Iry Paret is a young man trying to go straight after serving time in Angola for manslaughter. The more he tries to avoid violence and trouble, the more he keeps walking into other people’s messes and having to deal with the consequences. He’s a country musician, and since his time in Angola he’s been trying to finish his only original song, “The Lost Get-Back Boogie, ” a song about “all those private, inviolate things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time.”
For Iry, the song won’t come. He remembers what an old Negro preacher said of his son who went to jail, “I tried to keep him out of the juke joint. But he just like a mockingbird. He know every song but his own.” For Iry to finish his song, he must learn to stay out of the juke joint and find his own voice.
When James Lee Burke was named Louisiana Writer of the Year at the 2002 Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, he accepted this honor at the historic old State Capitol, in the House Chambers, standing room only. Wearing his trademark western attire — dark suit and boots, holding his Stetson at his side — he gave the most gracious speech I’ve ever heard, brimming with heartfelt love for the state and its people. He has brought them to literary life in a Louisiana landscape that no writer before him has evoked in all its raw and violent beauty.
Afterwards, a young woman in the audience asked if he ever mentored writers. Jim’s answer should be printed and hung on the wall of every writer just starting out and of any writer who experiences doubt or block during his career. A writer, he said, makes a contract with himself that he’s going to write, and only he can honor that contract by writing every day, honing his craft, and becoming the best writer he can be. A writer mentors himself.
Writing novels is a lonely profession, and it’s possible that a writer’s success largely depends on how much joy he experiences as he plies his trade. Whenever Jim talks about writing, his excitement about the process is apparent. He once wrote me a card — he likes to type letters to his friends on postcards showing Montana’s Blackfoot and Bitterroot Valleys or the Clark Fork River Gorge — when he was writing the screenplay for A Morning for Flamingos. “I’m also trying to finish the new novel [A Stained White Radiance],” he wrote, “which I think is a whammeroo.”
This is a writer who is enjoying every surge of his creative power. He finds a way to be grateful and to keep his humility and his unfailing sense of humor with him even on the bad days: “There are worse things, I guess, like putting one’s head in the microwave for ten minutes each morning to get a jump-start on the day.”
Then there’s success. Some writers falter and freeze or become arrogant when sales rise and the movie people knock at the door. Jim knows how to keep his priorities straight. “I just concentrate on whatever I’m working on at the present and let the rest take care of itself. . What counts is the present writing project.”
For that young woman at the old State Capitol and anyone else who might need one, Jim Burke is a mentor by example. In his quiet and unassuming way, he goes into his room every day and writes from “cain’t-see to cain’t-see,” as his grandfather used to say, grateful that his work touches so many people, and grateful for the love and support of his strong family — his wife, Pearl, and their four children.
It seems to me that for Jim, The Lost Get-Back Boogie was finding his song. Its title reflects his love of music and the struggle that runs through all of Jim’s work — getting lost and getting back — the song that his characters dance to in every book. With the creation of Iry Paret, Jim recognized his unique power to write our vulnerabilities and flaws and show us how they can ennoble us if we so choose. But as Iry says, “when you try to catch all of something, particularly something very good, it must always elude you in part so that it retains its original mystery and magic.”
James Lee Burke continues to try to catch all of it, and thus we have the growing body of work of a great American novelist.
Christine Wiltz
New Orleans
May 2004
One
The captain was silhouetted on horseback like a piece of burnt iron against the sun. The brim of his straw hat was pulled low to shade his sun-darkened face, and he held the sawed-off double-barrel shotgun with the stock propped against his thigh to avoid touching the metal. We swung our axes into the roots of tree stumps, our backs glistening and brown and arched with vertebrae, while the chain saws whined into the felled trees and lopped them off into segments. Our Clorox-faded, green-and-white-pinstripe trousers were stained at the knees with sweat and the sandy dirt from the river bottom, and the insects that boiled out of the grass stuck to our skin and burrowed into the wet creases of our necks. No one spoke, not even to caution a man to step back from the swing of an ax or the roaring band of a McCulloch saw ripping in a white spray of splinters through a stump. The work was understood and accomplished with the smoothness and certitude and rhythm that come from years of learning that it will never have a variation. Each time we hooked the trace chains on a stump, slapped the reins across the mules’ flanks, and pulled it free in one snapping burst of roots and loam, we moved closer to the wide bend of the Mississippi and the line of willow trees and dappled shade along the bank.
“OK, water and piss it,” the captain said.
We dropped the axes, prizing bars, and shovels, and followed behind the switching tail of the captain’s horse down to the willows and the water can that sat in the tall grass with the dipper hung on the side by its ladle. The wide, brown expanse of the river shimmered flatly in the sun, and on the far bank, where the world of the free people began, white egrets were nesting in the sand. The Mississippi was almost a half mile across at that point, and there was a story among the Negro convicts that during the forties a one-legged trusty named Wooden Unc had whipped a mule into the river before the bell count on Camp H and had held on to his tail across the current to the other side. But the free people said Wooden Unc was a nigger’s myth; he was just a syphilitic old man who had had his leg amputated at the charity hospital at New Orleans and who later went blind on julep (a mixture of molasses, shelled corn, water, yeast, and lighter fluid that the Negroes would boil in a can on the radiator overnight) and fell into the river and drowned under the weight of the artificial leg given him by the state. And I believed the free people, because I never knew or heard of anyone who beat Angola.
We rolled cigarettes from our state issue of Bugler and Virginia Extra tobacco and wheat-straw papers, and those who had sent off for the dollar-fifty rolling machines sold by a mail-order house in Memphis took out their Prince Albert cans of neatly glued and clipped cigarettes that were as good as tailor-mades. There was still a mineral-streaked piece of ice floating in the water can, and we spilled the dipper over our mouths and chests and let the coldness of the water run down inside our trousers. The captain gave his horse to one of the Negroes to take into the shallows, and sat against a tree trunk with the bowl of his pipe cupped in his hand, which rested on the huge bulge of his abdomen below his cartridge belt. He wore no socks under his half-topped boots, and the area above his ankles was hairless and chafed a dead, shaling color.
He lived in a small frame cottage by the front gate with the other free people, and each twilight he returned home to a cancer-ridden, hard-shell Baptist wife from Mississippi who taught Bible lessons to the Sunday school class in the Block. In the time I was on his gang, I saw him kill one convict, a half-wit Negro kid who had been sent up from the mental hospital at Mandeville. We were breaking a field down by the Red Hat House, and the boy dropped the plow loops off his wrists and began to walk across the rows toward the river. The captain shouted at him twice from the saddle, then raised forward on the pommel, aimed, and let off the first barrel. The boy’s shirt jumped at the shoulder, as though the breeze had caught it, and he kept walking across the rows with his unlaced boots flopping on his feet like galoshes. The captain held the stock tight into his shoulder and fired again, and the boy tripped forward across the rows with a single jet of scarlet bursting out just below his kinky, uncut hairline.