Before Sanna, the only letters I ever tried to keep were from Trulu Philpot. A week after our engagement was announced in the newspaper, I called it off. That great love affair ended at a house party in the mountains. We all went out to pick blackberries and were scattered along the roadside when a thunderstorm came up. I ran under a bridge to get out of the rain, and there was Trulu, kissing one of my fraternity brothers. Right then and there I demanded my ring back. It like to killed me.
There’s nobody quite as mad as an old flame when she gives you back your letters and your picture and demands hers, and you have to admit you never saved them. When Trulu asked me for her letters, I got some satisfaction out of telling her I’d been using them to get fires going in my fireplace. It wasn’t so, but I said it. Then for spite I passed them around the Sigma Chi house for the boys to read and laugh at. It was a mean thing to do, but I did it.
That happened a year before I met Sanna. I’d be excited, opening a letter from Trulu, but I don’t remember ever reading one twice. From the beginning I knew it was different, how I felt about Sanna, because I’d keep reading her words over and over till the next letter came.
They haven’t lost any of their magic, but not many are here in the collection. I know I tried to keep all Sanna’s letters, but I’m sure many got left behind in hotel rooms—lost from pure carelessness.
Now, holding Sanna’s packet of letters, I grieve for all those she wrote that aren’t here.
My second letter to Sanna was written after our first “date”—the evening service at church.
***
Wednesday, September 19, 1917
Dear Sanna,
I hope you don’t mind if I call you Sanna. I’ve known you a long time now—two whole weeks and three days.
This is circus day in Athens. Everybody from everywhere is in the big tent, including the people I’m supposed to work with, so I’m sitting at my desk with nothing to do but write up reports. It was like a light came on in here when I decided to write to you instead.
I certainly did enjoy that long-drawn-out sermon Sunday night, and our chat after we carried the others home.
I hope you don’t mind the way I filled up Papa’s car with friends. The more people, see, the closer I can sit to you. Too bad our number keeps diminishing. If this war keeps up and everybody but me gets to go, I’ll be looking after all you girls by myself. Call it a slacker’s paradise. I’m equal to it and I’d take pleasure in doing my duty. But I wouldn’t take pride in it.
This is some busy week. I’ve already been everywhere except Mitchellville and would have gone there if you could have gone with me.
Had a telegram yesterday from my Aunt Loma in New York (you met her at the watermelon cutting) saying she had tied the knot. Her new husband is rich and old and a Yankee, and most likely a Republican. Mama is real upset about it. Miss Alice Ann Boozer (have you met her?) says, “Anythang that’s outlandish, Loma has did it.” I think marrying a Yankee takes the cake when it comes to outlandish.
I like the way “Dear Sanna” looks on paper. I’ve been practicing the way it sounds. I never heard the name Sanna before. Were you named for a grandmother or somebody?
May I impose on you for a date Saturday night?
Please write that it’s OK. Sincerely,
Will T.
***
Sanna’s answer is the next letter in the stack. Reading my name on the envelope, I feel again the same rush of excitement I always did when an envelope came addressed in her handwriting. Now as then, I can picture her sitting down to write at the oak table in her upstairs room at Miss Love’s house. Her long black hair is braided for the night. The drapey silk shade on the lamp casts a soft glow on her dark skin, and her small lovely hand is graceful as she dips the pen into the ink bottle.
***
Dear Will T.,
Your letter was in the mail basket when I got in from school today. I’m pleased to say I have no plans for Saturday night.
No, I didn’t mind “the crowd.” They were all so nice to me. I’m a rather shy person, but they were easy to be with, and you saw to it that I and everybody else had a good time.
This was a hard day. I had to paddle two boys. With fifty-five fourth-graders I don’t have an easy job, but I am not discouraged. The main problem is the animosity between town children and mill children. We didn’t have that in Mitchellville, though poor farm children are looked down on there—people say they’re “from over the river.”
Your Uncle Sampson is trying very hard to be good, but he still talks instead of listening, and he distracts the class. He’s always plotting mischief. But he is bright and charming and at home we. are good friends. Little Precious Roach is a delight. I hope she doesn’t come to hate her name the way I used to hate mine.
You asked how I happen to be called Sanna.
My mother, named Flora, gave flower names to all six children ahead of me. The first three were grown and married before I was born—Blossom, Lily Maude, and Magnolia. Magnolia, called Maggie, raised me from the time I was ten years old. After them came Zinnia, Violet, and Joe Pye. (I’m sure you know the big dusky-pink Joe Pye weed that grows by the roadside. When Joe Pye was a boy, everybody called him “Weed” and he never minded. I’d have hated it.)
There was another boy, born before me. He died of pneumonia at six months so I never knew him. His name was Welcome Peter George Klein. Mrs. Herndon, our neighbor across the road, says that when he was born she asked Mama, “Miss Flora, how come you named him Welcome Peter George? You ain’t near run out of flowers yet. Not even boy flowers.” She says Mama told her, “One name sounds good as another when you get to be forty years old. I reckon I’m just tired of gardenin’. From here on out I’ll just reach up and pick me one out of the air.”
Mama was forty-three when I was born. She picked my name out of the air. It made me feel different in the family, and at school, too.
Little Sophronia came four years later, and Mama named her for a childhood friend at Brick Store Community in Newton County where she grew up. Poor Sophie was what the country people speak of as “illy formed.” Her head was too big, and she never sat up by herself or talked. I have only one memory of her, lying on a blue blanket near the hearth like a limp doll, watching the logs flicker. Sophie lived only eighteen months.
When Mama was forty-seven, she had Carrie, called Tattie, and made a pet out of her. Mrs. Herndon says Tattie was the first child Mama had time to spoil.
Ever since my papa died, when I was thirteen and I went to live with Sister Maggie and Brother Hen in Mitchellville, their house has seemed more like home than the farm does.
I have papers to grade so I will close by saying I look forward to Saturday night. You forgot to tell me what time.
Sincerely,
Sanna K.
***
11
AT THE time, all I really knew about Sister Maggie and her husband, Mr. Henry Jolley, was the gossip I’d heard from Mr. Charlie in Mitchellville. But Sanna had told me how much they had done for her. Mayor Jolley had sent her through Shorter, a Baptist college for girls in Rome, Georgia, from which she graduated in 1915 with a degree in mathematics. Then she’d lived with them and taught fourth grade for two years in Mitchellville before coming to P.C.
“But I got so restless,” she’d told me as we sat on Miss Love’s porch swing after church Sunday night. “Most of my friends were married and gone, and I wanted to make a new life for myself. One Sunday a missionary who was home from Africa talked at our church, hoping to recruit young people to the mission field, and I wanted to go. A college friend of mine had married a missionary and they went to China. Every time I had a letter from her, I’d say I’m going to be a missionary someday. Imagine, teaching heathen people about the love of Jesus Christ, and teaching them to read! All the time the man was talking about Africa, I felt God was calling me, telling me to go there. Even showing me the way. How to apply, where to get training.”
“
But you didn’t do it,” I said.
Sanna gave a helpless little shrug. “Sister Maggie wouldn’t hear of it. She kept saying, ‘You’ll just end up an old maid in the jungle. With you being so particular, I can’t imagine you living in a dirty hut in a village full of savages. They don’t have any dentists or doctors in Africa. You’ll get leprosy and jungle fever and I don’t know what all.’ Sister Maggie told me about a young missionary lady who got all her teeth pulled on a visit home so she wouldn’t have to worry about toothaches in Africa. Will, I’m ashamed to admit it, but after Sister Maggie said that, God’s call got weaker.”
I told Sanna I was glad she didn’t end up in the jungle, since I wouldn’t be there.
“I felt so guilty. Jesus said, ‘Go ye into all the world,’ but Sister Maggie kept saying, ‘Don’t go, don’t rot your life away after all the advantages we’ve given you.’ I couldn’t bring myself to go, with her so opposed. It seemed unappreciative. But I’ve always regretted it.”
I knew what it was like to have somebody pushing and pulling at you. “Grandpa Blakeslee always expected me to come into his store business,” I told her. “He had a fit when I said I wanted to be a farmer.”
“I can see why,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if she’d had a whiff of pigpen.
“Grandpa died when I was fifteen, so it never came to a head. The choice, I mean. But if Grandpa had lived and kept aggravatin’ me about the store, I’d have just got more hard-headed. I’m that much like him.”
She smiled. “Well, I’d hate to see you get old behind a mule, Will. This way you aren’t exactly wasting your degree, and you get paid every month.”
“I aim to farm someday.” I said it real firm. “Soon as the war’s over, Papa’s go’n buy the land and the home place from his daddy out in Banks County and give it to me. I’ll take you out there one day, Sanna, to see Grandpa Tweedy. He’s the world’s laziest man. He married a widow woman named Miz Jones, and that’s what he still calls her. Too lazy to change it. He used to sit on the porch all day swattin’ flies, and he had a pet hen to peck up the dead ones. Now the hen’s dead, so he just sits there.”
“I think you like him,” she said with a laugh.
“I hated him when I was a boy. But I don’t have to mind him now.”
Sanna hadn’t mentioned Hugh again. You don’t help somebody forget anybody if you keep bringing up the subject, so I didn’t, and pretty soon I forgot about him myself. But I did ask Miss Love one day if Sanna was getting much mail from Jefferson.
“No,” she said. “Sanna told me she wouldn’t be seeing the young man anymore. I never thought that would be the end of it, but I guess it was.”
Miss Love took the opportunity to tell me how nice Sanna was, how she kept her room neat as a pin and her clothes immaculate. “She reminds me of Mrs. Villy, a woman I knew in Baltimore. After every rain Mrs. Villy got out a stepladder and wiped off the outside of all her windows. I really like Sanna,” Miss Love continued. “She never complains about anything, which is more than I can say about the others, especially Issie. Issie says her mattress is too hard, it’s hot up there, she wishes she didn’t have to go next door for meals, and she fusses about Sanna hogging the bathroom. Sanna can spend an hour in the tub, it’s true, and she’s forever washing her hands. I didn’t expect girls to be spilling over into my bathroom when I rented those rooms, but I’ve told them they can if they have to.”
That was the closest Miss Love ever came to criticizing Sanna. Mostly she kept trying to sell her to me, as if she was selling a hat or a car at the store. Any time she wasn’t bragging about how neat Sanna kept her room, she was saying what beautiful taste she had in clothes. “Her Sister Maggie makes most of them, you know. Sanna says when she was learning to sew, if a seam was the least bit crooked, her sister made her take it out and stitch it again. Now she makes herself do that. I think it’s admirable, don’t you, Will?”
“It sounds tedious to me.”
“I mean, to try that hard, and be conscientious enough to take the time.”
One afternoon Miss Love said that when she got home from the store, Sanna was in the parlor playing the piano. “Sanna played very competently, but when she saw me, she quit.”
Later, when I asked Sanna to play me a piece, she wouldn’t. Her lovely eyes were cast down and she was picking at her thumb with a fingernail. “Will, I’ve never told—well, my piano teacher at Shorter asked me once if I’d heard much music as a child. I said no, and she said she thought not. She thought I played mechanically, said I worried so much about getting the right notes, I couldn’t play with feeling. I’ve never had much confidence since then—about my music. If anybody’s listening, I just can’t play.”
We were sitting together on Miss Love’s loveseat in the parlor.
“Me neither,” I said. “Not if somebody’s listenin’, or if they aren’t. I count it as one of my blessings, Sanna. I’m crazy about dance music, especially the way Miss Love plays it, but the most miserable six weeks of my life was that time Papa traded twenty pounds of cornmeal for a clarinet. Folks were always bringin’ in things like that to the store. One time a troupe of midget clowns got financially strapped here and talked him into swappin’ some tobacco and canned goods for a clown costume. He brought it home for Mary Toy to play dress-up in.”
“But what about the clarinet?”
I shifted a little on the loveseat. In her direction. “A man came to town sellin’ band instruments and givin’ lessons, and we had the clarinet, so Mama made me take them. Practicin’ was about as prickly and borin’ as pickin’ up sweetgum balls. I told my teacher I hated practicin’. He said, ‘Just play a little while and then walk around the house and then practice some more.’ The piece I learned on was ‘Abide With Me.’ It got so I couldn’t abide ‘Abide With Me,’ much less the clarinet. One day I traded it to Pink Predmore for a pair of skates. Mama fussed, but I think it was a relief to her and everybody.”
By now we were somehow sitting right close on the loveseat, and she was looking up at me, saying how much more fun life would be if she were more like me, taking things as they come and not being scared to fail.
“Oh, I don’t take kindly to failin’, as they say in the country.” I eased my arm across the back of the loveseat behind her, getting set to casually touch her shoulder. “But if one thing won’t work, I try another. It’s a challenge,” I said softly. Our eyes met. The raspberry lips parted slightly. I could feel her warm breath. My arm was around her. “Like for instance,” I whispered, “I’ve tried a dozen times to kiss you, and you...”
She pushed me away firmly and stood up. “It’s late, Will. I think you’d better go.”
I got up, stood looking down at her, moved a step closer. Slowly, slowly, I bent forward.
She moved a step back. “I thought you were different from other men, Will. Why do you keep...”
“I love you, Sanna. I love you.”
“Nobody can really be in love this fast.”
“I can. I am.”
“Then quit trying to force yourself on me. Please, Will.” She was very upset.
“I don’t want to force anything. I just...”
“Good night, Will.” She gave me a quivery little smile.
I followed her to the parlor door and watched as she ran quickly up the stairs.
12
EDITOR’S NOTE: During the fall of 1917, with Will constantly on the road, he and Sanna fell in love through their letters. In the first draft of the manuscript, Olive Ann Burns told much of the story through these letters, but in her revision she intended to replace some of them with scenes in which Sanna and Will learned about each other face to face.
In the following letters Will declares his love for Sanna and makes plans to accompany her to Thanksgiving dinner in Mitchellville.
***
October 31, 1917
My dear Sanna,
I bet you haven’t written me one line, but I’m going to Macon tomorrow just to
find out.
I left Athens Monday, got to Camilla at ten on Tuesday, built a barn, and came on to Vidalia. We had a food-conservation meeting tonight at which Yours Truly presided and told all he knew in two minutes. We’ll hold another tomorrow morning at the schoolhouse to try to get the kids to save waste paper and eat a little less of the foods needed by the Army and Navy for my boyhood pals and fraternity brothers in uniform.
I’ll leave here tomorrow afternoon for Macon to get my precious letter from you, be there thirty minutes, go on to Tifton, hold meetings, go on from there to Barnesville, hold meetings, then back to Athens and then P.C. Saturday evening, when I hope to find you without a date. That’s my program for the week and I’ll complete it or bust.
Vidalia is a quaint little south Georgia town, with the same old moon that rides above your room at Miss Love’s house. It’s a beautiful night, almost perfect, but not perfect because you’re not with me. I didn’t really know how much I could miss you until I came way off down here.
Sanna, I know you think I’m the biggest fool in the world, but I can’t help saying I love you. I knew it almost from the moment I saw Sampson’s watermelon explode on your shoulder. I’ve tried to hold back, Lord knows. I can tell it makes you uneasy. But it’s hard to have self-control when I love you so much. You’ll pardon me saying all this, won’t you, Sanna? Please at least consider me a true friend who’s always ready and willing to help you any way I can. Ask me to do anything that will be of help to you or give you pleasure. I will do it. You are the sweetest, truest, best person I have ever known. It’s after one o’clock, so be good and don’t forget—
Will T.
***
Sunday, November 18, 1917
Dear Sanna,
Little ole girl, I like to talk to you, I love to think of you and be with you. I don’t ask for all your time or thoughts. I just want a little of your love, though I’m not worthy of even your friendship.