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
Acknowledgements. My deepest thanks to Dr. Allen Tullos for his sound advice and guidance on this article, to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments, and to Mary Battle for devoting countless hours to making this article more readable and much prettier and for enthusiastically traveling with me to Sweet Apple, camera in hand.
Notes:
1. Raymond Williams and Leo Marx discuss this type of pastoral in their respective works, The Country and The City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
2. Ashmead was an editor at Doubleday, then at Simon & Schuster, and finally, at Harper & Row; Sibley followed him to each publishing house. Sibley's published works include: the semi-autobiographical novels Jincey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978) and Children, My Children (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Young'uns: A Celebration (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); her memoir, Turned Funny; six mysteries, The Malignant Heart (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), Ah, Sweet Mystery: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), Straight as an Arrow: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), A Plague of Kinfolks: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), and Spider in the Sink: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); two works on Atlanta, Peachtree Street U.S.A. (1963), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1986, and Dear Store: An Affectionate Portrait of Rich's (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1990; two books on her cabin in North Georgia, including A Place Called Sweet Apple: Country Living and Southern Recipes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, and The Sweet Apple Gardening Book (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); collections of her columns, including Christmas in Georgia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, Especially at Christmas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, Mothers Are Always Special (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, Day by Day with Celestine Sibley (New York: Doubleday, 1975), Small Blessings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), For All Seasons (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, 1984); and Tokens of Myself (Atlanta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1990). She also wrote the foreword to Peter Beney's collection of photographs titled Atlanta: A Brave and Beautiful City (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1986) and the text for The Magical Realm of Sallie Middleton (Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor House, 1980).
Note: I use parenthetical citations for page numbers from these novels and the following abbreviations for each book: ASM for Ah, Sweet Mystery; PK for A Plague of Kinfolks; SS for Spider in the Sink; and DH for Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle.
3. "Atlanta Metropolitan Growth Since 1960," http://demographia.com/db-atl1960.htm (accessed January 10, 2009).
4. My thanks to an anonymous Southern Spaces editorial reviewer for pointing me to these demographic trends and their connection to Sibley's move from midtown Atlanta to north Fulton County. See generally Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. Williams, 1.
6. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 121.
7. Ibid., 5. Italics in original.
8. Ibid., 151.
9. Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 3-6, 13-14.
10. For a rich discussion of the development and growth of these neighborhoods on the western, southwestern, and southern edges of the city of Atlanta from World War II forward, see Andrew Wiese's talk, "African American Suburban Development in Atlanta," Southern Spaces, http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2006/wiese/1a.htm (accessed January 10, 2009).
11. One exception to this is Sibley's chapter on African Americans in a chapter from Peachtree Street U.S.A., entitled "The Darker Third."
12. Massey, 165-66. Massey argues that the effects of globalization in the later part of the twentieth century "have undermined an older sense of a 'place-called-home,' and left us placeless and disorientated" (163), which helps to explain people's searches for rooted-ness.
13. Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple, 57-58; Sibley, Tokens of Myself, 15. (This column originally appeared on October 11, 1983.)
14. Sibley claims that his boss at the AP shattered his confidence in the early 1940s, and an offer was made to Celestine to switch jobs with her husband. She declined, and Little was fired. He took a job at the Jacksonville Journal while Sibley stayed in Atlanta with the kids. When Sibley considered quitting the Constitution to join him in Florida, Ralph McGill offered to hire Jim. In August 1943, Sibley gave birth to their third child, Mary. Little was fired from the paper before Celestine's pregnancy was known, and he went to work at the Bell Aircraft bomber plant editing their publications. He continued to drink heavily, and he began to have an affair with a woman he met at the plant, calling it off only after Sibley confronted him. Sibley, Turned Funny, 119-23.
15. Sibley, Turned Funny, 147-48. The play Turned Funny, adapted from Sibley's memoir, implies that Ralph McGill offered her a column as a way to prevent her from having to contribute to confessional magazines for extra money. Phillip DePoy wrote the play, which had its debut under the direction of Fred Chappell at the Theatre in the Square in Marietta, Georgia, August 6-September 24, 2006.
16. Turned Funny, 166-67. The Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution came under common ownership in June 1950, when James M. Cox purchased the Constitution. "The Constitution continued as a morning paper with a liberal editorial bent, while the afternoon Journal had a more conservative leaning," states the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The two papers combined newsroom staffs in 1982, but did not officially merge into the Journal-Constitution until 2001. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Atlanta Journal-Constitution," http://www.newgeorgiaencyclopedia.com/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1807&sug=y (accessed September 29, 2006).
17. Turned Funny, 177-78.
18. Mary seems to have been a somewhat unpredictable young woman. In 1965, for example, she ran away to Montgomery, Alabama, to join in the March to Selma. Upon learning of Mary's flight, Sibley called Martin Luther King and asked him the personal favor of having one of his lieutenants escort her back to Atlanta, which he did. Sibley wrote in 1968 that upon hearing of his assassination, she realized she had never thanked him. Celestine Sibley, "In the Rain by a Mississippi Truck Stop," Atlanta Constitution, April 9, 1968. Letters between Sibley and her New York editor, Larry Ashmead, also indicate that Mary had forged checks on her mother's account in the 1970s.
19. Celestine Sibley Fleming and Sibley Fleming. Celestine Sibley: A Granddaughter's Reminiscence (Athens, Georgia: Hill Street Press, 2000), 28-29.
20. Sibley, Turned Funny, 258.
21. Celestine was convinced that the children had been brainwashed, and she believed that Mary was an innocent victim of Cricket's irrational behavior. Sibley Fleming provides a somewhat different account of that period of her childhood. Fleming claims that her mother drank excessively (which Celestine also alludes to in the fictional character of Leslie in Children, My Children) and that she threatened suicide in front of Fleming and her brother. She was at times abusive, especially when she thought that Cricket was having an affair. After moving to New Harmony, Indiana, to live with their paternal grandparents, they told their father that they wanted to talk to Celestine. He would allow it, but he said that they had to tell Sibley what Mary was like as a mother. When they did, claims Fleming, Celestine refused to believe them. But Sibley had always been the one who came to their rescue. For example, when Fleming's Uncle Jimmy, Celestine's first born, allegedly molested her one night when Celestine was out of town, Celestine immediately sent money to pay for a bus ticket to get Jimmy out of their house. Despite the protection Celestine Sibley had always given her grandchildren, she failed to believe their assessment of their mother — her daughter — as unfit, which in turn pushed those children further away. Fleming, Celestine, 55-65. Two letters to Celestine Sibley from her editor, Larry Ashmead, suggest that she had told him about her concern over Jimmy. Ashmead wrote in July 1975 that Jimmy is "so nice and so bright and my heart hurts for his lack of motivation and utilization"; a month later, he cryptically wrote to Sibley that "it is best for Jimmy" but that he understood "it" had caused her to feel low. Larry Ashmead to Celestine Sibley, July 16, 1975 and August 8, 1975, Box 2, Folder 8, Celestine Sibley Papers, MARBL, Woodruff Library, Emory University.
22. Sibley, Turned Funny, 270. In her novel, Children, My Children, a book Sibley allegedly wrote to pay for the detectives and lawyers hired to locate her grandchildren, Celestine tells a similar tale, portraying in rich detail the emotional turmoil experienced by the grandmother-protagonist Sally. She also depicts Sally's daughter Leslie as a genuinely caring and devoted mother, though not someone who is always forthright about her troubled relationship with the children's father.
23. Jack Strong, Sibley's longtime partner who eventually became her second husband, introduced her to Sweet Apple. In search of some land in the country in 1961, he had found a man named Doc Smellie who "dabbled a bit in real estate" to show him some areas in northern Fulton County one Saturday afternoon. Doc took them by a dilapidated log cabin, dating to the early 1840s, that had once served as a schoolhouse for local residents. Instantly enamored, Sibley bought the cabin and the acre of land on which it stood for $1,000, and Jack purchased the twenty acres nearby. She sold her house on Thirteenth Street, rented an apartment while the renovation of Sweet Apple was completed, and finally moved to the cabin in 1963. Sibley, Turned Funny, 204. Sibley chronicles the renovation process in the beginning of A Place Called Sweet Apple (1967).
24. Elsewhere I discuss at greater length Sibley's genuine love of and appreciation for the city of Atlanta, arguing in fact that she crafts Atlanta as "urban pastoral" in her writing. See Margaret T. McGehee, "On Margaret Mitchell's Grave: Women Writing Modern Atlanta" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2007).
25. Carole Ashkinaze, "Celestine Sibley: Gone But Not Forgotten," The Southerner, http://www.southerner.net/v1n4_99/passing4a.html (accessed January 12, 2004).
26. Celestine Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple, 17. A 1967 article written by Sibley's friend Wylly Folk St. John (who came to work at the Atlanta Journal the same year that Sibley arrived at the Constitution) details Sweet Apple, describing the "10,000 hours of personal labors-of-love" that Sibley and others put into the cabin's renovation. Wylly Folk St. John, "Celestine Sibley's Sweet Apple Cabin," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine, November 5, 1967, 8+.
27. Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple, 51.
28. Ibid., 59.
29. Ibid., 58.
30. Sibley, Ibid, 84.
31. Ibid., 63-64.
32. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 22, 1999 (originally appeared on June 6, 1986).
33. Sibley, Tokens of Myself, 129. This column originally appeared on April 8, 1980.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 130.
36. Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple (1986), 235.
37. Larry Ashmead told Sibley in a 1989 letter that he and literary agent Helen Pratt had "talked about how we're going to make you the Agatha Christie of Roswell." Larry Ashmead to Celestine Sibley, 1989, Box 25 (unprocessed), unnumbered folder of correspondence from Larry Ashmead, Celestine Sibley Papers, MARBL, Woodruff Library, Emory University.
38. For a discussion of "women's pages" as related to newspapers' evolving understanding of "lifestyles," see Patrick T. Wehner's "Living in Style: Marketing, Media, and the Discovery of Lifestyles" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2000).
39. Sibley, Ah, Sweet Mystery, 25.
40. Although Kate's age is never clear, she notes in Spider in the Sink that the new minister in the area, age forty-five, is "only a few years her junior," 11. In Dire Happenings, we learn that she and her husband had lived in the log cabin twenty years prior to his death. It's never clear how long he has been gone. If the time of the book's setting corresponds to the time of its publication and if Kate had been in her mid- to late-twenties in The Malignant Heart, published in 1958, Kate would be in her mid- to late-sixties by 1997, the publication date for Spider in the Sink.
41. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this article who pointed out that in Sibley's discussion of the former commercial district, she "missed the opportunity to detail the ethnic diversity" that had characterized "old Decatur Street," including the presence of Jewish merchants who sold goods to black customers.
42. According to Sibley's friend and fellow mystery writer, Kathy Trocheck, Celestine Sibley conducted research for this book by tagging along with Atlanta's Red Dog antidrug squad. Trocheck, untitled tribute to Celestine Sibley, in The Celestine Sibley Sampler, 37.
43. For discussions of Atlanta's development and expansion in the last half of the twentieth century, see Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1989); Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Harmon, Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations: Atlanta, Georgia, 1946-1981 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996); Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta; Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta (New York: Scribner, 1996); Frederick Allen, Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City, 1940-1990 (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996); Harvey K. Newman, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); and Kevin Kruse, White Flight (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
44. Keating, Atlanta, 209-10.
45. Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 68.
46. See Kevin Kruse's White Flight for an extremely comprehensive account of white Atlantans' exodus from the city after World War II. The population of the city of Atlanta, as of 2000, was 61.4% Black or African American. U.S. Census Bureau, Data set on race and ethnicity for Atlanta, Georgia, 2000 U.S. Census, http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=16000US1304000&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_QTP3&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U (accessed May 23, 2006).
47. For compelling and much more thorough discussions of this figure, see Micki McElya's Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders' Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
48. An anonymous reviewer of this article confirmed what s/he termed "white myopia," stating that in her "imagined landscape," Sibley indeed failed to account for the African American farm workers and sharecroppers in rural north Fulton County at this time.
49. See Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1994).
50. Ibid, 18.
51. "Sibley Milestones," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 22, 1999.
52. Mike Luckovich, untitled cartoon, Atlanta Constitution, August 17, 1999.
53. Litchfield Hundred, http://litchfieldhundred.com/outside_frame.asp (accessed February 20, 2007).
54. Cathy Meder, "Roswell Homes and Subdivisions," http://www.cathymeder.com/Nav.aspx/Page=%2fPageManager%2fDefault.aspx%2fPageID%3d1557869 (accessed February 20, 2007).
55. http://www.chathamlegacy.com/newhome/overlook/index.asp (accessed June 10, 2008).
56. http://kingestatesmanor.net/10497/dsp_agent_page.php/53580/King_Estates_ Manor_Offerings/King_Estate_Manor_Offerings (accessed June 10, 2008).
57. http://www.lakesideatansley.com (accessed June 10, 2008). The racial demography for the city of Roswell, as of 2000, was 81.5% white, 10.6% Hispanic or Latino, 8.5% black, 3.7% Asian, 1.9% reporting 2 or more races, and .2% American Indian or Alaska Native. U.S. Census Bureau, State and County Quick Facts for Roswell, Georgia, 2000 U.S. Census, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/13/1367284.html (accessed August 4, 2008).
2. Ashmead was an editor at Doubleday, then at Simon & Schuster, and finally, at Harper & Row; Sibley followed him to each publishing house. Sibley's published works include: the semi-autobiographical novels Jincey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978) and Children, My Children (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Young'uns: A Celebration (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); her memoir, Turned Funny; six mysteries, The Malignant Heart (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), Ah, Sweet Mystery: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), Straight as an Arrow: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), A Plague of Kinfolks: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), and Spider in the Sink: A Kate Mulcay Mystery (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); two works on Atlanta, Peachtree Street U.S.A. (1963), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1986, and Dear Store: An Affectionate Portrait of Rich's (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1990; two books on her cabin in North Georgia, including A Place Called Sweet Apple: Country Living and Southern Recipes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, and The Sweet Apple Gardening Book (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); collections of her columns, including Christmas in Georgia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, Especially at Christmas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, Mothers Are Always Special (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), reissued by Peachtree Publishers in 1985, Day by Day with Celestine Sibley (New York: Doubleday, 1975), Small Blessings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), For All Seasons (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, 1984); and Tokens of Myself (Atlanta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1990). She also wrote the foreword to Peter Beney's collection of photographs titled Atlanta: A Brave and Beautiful City (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1986) and the text for The Magical Realm of Sallie Middleton (Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor House, 1980).
Note: I use parenthetical citations for page numbers from these novels and the following abbreviations for each book: ASM for Ah, Sweet Mystery; PK for A Plague of Kinfolks; SS for Spider in the Sink; and DH for Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle.
3. "Atlanta Metropolitan Growth Since 1960," http://demographia.com/db-atl1960.htm (accessed January 10, 2009).
4. My thanks to an anonymous Southern Spaces editorial reviewer for pointing me to these demographic trends and their connection to Sibley's move from midtown Atlanta to north Fulton County. See generally Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. Williams, 1.
6. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 121.
7. Ibid., 5. Italics in original.
8. Ibid., 151.
9. Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 3-6, 13-14.
10. For a rich discussion of the development and growth of these neighborhoods on the western, southwestern, and southern edges of the city of Atlanta from World War II forward, see Andrew Wiese's talk, "African American Suburban Development in Atlanta," Southern Spaces, http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2006/wiese/1a.htm (accessed January 10, 2009).
11. One exception to this is Sibley's chapter on African Americans in a chapter from Peachtree Street U.S.A., entitled "The Darker Third."
12. Massey, 165-66. Massey argues that the effects of globalization in the later part of the twentieth century "have undermined an older sense of a 'place-called-home,' and left us placeless and disorientated" (163), which helps to explain people's searches for rooted-ness.
13. Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple, 57-58; Sibley, Tokens of Myself, 15. (This column originally appeared on October 11, 1983.)
14. Sibley claims that his boss at the AP shattered his confidence in the early 1940s, and an offer was made to Celestine to switch jobs with her husband. She declined, and Little was fired. He took a job at the Jacksonville Journal while Sibley stayed in Atlanta with the kids. When Sibley considered quitting the Constitution to join him in Florida, Ralph McGill offered to hire Jim. In August 1943, Sibley gave birth to their third child, Mary. Little was fired from the paper before Celestine's pregnancy was known, and he went to work at the Bell Aircraft bomber plant editing their publications. He continued to drink heavily, and he began to have an affair with a woman he met at the plant, calling it off only after Sibley confronted him. Sibley, Turned Funny, 119-23.
15. Sibley, Turned Funny, 147-48. The play Turned Funny, adapted from Sibley's memoir, implies that Ralph McGill offered her a column as a way to prevent her from having to contribute to confessional magazines for extra money. Phillip DePoy wrote the play, which had its debut under the direction of Fred Chappell at the Theatre in the Square in Marietta, Georgia, August 6-September 24, 2006.
16. Turned Funny, 166-67. The Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution came under common ownership in June 1950, when James M. Cox purchased the Constitution. "The Constitution continued as a morning paper with a liberal editorial bent, while the afternoon Journal had a more conservative leaning," states the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The two papers combined newsroom staffs in 1982, but did not officially merge into the Journal-Constitution until 2001. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Atlanta Journal-Constitution," http://www.newgeorgiaencyclopedia.com/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1807&sug=y (accessed September 29, 2006).
17. Turned Funny, 177-78.
18. Mary seems to have been a somewhat unpredictable young woman. In 1965, for example, she ran away to Montgomery, Alabama, to join in the March to Selma. Upon learning of Mary's flight, Sibley called Martin Luther King and asked him the personal favor of having one of his lieutenants escort her back to Atlanta, which he did. Sibley wrote in 1968 that upon hearing of his assassination, she realized she had never thanked him. Celestine Sibley, "In the Rain by a Mississippi Truck Stop," Atlanta Constitution, April 9, 1968. Letters between Sibley and her New York editor, Larry Ashmead, also indicate that Mary had forged checks on her mother's account in the 1970s.
19. Celestine Sibley Fleming and Sibley Fleming. Celestine Sibley: A Granddaughter's Reminiscence (Athens, Georgia: Hill Street Press, 2000), 28-29.
20. Sibley, Turned Funny, 258.
21. Celestine was convinced that the children had been brainwashed, and she believed that Mary was an innocent victim of Cricket's irrational behavior. Sibley Fleming provides a somewhat different account of that period of her childhood. Fleming claims that her mother drank excessively (which Celestine also alludes to in the fictional character of Leslie in Children, My Children) and that she threatened suicide in front of Fleming and her brother. She was at times abusive, especially when she thought that Cricket was having an affair. After moving to New Harmony, Indiana, to live with their paternal grandparents, they told their father that they wanted to talk to Celestine. He would allow it, but he said that they had to tell Sibley what Mary was like as a mother. When they did, claims Fleming, Celestine refused to believe them. But Sibley had always been the one who came to their rescue. For example, when Fleming's Uncle Jimmy, Celestine's first born, allegedly molested her one night when Celestine was out of town, Celestine immediately sent money to pay for a bus ticket to get Jimmy out of their house. Despite the protection Celestine Sibley had always given her grandchildren, she failed to believe their assessment of their mother — her daughter — as unfit, which in turn pushed those children further away. Fleming, Celestine, 55-65. Two letters to Celestine Sibley from her editor, Larry Ashmead, suggest that she had told him about her concern over Jimmy. Ashmead wrote in July 1975 that Jimmy is "so nice and so bright and my heart hurts for his lack of motivation and utilization"; a month later, he cryptically wrote to Sibley that "it is best for Jimmy" but that he understood "it" had caused her to feel low. Larry Ashmead to Celestine Sibley, July 16, 1975 and August 8, 1975, Box 2, Folder 8, Celestine Sibley Papers, MARBL, Woodruff Library, Emory University.
22. Sibley, Turned Funny, 270. In her novel, Children, My Children, a book Sibley allegedly wrote to pay for the detectives and lawyers hired to locate her grandchildren, Celestine tells a similar tale, portraying in rich detail the emotional turmoil experienced by the grandmother-protagonist Sally. She also depicts Sally's daughter Leslie as a genuinely caring and devoted mother, though not someone who is always forthright about her troubled relationship with the children's father.
23. Jack Strong, Sibley's longtime partner who eventually became her second husband, introduced her to Sweet Apple. In search of some land in the country in 1961, he had found a man named Doc Smellie who "dabbled a bit in real estate" to show him some areas in northern Fulton County one Saturday afternoon. Doc took them by a dilapidated log cabin, dating to the early 1840s, that had once served as a schoolhouse for local residents. Instantly enamored, Sibley bought the cabin and the acre of land on which it stood for $1,000, and Jack purchased the twenty acres nearby. She sold her house on Thirteenth Street, rented an apartment while the renovation of Sweet Apple was completed, and finally moved to the cabin in 1963. Sibley, Turned Funny, 204. Sibley chronicles the renovation process in the beginning of A Place Called Sweet Apple (1967).
24. Elsewhere I discuss at greater length Sibley's genuine love of and appreciation for the city of Atlanta, arguing in fact that she crafts Atlanta as "urban pastoral" in her writing. See Margaret T. McGehee, "On Margaret Mitchell's Grave: Women Writing Modern Atlanta" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2007).
25. Carole Ashkinaze, "Celestine Sibley: Gone But Not Forgotten," The Southerner, http://www.southerner.net/v1n4_99/passing4a.html (accessed January 12, 2004).
26. Celestine Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple, 17. A 1967 article written by Sibley's friend Wylly Folk St. John (who came to work at the Atlanta Journal the same year that Sibley arrived at the Constitution) details Sweet Apple, describing the "10,000 hours of personal labors-of-love" that Sibley and others put into the cabin's renovation. Wylly Folk St. John, "Celestine Sibley's Sweet Apple Cabin," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine, November 5, 1967, 8+.
27. Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple, 51.
28. Ibid., 59.
29. Ibid., 58.
30. Sibley, Ibid, 84.
31. Ibid., 63-64.
32. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 22, 1999 (originally appeared on June 6, 1986).
33. Sibley, Tokens of Myself, 129. This column originally appeared on April 8, 1980.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 130.
36. Sibley, A Place Called Sweet Apple (1986), 235.
37. Larry Ashmead told Sibley in a 1989 letter that he and literary agent Helen Pratt had "talked about how we're going to make you the Agatha Christie of Roswell." Larry Ashmead to Celestine Sibley, 1989, Box 25 (unprocessed), unnumbered folder of correspondence from Larry Ashmead, Celestine Sibley Papers, MARBL, Woodruff Library, Emory University.
38. For a discussion of "women's pages" as related to newspapers' evolving understanding of "lifestyles," see Patrick T. Wehner's "Living in Style: Marketing, Media, and the Discovery of Lifestyles" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2000).
39. Sibley, Ah, Sweet Mystery, 25.
40. Although Kate's age is never clear, she notes in Spider in the Sink that the new minister in the area, age forty-five, is "only a few years her junior," 11. In Dire Happenings, we learn that she and her husband had lived in the log cabin twenty years prior to his death. It's never clear how long he has been gone. If the time of the book's setting corresponds to the time of its publication and if Kate had been in her mid- to late-twenties in The Malignant Heart, published in 1958, Kate would be in her mid- to late-sixties by 1997, the publication date for Spider in the Sink.
41. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this article who pointed out that in Sibley's discussion of the former commercial district, she "missed the opportunity to detail the ethnic diversity" that had characterized "old Decatur Street," including the presence of Jewish merchants who sold goods to black customers.
42. According to Sibley's friend and fellow mystery writer, Kathy Trocheck, Celestine Sibley conducted research for this book by tagging along with Atlanta's Red Dog antidrug squad. Trocheck, untitled tribute to Celestine Sibley, in The Celestine Sibley Sampler, 37.
43. For discussions of Atlanta's development and expansion in the last half of the twentieth century, see Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1989); Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Harmon, Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations: Atlanta, Georgia, 1946-1981 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996); Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta; Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta (New York: Scribner, 1996); Frederick Allen, Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City, 1940-1990 (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996); Harvey K. Newman, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); and Kevin Kruse, White Flight (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
44. Keating, Atlanta, 209-10.
45. Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 68.
46. See Kevin Kruse's White Flight for an extremely comprehensive account of white Atlantans' exodus from the city after World War II. The population of the city of Atlanta, as of 2000, was 61.4% Black or African American. U.S. Census Bureau, Data set on race and ethnicity for Atlanta, Georgia, 2000 U.S. Census, http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=16000US1304000&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_QTP3&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U (accessed May 23, 2006).
47. For compelling and much more thorough discussions of this figure, see Micki McElya's Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders' Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
48. An anonymous reviewer of this article confirmed what s/he termed "white myopia," stating that in her "imagined landscape," Sibley indeed failed to account for the African American farm workers and sharecroppers in rural north Fulton County at this time.
49. See Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1994).
50. Ibid, 18.
51. "Sibley Milestones," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 22, 1999.
52. Mike Luckovich, untitled cartoon, Atlanta Constitution, August 17, 1999.
53. Litchfield Hundred, http://litchfieldhundred.com/outside_frame.asp (accessed February 20, 2007).
54. Cathy Meder, "Roswell Homes and Subdivisions," http://www.cathymeder.com/Nav.aspx/Page=%2fPageManager%2fDefault.aspx%2fPageID%3d1557869 (accessed February 20, 2007).
55. http://www.chathamlegacy.com/newhome/overlook/index.asp (accessed June 10, 2008).
56. http://kingestatesmanor.net/10497/dsp_agent_page.php/53580/King_Estates_ Manor_Offerings/King_Estate_Manor_Offerings (accessed June 10, 2008).
57. http://www.lakesideatansley.com (accessed June 10, 2008). The racial demography for the city of Roswell, as of 2000, was 81.5% white, 10.6% Hispanic or Latino, 8.5% black, 3.7% Asian, 1.9% reporting 2 or more races, and .2% American Indian or Alaska Native. U.S. Census Bureau, State and County Quick Facts for Roswell, Georgia, 2000 U.S. Census, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/13/1367284.html (accessed August 4, 2008).
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Merthiolate-Colored Flags | The Country of Mystery | White Country, Black City | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
