Interview with John Yearwood, author of Jar of Pennies
.jpeg)
Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview John Yearwood, whose novel Jar of Pennies was our featured new release on October 1.
What made you decide to write a murder mystery set in 1970’s Texas?
After 15 years as a newspaper reporter in East Texas, I was full of stories about the people and their culture. After writing my first four novels, I wanted to write something that put this unique area of Texas into better focus because I felt the area had been largely ignored by the rest of the world. It is an area of dense forests the size of England, more than ninety percent wooded, where modernity skipped by in the distance without leaving much trace on the people or their towns. At the turn of the twenty-first century, some thousand-square-mile counties had only two stoplights, for example. Yet the area is full of interesting people engaging with all the complexities of human culture and the natural world, sandwiched between the megalopolises of Houston/Dallas on the west and the Mississippi river basin on the east. It is a fascinating area, home to unique species of animals and plants, with over 380 different birds, every species of hardwood in North America, large cats, bear, red wolves, and other native life, both human and wild. The stories of the people and their environment are abundant, and I knew them well. I wanted to tell those stories.
The novel is set in the lumbering world of East Texas. How did you learn about that milieu and its significance?
In 1968, I fell in love with a girl from a lumbering family in an area officially designated by the State of Texas as “Deep East Texas.” We’ve been married for 52 years. In 1980, I started a weekly newspaper in her hometown, which I ran for 15 years, where I became intimately familiar with thousands of residents and their stories.
Along the Gulf Coast of Texas, really from Alabama to Mexico, the primary industries are petroleum and fishing. But east of Houston if you move inland thirty or forty miles, the land turns into mixed pine/hardwood forest that once stretched without interruption all the way from the Atlantic coast. The part of that forest in East Texas is known as the Big Thicket because of its jungle-like density full of rich wildlife and unique plant species. Originally nearly a million square miles, it was unoccupied by First Peoples, who only hunted in it and occasionally set fires to drive wildlife. Since the nineteenth century, lumbering and civilization have all but erased the virgin forests, but the United Nations designated the area as a “Man and the Biosphere” reserve and the US established the Big Thicket National Park in the 1970s with 88,000 acres of various types of forest, from bogs to upland forests.
From the point of view of a naturalist, it is significant as an area with forms of life found nowhere else, including carnivorous plants, unique species of orchid, and unique birds. Once home to the ivory-billed woodpecker, it is now home to the endangered red cockaded woodpecker which is the only woodpecker species to hollow out nesting areas in mature, living longleaf pine. Cacti grow next to trilliums, wild azaleas perfume the deep shadows, and sometimes you can hear the lonely howl of the endangered red wolf. From a human point of view, its significance lies in a culture different from the rest of the United States, an uneasy marriage between West Texas-style independence and Deep South nostalgia for a mythical aristocratic past.
The protagonist BoMac (short for Beaufort Sebastien Maclean), a young journalist, sets out to solve a series of unsolved murders. You yourself worked as a stringer for the New York Times and were an award-winning journalist for 15 years. To what extent does Jar of Pennies draw on your experience?
BoMac is not me, though I think all small newspapers are alike in the constant pressure to stay afloat. Indeed, it is a vanishing lifestyle, just like the art of making wooden wheels for buggies. I created and was the sole proprietor of my own newspaper. Sending info to the NY Times was a side gig for me. As for my little weekly, we had weeks when my only income was from coins I found lying on the sidewalk. I bought a used Coca-Cola machine to sell drinks to the public because I could make twelve cents per can, often my most profitable enterprise. It was not easy running a small business that depended upon public literacy to succeed in the early years of the Reagan administration.
BoMac is younger than I was when I started my newspaper. He is a college dropout; I had finished my college education. He is single; I was married with a child. He is 24; I was 31. He has an imperious boss; I was on my own. And so on. The descriptions I put in Jar of Pennies of BoMac’s job paint an accurate picture of what it was like to run a rural newspaper at the end of the twentieth century. It was, I hope, significant toil.
This novel is not so much a “whodunnit” as a “whydunit”, searching for the causes of crime, since the identity of the killer is known from the start. Why did you want to write Jesse Grinder, an imaginary character whose life is partly based on a real case?
Jesse Grinder is a high school dropout, condemned to a life of ignorance and unable to think critically when he most needs to. As a result, he is only able to react to situations and unable to reason from circumstances to consequences. But every child is like that until years of education instil the learned skills of logic and rationality. Or rather, education should instil those intellectual skills.
What I have witnessed in my decades of classroom experience is that public and private education so often punts on the responsibility for teaching critical thinking in favor of indoctrinating obedience in students. As a result, school becomes a bootcamp for social acceptance instead of a creative and engaging activity. When your population is raised without the skills to think critically, you have a herd, not a community of mature and functional adults. That is one of the messages of Jesse Grinder: he never acquires the ability to think about what he is doing, and his society ends up executing him as a result.
Coincidentally, some of the events involving Jesse Grinder actually occurred and sent the perpetrator to the death chamber.
The theme of state execution is significant to the story. Tell us how that theme relates to the Jar of Pennies itself, and how you chose to name characters in the book.
The name of the chief protagonist, BoMac, is the only male name in the novel not taken from a list of persons executed by the State of Texas. There are so many! I was astounded at how many people Texas has executed in its 200-year history. The names of women were somewhat harder to find since fewer of them have been executed. However, all the female characters’ names come from lists of women executed in Texas and other states, or from well-known murderesses.
I did this to illustrate the continuity in human nature over the centuries. Crucifixion for the Romans is no different in intent, despite the difference in method, than injecting poisons into someone’s veins. In other words, history does not repeat. People repeat, and only their methods change. So any view of humanity, no matter where it is taken or in what century it occurs, is like every other view of humanity forever.
Also important to BoMac is his ally and mentor, Charles Henniker, a Black retired Air Force colonel who teaches economics and history at the local high school. How does he influence BoMac and why is the theme of education itself so important to the story?
I created Henniker because I wanted to introduce a Black character who could not be threatened by the White population of Whitmire. In a town where racism is pervasive, Henniker is exactly the kind of man most feared by the White population: he is independent, he has an income from his military retirement, he is educated, and he is not readily intimidated. In other words, their opinions of him don’t matter to him, and this is almost—but not quite—intolerable to them. I hoped Henniker would help to highlight the subterranean theme of fear that runs throughout White culture in the south.
East Texas is imagined as a place of fear, with a primeval forest and a rural population who live in fear themselves, using it to fend off modernity and strangers. Is this idea of Southern Gothic more than just a trope?
You know, sometimes tropes are real. A trope is just a condition that is widely observed, and in my experience, much of Southern Gothic is real. Here are the typical aspects of Southern Gothic: ancient wealth (usually lost), isolation from mainstream culture, possible insanity but certainly ignorance, fear of the unknown, and unknowable things (maybe ghosts) that cause fear, and decay.
In Jar of Pennies, most of the wealth has concentrated in a single old, childless, heartless woman. A few other people can make enough money to be comfortable, but no one is as wealthy as she. And she is a termagant. She is mean, impulsive, and yet conniving. A sociological study of small-town America decades ago found that most small towns were owned and run by four conservative families, and nothing changed without their leadership. In Whitmire, nothing changes unless Mrs. Jane Elkins wants it to, and she has the money to make it happen. No one else does, not even the local tax-supported governments. And she doesn’t want anything to change.
So is that trope? Yeah, it is. This consolidation of wealth and power is a widespread condition in most of small town America, but possibly more brutal in the isolated culture of East Texas.
Coincidentally, the original Jane Elkins was a slave who was accused of murdering her abusive master and hanged in Dallas in 1856. If she was guilty, she had a good reason to be.
When imagining and describing small towns in East Texas, how far do you nod to such literary precedents, and how far focus on the reality of life as you have known it?
It is hard to escape the small town archetype, like Macomb, Alabama, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Anarene, Texas, in Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. These depictions of small towns are accurate as far as they go. But in my experience, one of the real advantages of a small town is that you get to meet every kind of human, from the insane psychopath to the empathic genius. If ten percent of the human population are capable of felony, and one percent are murderers, you will meet these people every day in a small town.
At the opposite end of the criminal scale, you will also meet people like the man whose tombstone reads, “If everybody was like him, nobody would need a lawyer.” Harper Lee gets closer to that, I think, since Atticus Finch is noble and principled in a way that many others of Macomb are not. I guess what I’m saying is that you find the people you look for, and if you are looking for a town full of hopeless and futureless folks, that is who you find. But if you keep your eyes open, there is more to life in small towns than the still, sad music of humanity.
Small towns differ from larger, richer places in the availability of services and in opportunities for growth. For example, if you have a dinner date in a small town you are likely to eat at Dairy Queen, whereas if you have a dinner date in a large town you might take your date to Ruth’s Chris Steak House. A cardiac ablation or knee replacement is not likely to happen in a small town. On the other hand, in a large city you won’t know your neighbors and their extended families and their genealogies the way you do in a small town. No one is lost in anonymity in a small town the way they are lost in large cities. In my opinion, small towns get you closer to what it means to be human than the rich and poor ghettos of large cities.
In Jar of Pennies, I try to show the kaleidoscope of human life in a small town. You have the outcasts and the criminals, the ignorant and the brilliant. I don’t find small towns in East Texas dominated by feelings of despair and hopelessness. On the other hand, ignorance is as prevalent in small town America as it is in every other corner of America, depression and drugs are major social ills, and prejudice substitutes for rational thought no more frequently in small towns in East Texas than it does in New York’s Hamptons. Whitmire, Texas, the small town in Jar of Pennies, is, I hope, a picture of America as a whole and its three thousand residents proportionally comparable to the 330 million US population. I hope. That was my goal.
How does the story speak to the legacy of bigotry and racial hatred in former slave states like Texas?
Cultures all over the world honor their ancestors. Asking a southerner to acknowledge that the Confederacy was wrong and it lost is in a way asking him to dishonor the memory of his ancestors. My great-grandfather was a Confederate lieutenant at the Battle of Vicksburg, and I still have his final salary payment in Confederate money (“payable in gold two years after cessation of hostilities with the United States.”) My first cousin has his sabre and his battle flag.
This is not the place to discuss the lasting influence of the lost cause on the descendants of those men, nor to excuse the fact that their fight was morally and legally wrong, but we must acknowledge that they were honored by their children and neighbors and lionized for their efforts to prevent a fundamental change to both the lifestyle and economy of the South.
In Jar of Pennies I hope I show how racism pervades every aspect of social life, from the mundane to the halls of Congressional power. Partly, racism is a holdover from the Antebellum aristocracy of the South, a mythology that Walt Disney tried to capture in “Song of the South,” where everybody was loving and peaceful and kids grew up learning stories about Brer Rabbit.
As the hanging of the real Jane Elkins shows, however, the reality and the myth are miles apart. The imposition of slavery corrupted both the slaves and the enslavers, establishing in one the permanent feeling that nothing about White culture was beneficial to Black people, and on the other convincing the children of enslavers they were better than the workers who made them money. These attitudes persist in some communities of both Black and White people. Is this ignorance? I like to think that it is, and I hope I’m right. It quacks and waddles like ignorance to me.
In the novel, however, I show the practice of racism as part of the broader story about the failure of education to promote the skills of critical thinking and the recognition of truth supported by evidence. No one who attended a class taught by the character Charles Henniker—even one titled by the State of Texas “the benefits of a free market economy”—would leave thinking he was in any way inferior or ignorant.
Racism is automatic among ignorant people in small town America; in large cities and in America as a whole, it is the dog whistle of certain political parties who use mythical grievance and lack of information to their own ends. Hateful people weaponize it. No one is unaffected. I consider racism one of the major ills of modern America.
You refer to the problem of corruption in small towns, where local government can have a negative, even malign influence on the lives of people there. Does Jar of Pennies weave this theme into its narrative?
A politician is someone who knows, or thinks he knows, how far to push public credulity. Possibly the most famous contemporary example is the politician who brags he could murder someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but every Ponzi and pyramid scheme is an example of the same credulity. In Jar of Pennies, the corruption of political figures is tied to continuing racism underlying the ongoing theft of property, life, and honor from Black citizens.
The story presents this racism as an offshoot of the unthinking, reactive violence lying just below the surface of American culture, like a coiled rattlesnake hidden in fallen leaves. The central theme of Jar of Pennies is that ignorance is violence itself. Racism and corruption develop from that central theme and slither through the narrative, occasionally glimpsed.
The conventional view is that large urban communities in the States are ethnically diverse, small rural communities less so. Is this true and how does Jar of Pennies explore this through the lives of the characters?
In my experience, large urban areas are only ethnically diverse in terms of overall population, not in terms of neighborhoods. On the contrary, most urban neighborhoods are not diverse at all. Of the millions of people in New York City or Los Angeles, many are partitioned into ghettos of racially or religiously similar subcultures. These cultural ghettos reinforce prejudices and stereotypes, never questioning these social constructions and often violently resisting any change toward inclusivity.
It is more difficult to enjoy this luxury in small towns, because you cannot avoid people who are not like you, no matter how hard you try. You might carry forward into all your relationships the prejudice that separates you from others, but at least you have the experience of the encounter. Small towns in the south are deficient in services, like restaurants and orthopedists, but not in diversity. So, it’s not true that small rural communities are less ethnically diverse. Ten Black people in a small town are more often encountered than a hundred thousand Black people in a city like Dallas. In other words, meeting people with diverse ethnicities and mental abilities is unavoidable in small towns.
In Jar of Pennies I tried to reconstruct small towns in East Texas to reflect the racial bigotry and conflict I observed during the 15 years I reported on the area. I included in that reconstruction some of the excuses and blindness commonly held. Many people will tell you there is no racial conflict in their towns, but trust your observations, not their words.
The very first issue of my little newspaper carried a picture of the four Black girls from an area school who won the regional high school championship in the 400-meter relay. Two years later, one of the girls drowned while wading in a local lake during a family picnic—being Black, she had never been allowed into a swimming pool and so was never taught how to swim. When she slid into a hole not far from shore, it killed her. I took that front page picture down to the local Black mortuary to inquire of the mortician which girl it was so I could be sure to run the right picture with the story. In my mind, she was a local hero. The Black mortician cackled at me, literally cackled, took out a ballpoint pen, and drew a dark “X” across the face of the dead girl. “That’s the one,” he chuckled. Was his attitude influenced by my whiteness, or by his own supposition about how the story would be received, or by what? Just a macabre sense of humor? I don’t know, but to me it underscored the ways in which, despite the close and frequent overlap of ethnicities and cultures, bridging between them is rare. I tried to include this dynamic in Jar of Pennies.
BoMac, the main character and mostly narrator, is an outsider observing the community and devoted to getting at the objective truth of the culture. He is often thwarted by the masks and subterfuges of those with whom he has dealings. A prime example is the vast ignorance he has about the feminine world when he is covering the local beauty pageant and a mother asks him if she can borrow a roll of duct tape. He is flabbergasted when he learns the tape is to be used on the girls’ young breasts.
His open-minded fondness for Charles Henniker, the Black history teacher at the high school, whom he adopts as a father figure, is another example how he differs from the rest of the population. The assistant high school principal’s statement that a Black man “might not know what an apology is,” is a deliberate contrast with BoMac’s outsider understanding of human nobility, a quality opaque to the racially biased principal. These kinds of conflicts operate on every level of the book, even in the reader’s attitude toward Jesse Grinder, the villain. Grinder is actually a sympathetic character in some ways, with his poverty and mental impairment, and yet he is vile as only a savage can be. But then, rattlesnakes are vile in that way too, through no fault of their own. This is why I use the rattlesnake, Old Coil, as a symbol for the human world.
Tell us something about your career as a teacher in high schools and universities. What is the importance of education to you and how did that lead you to write A Jar of Pennies?
I was fortunate enough to teach in universities for 20 years and in high schools for 17 years. Early in my teaching career I realized students spend 90 percent of their time in class studying the teacher and only ten percent of their time learning. If the teacher is bored with the subject, students know immediately and are also bored. So early on in my own teaching I set out to demonstrate two things to my classes: how to be the best student in the class, and why I loved the subject.
To me, the importance of education cannot be overstated. Civilization and education are the same. Education is civilization; civilization is education. Without education, your community forms a herd, not a culture. But education is not an assembly line process. You don’t shovel raw material in one end and get doctors out the other, like you do with other kinds of manufacturing. Education, in other words, is not about acquiring facts and discipline, but about developing the ability to think critically.
The teacher should pose a question and then ask the students what they need to know in order to answer it. When they make some suggestions, then the teacher needs to pose a second question: how do you go about learning what you need to know? Then the teacher helps the students discover knowledge. This makes learning fun and playful, promotes creativity, and provokes student imagination.
When you have students who learn happily and creatively, you have students who learn to think critically. Someone who can think critically can reason from actions to consequences. Someone who does not learn to think critically can only react. In Jar of Pennies, the villain Jesse Grinder is a person who is condemned to a life of reaction instead of thinking. He’s doomed. Inability to reason is a life sentence.
Temple Grandin, the famed animal behaviorist, explains it this way. She says, suppose a dog steps off a curb and gets hit by a car. Assume the dog survives. What happens? The dog does not learn to watch for traffic before crossing the road, because that requires critical thinking. The dog does not learn not to cross the road, because that requires critical thinking. In both those cases, the dog cannot reason from being hit by a car to learning the consequences of stepping blindly off a curb. No, what the dog learns is not to step off the curb again at that spot. It will joyfully run right out into traffic from another spot.
Humans are the same way. If they don’t learn how to think, how to reason from actions to consequences or from evidence to understanding, then they are no more intelligent than a dog. In fact, they are in worse shape than the dog, because they lack the dog’s extraordinary senses of smell, hearing, movement, and reflex. In Jar of Pennies, Jesse Grinder is a school dropout who survives like an animal without critical thinking skills just long enough to be executed by the State of Texas. The purpose of education is to help children develop critical thinking skills so they don’t end up like Grinder.
What made you decide to become a writer of fiction and how different is it to journalism - and your academic work on the First Amendment and the extra-Constitutional powers of the Presidency? What are the challenges and what can you tell us about your non-fiction work?
The only immutable rule in journalism is summed up in three words: tell the truth. Fiction has no immutable rules. The two are similar in that they both use words, and that’s where the similarity ends. Journalism worth reading is verifiable. Fiction worth reading is believable. Academic writing, meanwhile, is a genre to itself and generally unreadable.
Journalism is the skill of communicating the actual. Fiction is the art of communicating the possible. Journalism, like your cat, sometimes makes you feel good and is entertaining, and sometimes makes you feel judged and threatened. You might be alarmed by the headless squirrel on your pillow, but you know your cat will kill and eat squirrels. In other words, journalism informs with actual facts, chronicles the many events of a community, serves as the foundation for future histories of the time, and helps to forge public opinion that keeps the powers of government benign and controlled. Most journalists try to write the news without suggesting an individual point of view—it’s not “I saw this or that,” but “anybody would have seen this or that.”
Fiction is a tiger. It eats YOUR head.
Fiction kidnaps your imagination and transports you away from wherever you are. “Call me Ishmael” (Moby Dick), “The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended” (2001: Space Odyssey); “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted” (The Adventures of Augie March): all of these opening lines launch your imagination out of your brain and into some other world. That’s fiction.
After decades chained by the restraints of academia and journalism, my mind finally broke out. Now it runs freely, literally all over the universe. I’ve written three novels based in Bronze Age Greece and a novel using quantum computing set in modern Cupertino. I’m working on a novel set on Mars and another set 500 years in the future; and of course, this amusing but also terrifying Jar of Pennies. Before I colonize Mars, I will probably finish a sister novel to Jar, of which I have already written seven chapters. The liberation of fiction is exhilarating. Exciting. Life-giving.
And hard.
What books do you like to read and are there any key influences?
I read a lot of books. I enjoy a good murder mystery and a good spy thriller. I’ve read all of Michael Connelly’s books, all of John le Carré, all of Tom Clancy up to his death, all of Dorothy Sayers and most of Agatha Christie, all of Michener, all of Toni Morrison, all of William Faulkner, all of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, all of Margaret Atwood, all of C.S. Lewis’s fiction and almost all of Tolkien (including his academic works), all of Patrick O’Brien’s sea novels, Larry McMurtry, John Grisham, Ernest J Gaines, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, John Irving, John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, and hundreds more. I enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith’s African detective stories. Philip Meyer’s The Son and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas have been big influences. I love Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Neal Stephenson blows my mind—what pleasure! This week I’ve read Michael Connelly’s Desert Star and am now, mid-week, reading Katherine Graham’s Personal History. My friend Helen Currie Foster writes a series of delicious cozy mysteries set in the Texas hill country. I truly enjoy John McPhee and Bill Bryson, and I like to think I write like McPhee. I’m not sure McPhee would agree.
You cannot fail to be influenced by great minds flowing into your brain through their words and stories. I wish I could say that I am the sum of all I have read, but that would not be true. I am bent and twisted and welded and molded by these writers, but the base metal, alas, is my own.
Is Southern Gothic a help or a hindrance to people dealing with the reality of the South today, and how far have those states fallen in love with their own myth?
The first (2014) season of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson’s TV series “True Detective” ticks all the boxes for Southern Gothic noir: isolation, murder of women, left over ruins from the Confederacy, insanity, incest, ignorance, sexual perversion and abuse, racism, deranged religious practices, lost wealth, femme fatales, hard-boiled cops, and compulsive clinging to the past. Throw in rabies and drop the cops and femme fatale and you’ve got To Kill a Mockingbird. Drop rabies but add in fishing and a cross-country trip by wagon with a corpse, and you’ve got As I Lay Dying.
For more than a century, Southern Gothic has featured in novels about the South—a far cry from its antithesis expressed by Disney in “Song of the South.” Both the Disney ideal and the Faulknerian grotesque views of southern life are only partly true. Antebellum homes do in fact sit mouldering among drooping live oaks, too large and drafty to be inhabited and too expensive to maintain without the economy of slave labor and tourism. Anyone can drive up the River Road from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and see these relics of the Old South or visit architecturally beautiful monuments to a slave economy in towns like Natchez, Mississippi. Life in the South has also been sweet and the people kind and loving.
Most of the people I met during my years in East Texas were honest, genuine, friendly, and caring. In Jar of Pennies, I tried to capture these conflicting views of society in an effort to fairly present East Texas life at the end of the twentieth century. Jesse Grinder, the character who encapsulates the deadly psychopathology of Southern Gothic is balanced, I hope, by Charles Henniker, the honorable Black teacher who seeks to pull the world out of hatred and ignorance through education. The narrative of the story arcs between these characters and what they represent.
So, in my opinion, focussing on the elements of Southern Gothic hinders an understanding of the real tensions in Southern culture today. Southern Gothic is shorthand for a collection of attitudes and macabre customs that is only partly accurate: gothic elements exist, but they are not all there is. “True Detective” was intended as a parody of the genre, after all, being so completely over the top in its exaggerations of stereotypes, pulling all of them together in what was clearly intended to be Southern Gothic noir. It succeeded.
Do the southern states see themselves as gothic? If that’s what you’re looking for, that’s what you see. So some people do, and a good many of those people long for the return of a mythical aristocratic class of wealthy white people who were genetically privileged and just plain better than anybody else. What we call racism today is one way in which this myth of pure blood and genetic superiority—as proven by the acquisition of wealth through slavery—is acted out.
This forum is not the place to discuss these issues extensively—indeed, I’m not qualified to be on such a stage. What I show in Jar of Pennies is what I observed: the Civil War is not over, it has not been settled, and it has not been forgotten by the losers. The more modern the South becomes, the more desperately some people cling to a myth of racial privilege and superiority, and half a century ago that myth was the dominant theme in most areas of the South. I wish I could say that the modern South has buried the myth for good, but like a “whack-a-mole” it keeps popping up somewhere else just when you think it’s gone.
He is the author of The Icarus Series: The Icarus Jump, The City and the Gate and The Gender of Fire; The Lie Detector App, which is set in modern California and follows the unfolding life of a genius kid who creates apps for the smartphone and discovers there is truth everywhere if you know how to look; and Jar of Pennies, a historical and cultural crime fiction novel set in a small town in East Texas. John lives in Austin with his wife and two small dogs.
Comments
Post a Comment