Once in a while, you luck across a book where something as simple and unique as the narrator’s voice hooks you from the start. This was my experience with Josephine Carson’s Drives My Green Age. Twelve year old Chris, an orphan living with her Aunt Merle and Uncle Ed in Morning Springs, Kansas somewhere in the early years of the Depression, has an eye and a voice that reminded me of Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t really have the time this week to read something discretionary in the midst of all my assigned texts, but by page four, I knew I was going to have to surrender a good chunk of my day to this book. It was this description of Merle and Ed, sitting on their front porch on a late summer evening: “They spoke dryly and softly once or twice like the sleepless in their beds at night.”
Chris has been living with Merle and Ed for years. Her father died when she was five, “leaving nothing behind worth knowing.” Her mother, who Merle described as an aristocrat with long fingers and pale cheeks, had died in childbirth. It’s a story Merle often retells, but for Chris, “It had lost one fine layer after another in my slowly billowing life until it was now the kind of story that did not speak of my mother or of me, but only of its teller.”
Drives My Green Age is about a year in Chris’ life, a year bookended by the arrival and departure of Miss Evelyn Bryan, the new schoolteacher in Morning Springs. Miss Bryan is the most glamorous thing ever to happen to the town: well-dressed, well-travelled and well-off enough to drive her own shiny new Packard. “I think she’s going to be beautiful. You know, kind of dressed up and swanky,” Chris tells a friend. Aunt Merle pulls off a coup by winning Miss Bryan as a boarder before the woman even arrives in town, though it means relocating her own bedroom and forcing Uncle Ed — old, heavy, and in poor health — to face the nightly ordeal of climbing upstairs. Chris despairs of the consequences: “Do not kill me for a season of fame, for a Packard car parked in the front of the house, for a celebrated guest,” she imagines Ed thinking. But “Uncle Ed, I remember, was as silent as the ground.”
When Miss Bryan finally arrives and Chris gets to know her — “in small bearable parcels, a bit each day until my eyes grew bolder” — she discovers the new teacher has an almost animal-like disinterest in her pupils:
I said in my other voice:
Now I look into your eyes.
And I looked into her eyes. I had seen them before on harmless little snakes, those eyes which were faintly pushed from behind and which extended far out to the sides of her face. They were large and not more than half open, and they moved slothfully, staring most of the time. I had wanted them to be flower eyes or wasp eyes, but they were inactive and did not even bother to look away from me.
The only real interest Miss Bryan shows is, ironically, animal-like: specifically, in the nightly company of a handsome young farmer named Lou Frizzell. Chris spies Lou slipping through the window to Miss Bryan’s bedroom. While Miss Bryan continues to allow the local bank manager to pay court and take her to town celebrations, she welcomes Lou’s night-time visits on a regular basis. Chris’ idealistic sensibilities are shocked, particularly when Aunt Merle fails to take any notice of the scandal brewing in her own house. Drives My Green Age is a coming of age novel, a book about the complexities one begins to see in the passage from childhood to what Aunt Merle calls “addylescence,” but it’s satisfyingly subtle in the lessons that come from a year living in the same house with Miss Bryan. In a way, what Chris learns is to hold a bit of the same disinterest for herself. When, come summer, Miss Bryan takes off in her Packard, Chris thinks, “Who cares?”:
And nothing answered me. There was the last of her, skimming off the edge of my sight, off the edge of our world. She was gone, utterly gone.
“She is gone,” I said, aloud again.
Josephine Carson was thirty-eight when she published Drives My Green Age. Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she’d seen her family’s fortune lost in the Wall Street crash, seen her parents lose themselves in alcoholism, lived in New York and L.A., and held a dozen different jobs when her mother came to her and said, “I know you’ve been trying to write. I can’t afford to help you here, but if we went to Mexico for a year, I could support
you.” As Carson later recalled:
[I]t was wonderful! My mother had just come out of her alcoholism. We had been in Mexico almost a year when we got word that my father had died. We returned to the States. My father left me an income. That was when I was not only able to stop being employed for a while, but able to begin taking myself seriously as an independent adult and pursue life more on my own terms. I bought a house and that gave me a tremendous sense of being grown up. The income my father left me gave me time to write. I was in my early thirties by then.
Carson went on to write two more novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of oral histories, Silent voices: the Southern Negro woman today (1969). She also taught writing at Bennington, San Francisco State, and UC Berkeley. She died in 2002 at the age of 83.
It’s clear from Drives My Green Age that Carson had been observing and recording long before she started writing. Even though this was her first novel, it’s full of observations, stored up over many years, of how people talk and act and react. And how they sit on porches — like Uncle Ed, “huge and cool and wanting nothing in the world.”
Drives My Green Age is available on the Open Library: Link.