On February 1, 1960, Olive Ann gave birth to a son, John. During those years, she didn’t write much at all. “Although I’m not a great housekeeper (I use a dust cloth when I can see the dust without my glasses),” she admitted, “I care about the house being a home. I don’t resent the fact that cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes has to be part of homemaking, but I do wish I were more effective at it.”
When Medora Perkerson died, Olive Ann was offered her job as the newspaper’s advice columnist, “Amy Larkin.” She snapped up the chance to work at home, and for the next seven years, she said, she “lived like a queen. I had a full-time maid and cook. I took care of the children and wrote the column, even when I was sick. It’s easier to write than vacuum when you’re sick, and I was always getting sick with sinus or chest infections.” At times she was too ill to care for the children, and John and Becky would go off to stay with their grandparents on Boiling Road, or at Olive Ann’s sister Jean’s. Even then, she realized that there was one great advantage to illness—it created space and time for writing. The mail to Amy Larkin made Olive Ann shock-proof and taught her much about human nature. But she knew that as long as she was answering letters, nothing more substantial would come from her typewriter. So she gave up the column and resumed writing three or four stories a year for the magazine.
In the fall of 1971, Olive Ann’s mother underwent surgery for stomach cancer. On the morning of the operation, Olive Ann prayed all the way to the hospital, “Dear God, please don’t let it be inoperable.” But the cancer had already spread. Afterward Olive Ann reflected that, of course, her mother’s cancer was inoperable regardless of her prayer; it was simply too late for God to change it. These thoughts marked a turning point for her, for it occurred to her that she had always prayed wrong, that almost everybody did. It was a mistake to ask God for material things, “like Cadillacs, and a pay raise, and for the body to get well.” Still, it would be several more years before she carried this idea any further, or before she moved beyond what she called “appreciation prayers”—“Thank you, God, for this; thank you, God, for that.”
Because Ruby Burns was susceptible to bouts of depression and anxiety, the doctor suggested that she not be told the outcome of the operation, and Arnold agreed. Olive Ann thought that the challenge of keeping the truth from his wife was part of what sustained her father over the following months. “Deception for a cause never bothered him at all,” she said. The doctor predicted that Ruby would have one or two good months following the surgery, after which it would all be downhill. At the most, he thought, she had about six months to live. For Olive Ann, the hardest part was lying to her mother. “I seldom had in my life,” she explained. She also felt Ruby was fully capable of handling the truth. “She had always been the kind to go to pieces over a Disposall not working or a water heater exploding,” Olive Ann wrote, “but the big things she could stand. I knew she could stand anything if Daddy was holding her hand and loving her out loud. But I couldn’t tell her if Daddy didn’t want to, and what if he did know best?”
After Ruby’s surgery, the family history became a family project and, as Olive Ann wrote later, “we had a wonderful winter and spring.” A relative had already worked on early genealogies, which Olive Ann’s sister Margaret began collating and typing.
When Ruby Burns died in September 1972, Olive Ann wrote, “I have to mention Mother’s beauty—physical beauty. As she lost weight in the last weeks I thought I had never seen anybody so beautiful. Her bone structure, her face, was an artist’s perfection. It was the beauty of youth; I could now imagine how absolutely perfect her beauty must have been when she and Daddy married. She was five foot three and only weighed 112 when she married, but in maturity she had always been overweight, and though glowing and lovely, her face was just not revealed. I shall never forget her on her birthday—so physically beautiful, her dark eyes alive and sparkling with hope and love.”
By the time Olive Ann’s father died, the next July, the family history was nearly complete. Olive Ann ended it with a eulogy for both of her parents, now “side by side in the twin beds of death.” Her mother’s death was the first she had ever experienced in her immediate family. “After all that’s happened,” she wrote to friends of her parents, “it almost seems now that Daddy died within weeks instead of ten months later, and that grief for one was all wrapped up with grief for the other, as if it were all one package.”
Olive Ann and Andy bought Arnold and Ruby’s house on Boiling Road and moved in the next spring. There, Olive Ann typed the final pages of the family history. “It’s fall now,” she wrote, “and we Sparkses have lived in Daddy’s house for six months. Outside we’ve got turnip greens planted—he was always generous with turnip greens, which he planted in his flower beds. And there are two blossoms on his roses. Every morning he would pick a bouquet for Mother and hand them to her and kiss her. He could write about love, but he couldn’t talk about it much, and she always felt the roses were a special thing between them. When the season was ending he might have only one or two for her, and he’d always say, ‘These are the last ones, I guess,’ but then he’d find another the next day. I think maybe what is out there now may be the last ones; I wish I knew how to keep them thriving and prolific, as he did.”
***
By 1974, Olive Ann Burns had lost her mother and watched as her sister grew desperately ill from chemotherapy treatments. Now, cancer was about to strike even closer. At a routine physical that October, her doctor detected a blood abnormality that led him to predict that, within the next two months to two years, Olive Ann would develop either leukemia or lymphoma. Olive Ann listened carefully to his explanation, wondering just how she could sit at home waiting to get cancer. Clearly, she would need something to keep her mind off her white blood cells and her own mortality. And then it came to her—she would write a novel. The idea, she said afterward, surprised her even more than the diagnosis. Before she left the building, she found a phone and called Andy at his office. “I may get cancer,” she told him, “but I am definitely going to write a novel.” Back home, she spotted her neighbor in the backyard. She told Norma Duncan the same thing, adding, “And I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.” Norma could tell that Olive Ann was serious. “From that day on,” she said, “we would talk about the book, but she never gave me the chance to pity her.”
From her father, Olive Ann had gained a lively sense of what it was like to grow up in a small town in Georgia at the turn of the century. And she already had an idea for a first chapter—the story of Grandpa Power. She would call him Enoch Rucker Blakeslee and give him one arm, a physical detail inspired by Andy’s mother’s recollection of a one-armed relative who had tickled her with his stump when she was a little girl.
Olive Ann figured she should start the book the way she had learned to start a magazine article: by grabbing the reader in the first paragraph. If any passage seemed slow or boring, she rewrote it. But, she confessed to her fellow Plot Club member Wylly Folk St. John, “I don’t know anything about plot.” “Well,” her friend advised, “don’t worry about plot. You just get your characters into trouble, and then you get them out.” So Olive Ann got Miss Love and Grandpa in trouble right in the first chapter and forged ahead, aware that she really didn’t know the first thing about writing a novel. “I never knew that the bookstores had shelf after shelf of books about how to write novels,” she later admitted. “I could have saved myself a lot of time.”
She finished the first chapter while visiting her sister Margaret in Pennsylvania, and sent it home to Andy, who was by then the editor of the Sunday Magazine. He returned it with a note: “I think you had better try again.” Back in Atlanta, she reworked the beginning, added more chapters, and showed them to Norma, whose judgment she also trusted. “You’re just trying to tell all those funny stories your daddy told you,” Norma observed. “You’ve got thirty-five pages of Will Tweedy and the boys putting rats out at the school play while I’m wondering what’s
happened to Grandpa and Miss Love.” Norma had more useful criticism: “Every time you introduce a character,” she said, “you write an article, instead of feeding the information into the action.”
Another friend, who taught writing, read the early chapters and observed that there were flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. Olive Ann knew she was floundering. She began to watch a soap opera and followed it for a year, learning how to weave plots and subplots together, and to keep the action moving. “And where at first I made all the characters into people I could like and respect,” Olive Ann recalled, “I noticed that the soaps always had a main character that viewers can hate. Hating is still a problem for me. I made Aunt Loma an unsympathetic character and I hated how she was, but I kept trying to help the reader understand her.”
When she was ready for more feedback, she read a few portions of the manuscript to the Plot Club. “I was surprised,” one member admitted. “I had no idea she could write something...so good.” Then, in December 1976, her monthly blood test brought the dreaded news. She had lymphoma, and she would need to undergo chemotherapy.
By this time, Olive Ann was having a fine time in Cold Sassy, Georgia, but the prospect of chemotherapy and its possible side effects terrified her. She was already running a high fever, and she knew there was no turning back. The worst thing that could happen was not that she would die; she had already accepted that. The worst thing would be to go on living with terrible fear—to be afraid any time she wasn’t busy; to wake up in the middle of the night, “cold and shivering in the pit of my soul.” On the gray January day before she was to begin treatment, Olive Ann knelt down alone in her living room and began to pray as she had never prayed before. She knew now that she could not ask God to make her well. Instead, she prayed with all her heart for courage. “Lord God,” she said over and over, “please help me not to be afraid.” A half hour went by, and Olive Ann rose from her knees with the realization that her prayer had been answered. The fear was gone. It was a moment she would remember with awe and gratitude; in the years that followed, she said, she never had to repeat that prayer.
As it turned out, this first round of chemotherapy consisted of a monthly dose of twelve tiny pills—not much to fear after all. The treatment didn’t make her sick, but it did cause her white blood cell count to drop, making her particularly vulnerable to infection. As a result, she was forced to stay at home and to stay rested—which meant that she could spend a good deal of her time working on the novel. Years before, a doctor treating her for arthritis had advised her not to vacuum anymore. Olive Ann was always grateful to him, for he had, in effect, granted her permission to spend less time on housework. Now, she tried to see her confinement in a positive light. “I realized that if I was going to be sick a long time, it would be hard on my family, so I’d better try to be as cheerful as possible,” she wrote.
Soon after the day she had prayed to be released from her fear, Olive Ann had a sudden insight into how to cope with her loss of health. On a sheet of yellow lined paper, which I found in her files, she told herself that instead of thinking of her cancer as a burden, which seemed intolerable, she would think of it as a challenge. “Each time of life has its peculiar problems,” she wrote. “A young girl doesn’t think of finding the right husband as a burden—she sees it as a challenge.” Rather than resent her cancer, she would figure out a way to get through it with grace. “A challenge is something to be faced and met. A burden is just heavy, and unbearable if it goes on too long. When seen as the biggest challenge I had ever faced, not only the illness itself, but my attitude about it—I felt that my spiritual resources were marshaled, not beaten down.”
Olive Ann had to summon those resources again and again in the months and years to come. As the chemotherapy progressed, she lost all of her hair and was plagued by a constant fever. The fever she dealt with as best she could, refusing to let it keep her down. “I got great pride in keeping the clothes washed and the supper cooked,” she said. “I would lie in bed and string beans, and when the fever went down I’d go fix a salad or put on a chicken, then go back to bed to write or read, then get up and empty the dishwasher.” Going bald presented its own challenge. She dealt with it by maintaining her sense of humor. In an article for the Sunday Magazine called “Co-Ed in the Bald Club,” Olive Ann wrote, “I hated being bald. I saw myself as a side-show, right up there with the tattooed lady and the two-headed calf. I’d like to say that I bore the affliction with grace. I certainly never felt that hair was more important than life.” Exactly two weeks after her first chemo treatment, Olive Ann noticed that her brush was thick with hair and, she said, she literally went weak in the knees. That night, she wrote, she told fifteen-year-old John that she was molting.
“AW, MOM!” John groaned, then with a sick look on his face said, “Well, please don’t talk about it.”
“Don’t you care?”
“Yes. But I know you. You won’t just lose your hair, you’ll tell everybody—even show them.”
“Tell, yes. Show, never.” There was an awkward moment as he stood miserably munching his Pop-Tart, avoiding the sight of my thinning hair. “Think of it as a new style,” I said brightly.
“Don’t make jokes, Mom. It’s not funny.”
“Had you rather I cry? I could cry for hours any minute.” I don’t know why I expected my son to like the prospect of having a bald-headed mamma when I hated the prospect of being one.
Olive Ann’s vanity never got in the way of a good story, and she wasn’t shy about telling this one. “There are said to be 100,000 follicles on the average human head,” she wrote. “Imagine the nuisance when they all start migrating from your scalp to your mouth or down your back, sticking like Velcro to clothing, upholstery, blankets, sheets, and pillowcases.” When she was completely bald, Olive Ann realized that covering her pate was a matter of necessity as well as esthetics—it was winter, and it was cold. She first tried a lace-trimmed white Colonial cap she’d bought in Williamsburg—“fetching,” she wrote, “but not as warm as the stretchy blue cut-off pajama leg I pulled out of the dustrag bag. This knit tube didn’t shift around, gave me a madonna look, as in Bible pictures, and prevented sinus headaches in cold weather if I slept with it pulled down over my eyes to the end of my nose.” Andy called it the Hooded Falcon Look.
Finally, she got herself a wig, although she never got over feeling “fakey” in it, as if she were pretending she wasn’t bald. Because she couldn’t go out to a store to try wigs on, friends and neighbors threw her a wig shower, hauling out their old bouffant hairpieces from the 1960s—over a dozen in all, from blazing orange to jet black to prim and proper iron gray. Olive Ann arranged them all in the bedroom until Andy complained that it looked like a headhunter’s trophy room. Six months after she had molted, Olive Ann began to sprout baby-fine black hair that gradually covered her head. In another three months, she wrote, “I had go-anywhere hair.” But there was nowhere to go. The doctor still wouldn’t let her out of the house.
Throughout that winter, Olive Ann’s goal had been to accept her illness, come what may. She took comfort in reminding herself that “any person in Atlanta, including me, could be dead on the highway next week.” But as the weather warmed and green shoots began to push through the earth in Andy’s garden, it occurred to her that perhaps she had been too accepting. “At first I was happily fatalistic,” she wrote. “I was so sure that whatever happened was all right that I forgot we’re here on earth to live. I accepted so totally, and was indeed content with my lot, that I forgot for a while how much life matters. Then all of a sudden, when spring came I was consumed with the joy of living. I accepted the illness, but I wanted to live, and every new day seemed like a treasure or like a passion that couldn’t be satiated.”
A few weeks before Christmas in 1977, Olive Ann’s doctor told her that the chemotherapy appeared to be working. After more than ten months of fever, her temperature was back to normal, and, although her white blood cell count was
still low, she felt well. In a letter to the Sunday school class that she and Andy attended throughout their marriage, she wrote, “You must be mighty tired of hearing how I am. It’s been hard for me to keep a sustained interest in it. So I will report, once and for all, that as far as day-to-day living goes, I am now a well person. I can wash windows, cook casseroles, and run the dishwasher and typewriter with the best of you.”
She said she loved to hear about art exhibits or shops that were so unsuccessful that nobody went—because then she could go. But the year at home had been a happy one, she said. “I’m convinced true fulfillment is living in God’s world one day at a time, savoring it, leaving today’s disappointments behind and borrowing no troubles from tomorrow. It’s done not only by accepting life, fever, and things that go bump in the night, but also by cultivating love and new and old friendships, and especially by finding a new work or project that makes it exciting just to get up in the morning.”
Working on the novel made it exciting for Olive Ann to get up in the morning. Day after day she sat at her kitchen table, surrounded by notes she had made on scraps of paper. She wrote on the old Royal typewriter on which she had composed her magazine features and her advice column. She edited and rewrote as painstakingly as ever, covering every typed page with dense scribbles in ink, always “cutting out the dull stuff.” She had taken her early readers’ advice to heart and by the middle of 1978 had several hundred typed pages that she felt good about. When Andy read them, he said, “Stop writing articles and finish the book.” It was all the encouragement she needed. She sent the chapters to an editor in New York, who turned them down, gently. Olive Ann took the rejection in stride. “I have to hope that in its finished form the book will seem salable to some other editor,” she responded. “Meanwhile I take encouragement from your appraisal that it is ‘splendidly written,’ for when I started I had no idea how to structure a novel. Even if it doesn’t sell, I will have learned a lot, and I’ve never had more fun.”