the paper's Sunday magazine.16

Sibley reared their three children while Little's drinking and misbehaving intensified. (He died from a stroke in 1953 at age forty-five.17) Sibley was, in effect, always a single mother relying on her mother and housekeepers while she worked. She was not always aware of, or privy to, the social lives of her children, who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From Sibley's semi-autobiographical novel Children, My Children and her granddaughter Sibley Fleming's book, we know the most about the heartaches that Celestine Sibley experienced with her daughter Mary Everitt Little (Fleming), who became pregnant at age seventeen and eloped with the baby's father, Cricket Fleming. The baby, a son named Richard, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome only a few months after his birth.18 The young couple had two more children, Bird and Sibley, and the family moved often due to Cricket's career as a jazz musician. According to Sibley Fleming, her parents never had money and would regularly leave her and her brother with Celestine for extended periods of time. Cricket seemed to resent Celestine's role in his children's lives, even though she regularly supplied the family with groceries and school clothes.19 As Celestine Sibley recounts, Cricket kidnapped the two children in 1976. Celestine helped Mary hire detectives and a lawyer to track them down, even going on a stake-out in New Orleans.20 The children had gone to live with Cricket's parents in Indiana and neither Mary nor Celestine saw them again until the mid-1980s.21 Sibley Fleming — after a move to Ireland, a marriage, and the birth of a son in 1985 — returned to Atlanta with her family and became her grandmother's assistant.22

Sweet Apple offered Sibley a space of retreat during tumultuous times in her personal life; its construction in print offered urban, mostly white, readers temporary reprieve from Atlanta's stresses and conflicts. Amid familial chaos and Atlanta's sprawl, Sibley continuously clung to pastoral ideals of her disappearing countryside. Twenty years after moving to Sweet Apple, urban sprawl stretched into Sibley's backyard.23 She began using her column to comment on the invasion of her Sweet Apple space and the desecration of natural surroundings, soothed only by her work at the Constitution and domestic life in the cabin. As the bulldozers encroached in the 1980s — signaling suburban subdivisions, strip malls, and businesses to Roswell — her resistance to Atlanta's growth intensified as her appreciation of urban development ambition waned.24 Others seemed to share her opinions. Carole Ashkinaze wrote that Sibley's Sweet Apple columns had a "vast following" that made "'Generation X' editors from other parts of the country. . . scratch their heads."25 In an era of increased urbanization and globalization, those editors were no doubt surprised by the continued appeal of one columnist's nostalgic musings to such a large number of urban readers.

It "may be a place shaped by memory and fleshed out by nostalgia," Sibley wrote, "but some of us believe in it."28 For urban readers, Sibley crafted a spot where time appeared to stand still, where antiquated agrarian traditions like barn raisings and corn shuckings continued to thrive.29 Sibley regularly contrasted urban and rural life in ways that reified the connection of the rural to nature. In describing the difference between kitchen windows, Sibley wrote: "A city kitchen window sill can retain its austere order year 'round. Suburban kitchen window sills change little, particularly if they're the new style facing the street with a wide swatch of picture-window glass above them . . . In the country the kitchen window sill is a catchall, a laboratory, a treasure cache."30

In response to a reader who had asked if "in this convenience and comfort-laden twentieth century . . . there is any difference in life thirty miles from a big city," Sibley recounted how she had awakened one night to find a snake peering in her window and how a bird had built a nest within her bathroom vent pipe.31 "How long," she asked in a 1986 column "can catnip hold out against bulldozers?"32 While Sibley portrays the people of the Sweet Apple area as isolated from the city, many were, like herself, connected to Atlanta, through jobs, consumerism, media, and the expanding highway system. In its networks of circulation, the AJC not only connected Atlanta to its suburbs and beyond, but joined the Atlanta region to national and global events. The bulldozers in her backyard signaled inevitable expansion, forcing Sibley to confront the Atlanta growth she once had praised.

Clearing logs in development near Sweet Apple, 2008

"Clamor has come to the country," she wrote in 1980. "Cars and motorcycles and trucks of all sizes and purposes roar by on our dirt road. Power saws whine through the afternoons."33 Suburban subdivisions — "with a cutesy-country name and a fresh cut split rail fence, not because it's the only kind of fencing available as in the old days in the mountains but because it is now country chic" — had begun to invade the place she called home and to disrupt the calm of her Sweet Apple retreat.34 "When it rains and the bulldozers are quiet we savor the tranquility," Sibley claimed. "One more day we have of country stillness, one more night when the moon can shine unchallenged by street lights."35 In the afterword to the 1985 revised edition of her 1967 book A Place Called Sweet Apple, Sibley bemoans:

A few years ago little Merthiolate-colored flags showed up on stakes in what we had come to regard as "our" woods, heralding the approach of suburbia. Now paved streets, with electric lights at the corners and city water plugs marching alongside, crisscross the old pastures and fields and pierce the wooded hills. Splendid stone chalets, Victorian mansions and English manor houses have risen on the slopes and in the hollows.

Where I once gathered wild persimmons and blackberries, newcomers have put in swimming pools and tennis courts. Where we once heard Denver Cox gee-hawing his mule as he plowed his cornfield, we now hear hammer blows, power saws and bulldozers clearing sites for still more building. Many of the cherished landmarks are gone. The secret woodland spots we regarded as our own private hideaways…are now open and owned, the property of newcomers who, in all probability, love them too, and may show it by having them landscaped.36

Using words like "marching" and "pierce," Sibley depicts these suburban developments as invading and ravaging the natural landscape of her area. The large houses — imitations of the estates of both the British and the Buckhead elite — and the landscaped yards suggest an imposition of order upon the natural, undeveloped land.

It would be easy to dismiss Sibley as one more link in a chain of pastoral writers longing for "the way things used to be" — before the train, or the bulldozer. But as I described earlier, what distinguishes her is the genre through which her critique comes — the murder mystery. Sibley infuses this popular and entertaining genre with the serious critique of development. Several of the murder mysteries written by "the Agatha Christie of Roswell" feature villains who are suburban real estate entrepreneurs or who reside in or near the fictional subdivision of Shining Waters.37 In many ways, a murder mystery serves as an ideal vehicle for such critique, given the basic binaries of good vs. evil and hero vs. villain at the core of the subgenre. Such binaries, in Sibley's case, nicely dovetail with the country vs. city dichotomy underlying her prose.

<<< Previous Section | Next Section >>>

Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources

Published: 9 March 2009 2009

© 2009 Margaret T. McGehee and Southern Spaces