A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl
Margaret T. McGehee, Presbyterian College
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City |
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
The Country of Mystery:
Sibley published her first murder mystery, The Malignant Heart, in 1958, but did not return to the genre until thirty-three years later. In this novel, she introduces readers to Katherine (Kate) Kincaid, a young reporter for the Atlanta Searchlight and an amateur sleuth who lives with her father, a retired policeman. Kate appears to be one of the few female news reporters on staff; most of the other women staffers work in the "Casserole and Camisole Department," writing, as most newspaperwomen did at that time, about fashion, food, gardens, club activities, and high society.38
Resembling Sibley, the fictional Kate "wrote a column a few days a week, covered an occasional story. . . and was available as a kind of office memory for youngsters who knew nothing about Atlanta's or the newspaper's past."39 When we meet her again in Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991), the widowed Kate Mulcay lives in north Fulton County in a cabin that she and her late husband Benjy restored. In her late forties to early fifties, Kate still reports for the Searchlight but also writes a regular column.40
Though "an old society editor" had told Kate "that nobody, but nobody, lived beyond the perimeter of Atlanta," the encircling Interstate 285, and though "[s]ociety's folklore decreed that you live within the circular boundaries of the big eight-lane highways which encompassed the city," Kate chose to break from "society" for a life in the woods (SS, 60) and committed to making the daily commute "in bumper-to-bumper traffic that was beginning to spill over onto the old country road" (ASM, 2). In Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle (1993), we learn that Kate covered the Georgia General Assembly as a reporter until her editor reassigns her to write a regular column, replacing her with "a lanky kid newly graduated from the University of Georgia's journalism school" (DH, 2). In Spider in the Sink (1997), we get more details on the forty years that have passed since the events of The Malignant Heart. Benjy and Kate had lived with her father in the early years of the marriage in a "clapboard cottage" in downtown Atlanta. In what would probably have been the early to mid-1960s, the city started to purchase areas of their neighborhood to turn into a parking lot for the new baseball stadium. After Kate's father died from a stroke, and "by the time the bulldozers were on their street," Kate and Benjy "were ready to move anyhow" (SS, 40). Kate's cabin — with "its raddled roof, its vacant lopsided window openings" — had won her affection the first time she and Benjy had seen it and had brought much happiness to them, "although both were city-reared" (ASM, 14).
Almost all of Sibley's later mysteries speak to land development in northern Georgia. In those mysteries, the villains turn out to be greedy capitalists. Take Ah, Sweet Mystery, in which someone has murdered local resident Garney Wilcox, "a mean avaricious jerk who was ruining the countryside with his real estate 'developments' — what a misleading word! — and breaking his mother's heart" (ASM, 3). In A Plague of Kinfolks (1995), the culprit responsible for beating eccentric local Mr. Renty, the murderer of Bets Dunn (wife of subdivision resident Bob Dunn), and the driver in a hit-and-run that kills a local teenager turns out to be Mr. Renty's niece and Bob Dunn's mistress, Charlene. Mr. Renty, we learn, owns "hundreds of acres" in north Fulton and Cherokee counties, land greatly coveted by subdivision developers. Driven to cash in on her uncle's potential profits to please Bob Dunn, Charlene tries to kill her uncle. Although unsuccessful, she does succeed in murdering two others.
These characters are also villainized through how they stand in contrast to the romanticized poor who have inhabited this country place for a century or longer. While Kate embraces home life in the north Fulton "wilderness," it is Miss Willie, Garney Wilcox's eighty-five-year-old stepmother, who embodies country living and stands as representative of the "folk" one finds in stereotypical local color. She is "everybody's best neighbor," we learn in A Plaque of Kinfolks, who "retained the flavor of the mountains in her speech, the love of mountain beauties in her heart" (ASM, 4). She epitomizes antiquated rural living, using an almanac to guide her planting and an iron pot and lye soap to wash her clothes. Miss Willie once sold butter, pound cakes, and vegetables in the nearby town of Roswell. At one moment in Spider in the Sink, she sits "by her fireplace, piecing together one of her interminable quilts by the light of the kerosene lamp" (SS, 54). Her old-timer ways, coupled with her dialect, make her into the lovable and endearing representative of the country. In her "earth-and-smoke smelling clothes" (ASM, 7), Miss Willie is the country and the ways of life that comprise it; any destruction of the area around her 140-year-old homeplace is a violation of Miss Willie herself.
The Shining Waters subdivision that separates Kate's cabin from Miss Willie's home stands in significant contrast to their rustic homes:
Resembling Sibley, the fictional Kate "wrote a column a few days a week, covered an occasional story. . . and was available as a kind of office memory for youngsters who knew nothing about Atlanta's or the newspaper's past."39 When we meet her again in Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991), the widowed Kate Mulcay lives in north Fulton County in a cabin that she and her late husband Benjy restored. In her late forties to early fifties, Kate still reports for the Searchlight but also writes a regular column.40
Though "an old society editor" had told Kate "that nobody, but nobody, lived beyond the perimeter of Atlanta," the encircling Interstate 285, and though "[s]ociety's folklore decreed that you live within the circular boundaries of the big eight-lane highways which encompassed the city," Kate chose to break from "society" for a life in the woods (SS, 60) and committed to making the daily commute "in bumper-to-bumper traffic that was beginning to spill over onto the old country road" (ASM, 2). In Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle (1993), we learn that Kate covered the Georgia General Assembly as a reporter until her editor reassigns her to write a regular column, replacing her with "a lanky kid newly graduated from the University of Georgia's journalism school" (DH, 2). In Spider in the Sink (1997), we get more details on the forty years that have passed since the events of The Malignant Heart. Benjy and Kate had lived with her father in the early years of the marriage in a "clapboard cottage" in downtown Atlanta. In what would probably have been the early to mid-1960s, the city started to purchase areas of their neighborhood to turn into a parking lot for the new baseball stadium. After Kate's father died from a stroke, and "by the time the bulldozers were on their street," Kate and Benjy "were ready to move anyhow" (SS, 40). Kate's cabin — with "its raddled roof, its vacant lopsided window openings" — had won her affection the first time she and Benjy had seen it and had brought much happiness to them, "although both were city-reared" (ASM, 14).
 |
Sibley's Commute: From Sweet Apple
to Atlanta (1:38 min.)
A short film by Mary Battle, 2008. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
Almost all of Sibley's later mysteries speak to land development in northern Georgia. In those mysteries, the villains turn out to be greedy capitalists. Take Ah, Sweet Mystery, in which someone has murdered local resident Garney Wilcox, "a mean avaricious jerk who was ruining the countryside with his real estate 'developments' — what a misleading word! — and breaking his mother's heart" (ASM, 3). In A Plague of Kinfolks (1995), the culprit responsible for beating eccentric local Mr. Renty, the murderer of Bets Dunn (wife of subdivision resident Bob Dunn), and the driver in a hit-and-run that kills a local teenager turns out to be Mr. Renty's niece and Bob Dunn's mistress, Charlene. Mr. Renty, we learn, owns "hundreds of acres" in north Fulton and Cherokee counties, land greatly coveted by subdivision developers. Driven to cash in on her uncle's potential profits to please Bob Dunn, Charlene tries to kill her uncle. Although unsuccessful, she does succeed in murdering two others.
These characters are also villainized through how they stand in contrast to the romanticized poor who have inhabited this country place for a century or longer. While Kate embraces home life in the north Fulton "wilderness," it is Miss Willie, Garney Wilcox's eighty-five-year-old stepmother, who embodies country living and stands as representative of the "folk" one finds in stereotypical local color. She is "everybody's best neighbor," we learn in A Plaque of Kinfolks, who "retained the flavor of the mountains in her speech, the love of mountain beauties in her heart" (ASM, 4). She epitomizes antiquated rural living, using an almanac to guide her planting and an iron pot and lye soap to wash her clothes. Miss Willie once sold butter, pound cakes, and vegetables in the nearby town of Roswell. At one moment in Spider in the Sink, she sits "by her fireplace, piecing together one of her interminable quilts by the light of the kerosene lamp" (SS, 54). Her old-timer ways, coupled with her dialect, make her into the lovable and endearing representative of the country. In her "earth-and-smoke smelling clothes" (ASM, 7), Miss Willie is the country and the ways of life that comprise it; any destruction of the area around her 140-year-old homeplace is a violation of Miss Willie herself.
The Shining Waters subdivision that separates Kate's cabin from Miss Willie's home stands in significant contrast to their rustic homes:
Streets and sidewalks and curbs replaced the road they had used. Now lights glowed back of French doors and stained-glass windows and the reproduction bubbly glass of twelve-over-twelve panes of saltboxes and southern colonials. One incongruously vibrant blue swimming pool had been lit up….But beyond them all the dark hulk of Cy Wilcox's hill rose, unpaved, unlandscaped, unlighted and unoccupied (ASM, 13).
What had once been pine woods with one old wagon road leading to the river when she and Benjy had first moved into the cabin were now paved streets lined with handsome half-million-dollar houses representing every kind of architecture Kate had ever seen, with the exception of log cabins and sharecroppers' shacks. There were French chalets, half-timbered stucco and brick, clapboard, and some new building material that Kate couldn't peg, but considered nonetheless splendid. She had never dreamed her own forest would be felled to make way for swimming pools and tennis courts and cunning little gazebos. (PK, 31-32)
"Country" and "city" sit side-by-side
on the same geography. While Sibley may show them as connected within that
landscape and within a broader economic network, the new house, with its "incongruously
vibrant" pool, doesn't belong. Here, new money — made by former
city residents who, in keeping with the notion of "city" as connected
to education and enlightenment, include a judge, lawyer, and doctor (PK, 111) — has
ushered in the illusions of luxury and the trappings of leisure. This subdivision "began
just beyond a thin stand of pines and scraggly shrubs separating the backyards
of the big new houses from the gravel road and mercifully screening from their
view Kate's shabby old cabin" (ASM, 19). Having taken Shining Waters'
name from nearby "Shine Creek" (once used in the illegal moonshine
business), the developers "had robbed [the creek] of its history and corrupted
it into prettiness" (ASM, 19).
The "chalets" of Shining Waters stand in significant contrast to the cabins and small homes built from local wood by their owners and inhabited by unschooled country folk like Miss Willie or Mr. Renty. At a dinner party held at the Dunns' Shining Waters residence, Kate makes clear her refusal to see her beloved country road paved. While Kate's obnoxious houseguest and cousin-by-marriage, Edge Green, assures fellow attendees that Kate is "for progress," she thinks to herself: "Progress is one of those Mother Hubbard words, covering everything and touching nothing. Progress is the most abused word in the English language. A word used by people who want to destroy" (PK, 113, italics in original). Kate is not so naïve as to think that change is avoidable, but she desperately longs to hold on to markers of the past.
Kate's cabin becomes a literal and figurative repository for the past. The material goods within that space, many of which she had purchased at yard sales or the Salvation Army, serve to evoke the past for her and for Sibley's readers — the "old pie safe," for example, or the "dime-store Fiesta ware" that had belonged to her mother (PK, 17). Furthermore, Kate has resisted making modern improvements to her living space. She has not installed much nighttime lighting around the cabin, keeping the area around the house "purposely dim because she did not want to capitulate to the pressure for streetlights and floodlights that the subdivision fostered." "A little light was a good thing," writes Sibley, "but too much light destroyed the illusion that she was in the country and dimmed the brilliance of the moon and stars." (PK, 23).
The "chalets" of Shining Waters stand in significant contrast to the cabins and small homes built from local wood by their owners and inhabited by unschooled country folk like Miss Willie or Mr. Renty. At a dinner party held at the Dunns' Shining Waters residence, Kate makes clear her refusal to see her beloved country road paved. While Kate's obnoxious houseguest and cousin-by-marriage, Edge Green, assures fellow attendees that Kate is "for progress," she thinks to herself: "Progress is one of those Mother Hubbard words, covering everything and touching nothing. Progress is the most abused word in the English language. A word used by people who want to destroy" (PK, 113, italics in original). Kate is not so naïve as to think that change is avoidable, but she desperately longs to hold on to markers of the past.
Kate's cabin becomes a literal and figurative repository for the past. The material goods within that space, many of which she had purchased at yard sales or the Salvation Army, serve to evoke the past for her and for Sibley's readers — the "old pie safe," for example, or the "dime-store Fiesta ware" that had belonged to her mother (PK, 17). Furthermore, Kate has resisted making modern improvements to her living space. She has not installed much nighttime lighting around the cabin, keeping the area around the house "purposely dim because she did not want to capitulate to the pressure for streetlights and floodlights that the subdivision fostered." "A little light was a good thing," writes Sibley, "but too much light destroyed the illusion that she was in the country and dimmed the brilliance of the moon and stars." (PK, 23).
Still, Kate discovers that she likes some residents of Shining Waters, who, with the exception of the drug dealers she helps to put away, are "not only affluent, but friendly, law-abiding, well-mannered people" (PK, 32). They by no means compare, for Kate, to "characters" from the area's past like Mr. Banana Pierce, who had sold produce and planted numerous fruit trees in the area (PK, 32-33), but she does become increasingly tolerant of their presence over the course of Sibley's Kate Mulcay series. She admits a fondness for Bets Dunn, probably because of Bets' "interest in country history and her pleasure in the country" (PK, 89).
Like Sibley herself, Kate Mulcay also regularly expresses a selective appreciation for the city of Atlanta. On her way to the office one day, Kate "looked at [Buckhead] with pride." "Handsome hotels — the big Ritz-Carlton, malls with all the stylish and expensive stores, restaurants where she never ate anymore but which she was glad to see there. A cosmpolitan city, her Atlanta," writes Sibley (PK, 73). Kate is a fan of Atlanta's public transportation, MARTA, "exulting in the cleanliness of buses and trains, the lack of torn upholstery and graffiti that marred the systems she had seen in other cities" (PK, 74). Appreciating to some extent what Atlanta has become, she bemoans what it used to be and is no longer. We learn that Kate "loved Decatur Street" in downtown Atlanta, but what she loves is the area that once was filled with merchants like Mr. Walter Bailey from whom she "[s]ought wooden butter molds and cedar water bucket" (PK, 100-101). "It had been a shabby old street," writes Sibley, "of pawnshops, secondhand furniture stores, and catfish and pork chop restaurants. Used dresses and suits on hangers, hanging from doorways . . . A peanut roaster whistled in front of a hardware store" (PK, 100).41 This was Decatur Street before the arrival of Georgia State University, which she does recognize as an important addition to the city. "Only a moss-backed diehard would rather have the old Decatur Street than the new one with its library and science building and its beautifully landscaped entranceways," Sibley writes, "But it just wasn't interesting" (PK, 101).
This nostalgic yearning is characteristic of Sibley's writing. In crafting places seemingly removed from urban Atlanta, Sibley was able to create a "sense of place" that is connected to"memory, stasis and nostalgia," as Doreen Massey puts it (119). "'Place' was necessarily an essentialist concept which held within it the temptation of relapsing into past traditions, of sinking back into (what was interpreted as) the comfort of Being instead of forging ahead with the (assumed progressive) project of Becoming" (119). Tying Massey's ideas to what one finds in Sibley, we begin to understand her writing of place as a retreat from the changes occurring within her surrounding area and a return (or "relapse" or "sinking back into") what she deemed to be comfortable.
Paired with the nostalgic element in Sibley's writings were more subtle indications of grief and mourning — not quite melancholia, but still a profound sense of loss, a sense of something deeply precious having been taken away. The nostalgia that surfaces within Sibley's writing is to some extent racialized: a mourning characteristic of many postwar generation southern whites, men and women, who were not necessarily anti-civil rights or pro-segregation but who were locked in a certain "structure of feeling" — a certain emotional register — that produced ambivalence towards change. Sibley could, for instance, have generally liberal views but write place in a way that reinforced selective social — and particularly racial — divisions.
Like Sibley herself, Kate Mulcay also regularly expresses a selective appreciation for the city of Atlanta. On her way to the office one day, Kate "looked at [Buckhead] with pride." "Handsome hotels — the big Ritz-Carlton, malls with all the stylish and expensive stores, restaurants where she never ate anymore but which she was glad to see there. A cosmpolitan city, her Atlanta," writes Sibley (PK, 73). Kate is a fan of Atlanta's public transportation, MARTA, "exulting in the cleanliness of buses and trains, the lack of torn upholstery and graffiti that marred the systems she had seen in other cities" (PK, 74). Appreciating to some extent what Atlanta has become, she bemoans what it used to be and is no longer. We learn that Kate "loved Decatur Street" in downtown Atlanta, but what she loves is the area that once was filled with merchants like Mr. Walter Bailey from whom she "[s]ought wooden butter molds and cedar water bucket" (PK, 100-101). "It had been a shabby old street," writes Sibley, "of pawnshops, secondhand furniture stores, and catfish and pork chop restaurants. Used dresses and suits on hangers, hanging from doorways . . . A peanut roaster whistled in front of a hardware store" (PK, 100).41 This was Decatur Street before the arrival of Georgia State University, which she does recognize as an important addition to the city. "Only a moss-backed diehard would rather have the old Decatur Street than the new one with its library and science building and its beautifully landscaped entranceways," Sibley writes, "But it just wasn't interesting" (PK, 101).
This nostalgic yearning is characteristic of Sibley's writing. In crafting places seemingly removed from urban Atlanta, Sibley was able to create a "sense of place" that is connected to"memory, stasis and nostalgia," as Doreen Massey puts it (119). "'Place' was necessarily an essentialist concept which held within it the temptation of relapsing into past traditions, of sinking back into (what was interpreted as) the comfort of Being instead of forging ahead with the (assumed progressive) project of Becoming" (119). Tying Massey's ideas to what one finds in Sibley, we begin to understand her writing of place as a retreat from the changes occurring within her surrounding area and a return (or "relapse" or "sinking back into") what she deemed to be comfortable.
Paired with the nostalgic element in Sibley's writings were more subtle indications of grief and mourning — not quite melancholia, but still a profound sense of loss, a sense of something deeply precious having been taken away. The nostalgia that surfaces within Sibley's writing is to some extent racialized: a mourning characteristic of many postwar generation southern whites, men and women, who were not necessarily anti-civil rights or pro-segregation but who were locked in a certain "structure of feeling" — a certain emotional register — that produced ambivalence towards change. Sibley could, for instance, have generally liberal views but write place in a way that reinforced selective social — and particularly racial — divisions.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City |
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
