A cottage with a wow factor

By Deborah Salomon   •   Photographs by John Gessner

Tom and Katrina Denza are book people. “I even like the smell of books,” Katrina admits. They read paper-and-ink books — thousands of them. Their historic district Southern Pines cottage is designed around his collection of classics, hers of contemporary fiction. Bookshelves are everywhere, mounted over doorways and under ceilings. Books in the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom. Katrina can locate every title. The converted attic holds their son’s childhood books. Opposite the front door, a wall of book cubbies lit by an undulating metal lighting fixture with purple globes makes the correct first impression.

“I moved to Southern Pines because of The Country Bookshop,” Katrina, a true bibliophile, confesses.

As for the house, you can’t judge this book by its cover. The sandy-tan exterior, unremarkable except for a long balcony, melts behind a greenery screen, as does the adjacent lot Tom purchased for a garden, pond and firepot. But once inside . . . wow.

First came the Boyds, then Weymouth, then resort hotels, then winter retreats for wealthy (or sickly) urbanites, then — east of the tracks but downhill from the estates — cottages built for support staff, shopkeepers, professionals, and the less affluent who followed seeking a temperate climate with amenities.

The hotels burned down, mansions changed hands, cottages fell into disrepair. When the tide turned, Weymouth was restored as a cultural center; prominent addresses were renovated; and now, finally, many of the modest cottages have been taken apart and reassembled as small gems.

Still, the Denzas’, built in 1927, stands out in a neighborhood of surprises, first by being inconspicuous. Curb appeal wasn’t a priority. Even the porches and decks accessed by sliding glass doors enhance the interior. “I feel like I’m in a treehouse,” Katrina says.

Obviously, well-developed personalities created this repository of literature, architecture and art.

Both Tom and Katrina gravitated south from states for which nearby streets were named: she from Vermont, he from Connecticut.

Katrina: “The South is so rich with literature. I can feel it in the ground.” Here, she started writing again — a collection of stories with Europe as background and a novel set in Vermont and Carolina. Her activism includes participating in (and reporting on) the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017. A friend told her about the Writers in Residence program at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. “There is such creative energy in that house.” She now manages the program as well as serving on the board of directors.

Tom: “I came for the heat and Faulkner — except for that I should have gone farther south.” (William Faulkner was born and raised in Mississippi.) Tom’s travels to Spain made him long for sunshine, warmth and friendly faces. With experience in home renovation gained as a young teen from an 80-year-old Irishman who needed a helper, Tom established a flooring business. “I was young and single.”

Tom bought the cottage in 1986 — a messy, neglected warren of rooms, no air-conditioning — and moved in with the intention of gutting and renovating it himself. This he did, gradually, replacing the roof, even excavating a basement to provide the solidity he remembered from the brick home where he grew up. While tearing down walls he found tiny glass ampoules; perhaps tuberculosis patients who came for the cleansing air once lived there.

The two New Englanders met, married, moved to Midland Road and had a baby while the renovation progressed.

He aimed for something simple, contemporary, vaguely Japanese. “It sounds ridiculous, but there was no conflict,” he says, noting that he and Katrina both admire Frank Lloyd Wright. Katrina selected earth tones. “I have a sense of it, color in small doses, a touch of orange against turquoise, no primaries or pastels.” Tom cooks, therefore planned the kitchen. Katrina chose a hallway overlooking the balcony for her desk bathed in natural light. Stairs to the former attic were tucked out of sight, not to break the expanse.

Tom insisted on fine details like solid wood paneled doors with glass knobs and high-tech light switches.

The entranceway, a separate room, previews Tom’s artistry: Brazilian cherry floorboards form a geometric pattern; a shoe cabinet (Asian influence) came from a train station; Lucite chairs are from Italy; and a massive jug is from France.

There are no rugs to detract from the assortment of woods and styles Tom selected for flooring.

Although it meant structural reinforcement, he decided to move the front door and open the main floor from the dining room at one end to the living room at the other with the kitchen and section of book cubbies in between, creating an unbroken expanse of about 50 feet, 10 feet shorter than a bowling lane. This architectural trompe l’oeil makes a house with smallish rooms appear vast.

Tom and Katrina subscribe to the wabi-sabi Japanese philosophy celebrating the well-used and slightly imperfect. Angled walls and ceilings add interest, character. Scale mattered; a dining room table with Scandinavian lines was custom made of cherry wood to fit the space and seat six, no more. The table stands beside a wall of textured plaster, painted a deep nameless color. Living room furnishings are arranged the old-fashioned way, a semicircle facing the fireplace, for sitting and reading or conversation. No sound system, just a lone, medium-sized TV mounted well below eye level.

Katrina would like to live without it. “We don’t have cable, just Netflix for watching movies.”

Glass doors rimmed in black connect the master bedroom, painted a retro pale avocado, to an arrangement of planters on the deck. The Japanese tone continues with a platform bed and a bathroom in the same shade of green with startling black lacquer accents. Upstairs, Tom planned to finish the attic with a sleeping porch but decided a bedroom, also with platform bed, would be more practical, along with a play space for kids. The upstairs interior bathroom has a large paned window looking out onto the staircase, opposite a real window that brings in natural light.

“I saved an original window and thought it would work there,” Tom says.

Chef Tom’s kitchen looks more cooked-in than picture-book. No granite, no marble, no gadgets. The original tin ceiling has been treated to resemble oxidized copper, a greenish shade called verdigris. A real copper range hood complements the overhead metal.

Tin squares are echoed by square countertop tiles. On them stands Tom’s prize, an Electra brass coffee press made in Italy that resembles an appliance from Leonardo DaVinci’s kitchen notebook. Tom roasts coffee beans outside, puts them through a countertop grinder and transfers coffee to the press to extract a superior brew, one cup at a time. Imagine the aroma.

“I’m very particular,” Tom says of his cooking utensils. “I watched and learned from Chef Warren and Mark Elliott.” First lesson: The right pan and fresh herbs from his garden make a difference. Travels through France don’t hurt.

On a par with books, art beats in the heart of this home. Katrina displays works by local artists Jessie Mackay, Denise Baker, David Hewson and others. Larger paintings dominating entire walls are, for the most part, abstracts as in Carol Bechtel, who describes her work as “about how things go together or touch or separate . . . making order from chaos and calmness from tensions.”

How the Denzas acquire art speaks to their relationship. Every year, on their wedding anniversary, they visit a gallery. Each chooses a painting without consulting the other. Amazing, how many times they both chose the same one, Katrina says.

For all its history, personality and artistry, Tom describes the Denza house as simple. Simple for them means a good book, a perfect cup of coffee, intelligent art, frogs in the pond and friends within walking distance — a harmony between people and their environment. Other words, from another book, in another language call it feng shui.  PS

A lost first edition, a vanished diary — two of Weymouth’s greatest mysteries endure

By Stephen E. Smith

On a warm June evening in 1935,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, celebrated author of The Great Gatsby, was feted by James and Katharine Boyd at their home in Southern Pines. Fitzgerald was in his element at intimate literary gatherings where he was the center of attention and as usual, he was intoxicated and pontificating, going on at length about the weaknesses he’d detected in his host’s latest novel, Roll River. He voiced his criticisms in front of Struthers Burt and his teenage son Nathaniel, the Boyds’ close friends and longtime neighbors, and James and Katharine were no doubt relieved when their over-served guest staggered off to bed and the uncomfortable episode receded into the past.

Except, of course, that the past is forever in the present.

What survives of that night’s unpleasantness are bits and pieces of mean-spirited sarcasm and post-party finger pointing referenced obliquely in an apologetic thank-you note from Fitzgerald and responded to in kind by a usually mild-mannered James Boyd. The evening also produced two genuine mysteries — a missing first edition of Fitzgerald’s Taps at Reveille inscribed to the Boyds; and a diary, also lost, kept by Katharine Boyd, that might offer insights into the state of mind of a talented but troubled writer.

Legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins had gently encouraged the Boyd-Fitzgerald friendship as a character-building exercise. He wasn’t anxious on Boyd’s account — James was always a solid citizen — but he was worried about Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age bad boy, who was, at that moment in his downwardly spiraling career, heavily in debt and beginning to suffer through what he would later describe as a “crackup.” His finances were being depleted by his lavish lifestyle, his wife Zelda’s confinement in the Sheppard-Pratt Psychiatric Hospital in Baltimore, and his daughter’s tuition at Bryn Mawr School. The April 1934 publication of his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, brought the author only tepid reviews and little in the way of royalties, and the March 1935 reception for Taps at Reveille, his fourth and final book of stories, was even more dismal. Changing literary tastes occasioned by the Great Depression had made it difficult for Fitzgerald to place short stories, always his chief source of income, in popular magazines, and his binge drinking only intensified his emotional woes. New Yorker writer James Thurber described Fitzgerald during this period as “witty, forlorn, pathetic, romantic, worried, hopeful and despondent . . . .”

The discussion that June night focused on the various mechanisms of the historical novel, and as the hour grew late and the alcohol flowed, Fitzgerald’s intoxication apparently overawed his fragile sense of decorum. Much of what we know about his conduct can be inferred from the self-serving thank-you note he wrote to the Boyds from Baltimore’s Hotel Stafford: “In better form I might have been a better guest but you couldn’t have been better hosts even at a moment when anything that wasn’t absolutely — that wasn’t near perfection made me want to throw a brick at it. One sometimes needs tolerance at a moment when he has least himself.”

But Fitzgerald’s thank you isn’t merely a plea for forgiveness; he uses the opportunity to reiterate his criticism of Boyd’s novel: “ . . . remember all the things I did like about Roll on Sweet Missoula [a sarcastic play on the title of Boyd’s Roll River] (I forget the exact name) and my theoretical objections to certain ideas of yours as to what in the novel should drive it. In spite of everything those are dangerous subjects as we grow older, no matter what we say, unless discussion is remote from anything of ours, like discussing someone else’s children in any terms except polite compliments . . . .” Fitzgerald, drunk or sober, couldn’t pass up an opportunity to further exacerbate the unfortunate encounter.

Although Boyd was usually polite to a fault, he didn’t endure Fitzgerald’s continued effrontery without responding in kind. In a letter dated June 26, Boyd wrote: “The way a writer handles other people’s ideas on writing is part of his character and his qualification as a writer. If they do him harm, that’s a deficiency in him . . . So don’t worry about our talk. I know my meat when I see it, and my poison too . . . If you have any qualms after this I’ll make my next, to relieve your mind, a novel of defiance: ‘Run on, Scott Fifty-Rivers,’ or, if that is too obscure a reference, simply ‘F— Scott Fitzgerald.’”

What’s missing from the June gathering is the inscription Fitzgerald scrawled in a copy of Taps at Reveille that passed between guest and hosts that evening. On July 22, Boyd mentions the book in a letter to Fitzgerald: “I read ‘Babylon Revisited’ [a story included in Taps at Reveille] again before I left. In feeling, rendering, and design it’s one of the completely satisfying jobs . . . Some of the lesser things have got no business in there with it at all. I know even the best of the boys can’t do a Hamlet every time out of the box, but in Taps at Reveille there’s too wide a spread to be inside the same covers.”

Although Fitzgerald had relished the chance to be judgmental, he wasn’t inclined to accept criticism from a fellow writer, no matter how diplomatically couched. After Boyd’s July 22 letter, Fitzgerald fell uncharacteristically silent, and the correspondence ceased altogether after two letters from Boyd went unanswered. On Nov. 21, Boyd wrote to Perkins: “Have never heard from Scott since writing him that some of his short stories in his last collection were not good enough to stand up against the best of them.”

Literary squabbles are frequent and frivolous, but Fitzgerald’s tiffs endure. He was our first celebrity writer, and his The Great Gatsby is a durable assessment of the dark side of the American Dream, as relevant now as it was when first published. His writing, firmly established in our literary canon, has shaded the thinking of generations of college students. Who knows what insights the missing inscription might offer scholars?

So where is the Boyds’ copy of Taps at Reveille? It’s safe to assume that the inscribed first edition — worth $75,000 or more in today’s provenance-driven collectors’ market — was, for at least a few years, safely stashed in one of the Boyds’ three in-house libraries, which were, over time, scattered to the winds. Fortunately, it’s possible to trace the dispersal of the Boyd books that have survived, and during the last 20 years, Weymouth librarian-archivist Dotty Starling has done yeoman’s service in reassembling the collections.

“James Boyd had three libraries in the house,” says Starling. “The books he used in his writing — dictionaries, reference works, and books by his favorite authors — were kept in his study, the room which now serves as the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. The novels he’d written and books related to his research were kept in the room designated as ‘the library,’ located on the first floor. Other books were shelved in the living room, which we now call the great room.”

Scattering books haphazardly about one’s home is a less-than-ideal organizational system, but Boyd had his own meticulous method for storing and locating books. “Each book had a printed label affixed to the inside cover designating the room, shelf and position of the book,” says Starling. “A book housed in the downstairs library would be labeled L-A-4, meaning library, shelf A, position four. A book assigned to a shelf in the living room might be labeled LR-A-3, designating the exact position Boyd assigned it. A book shelved in Boyd’s study could be labeled S-A-1 and so forth. As books have been returned to Weymouth, I’ve been able to determine the exact position they occupied when Boyd owned them. We hope that people in the community who come across books with the Boyd nameplate will return them to us so that we can continue to reassemble the collections.”

Not long after James Boyd’s death in 1944, Katharine gifted the Princeton University Library 15 archival boxes containing manuscripts and galleys of her late husband’s novels — Drums, Long Hunt, Bitter Creek and Roll River — and miscellaneous correspondence, articles, short stories and verse. The books and manuscripts remain the property of Princeton University, Boyd’s alma mater. Taps at Reveille is not listed as part of Princeton’s Boyd collection.

In the late 1940s, Katharine funded an addition to the Southern Pines Library, located next to the post office on Broad Street. The room was modeled on the library at the Boyd house, complete with a reproduction fireplace and mantel, and the shelves were stocked with books from James Boyd’s collection, including many rare and valuable books — 20 volumes of Jefferson’s writings, 10 volumes of Thackeray, and a collection of Washington Irving’s works — but no Taps at Reveille.

“Everyone had access to the Boyd collection and could use the books,” says Lynn Thompson, the library’s current director. “The catalog was simply cards stacked in a shoebox. It wasn’t long before valuable books began to disappear.” When the Southern Pines Library moved from Broad Street to its present location on West Connecticut, the city, who had legal ownership of the Boyd Room books and accoutrements, lent the materials to the Weymouth Center. Before the transfer, an appraisal of the Boyd Room volumes was undertaken by book dealer Perry Payne, but there’s no mention of Taps at Reveille in the inventory.

The largest dispersal of Boyd books occurred when Sandhills Community College opened in 1965. Teresa Wood, an early employee of the college, recalls Mrs. Boyd’s generosity. “Our offices were located above what’s now the Ice Cream Parlor on the corner of Broad and New Hampshire in downtown Southern Pines. In order to open for classes, we needed a library, and Mrs. Boyd donated hundreds of books. We had shelves built in the building behind the Ice Cream Parlor — it’s some kind of restaurant now — and when classes started in 1966 we had a library for student use.”

Wood doesn’t recall receiving a copy of Taps at Reveille, but if the book were among those donated, it would likely have remained in the college collection. In 1967, the college moved to its present location on Airport Road, and the Boyd books, each fitted with a nameplate acknowledging the gift, were shelved in the new library on the first floor of Meyer Hall. “When we moved to the new campus,” Wood says, “Mrs. Boyd donated even more books. We went through the donation and discovered her diary, which we immediately returned along with any other materials we thought were personal.”

The Boyd volumes remained in Meyer Hall until the Katharine Boyd Library opened, when a large number of the books were discarded as outdated. Miraculously, many of those volumes found their way back to the Weymouth Center, where Dotty Starling returned them, whenever possible, to their original positions on the shelves.

Did Taps at Reveille become lost in the shuffle?

The mystery was temporarily solved in 1993 when Faye Dasen joined The Pilot as Editor Sam Ragan’s assistant. “Mr. Ragan asked me to help organize his office,” Dasen recalls, “and I worked at straightening things up in my spare time. I was sorting through the bookshelves when I happened upon a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I opened the cover and there was a five- or six-sentence inscription signed by the author. When I asked Mr. Ragan about the book, he said, ‘Oh, that belongs to Weymouth. I have to take it up there next time I go.’ As far as I know, the book had been on the shelf since the Boyds owned The Pilot.”

James Boyd had purchased The Pilot in 1941. After his death in 1944, Katharine took over management duties until she sold the business to Sam Ragan, former editor of the News and Observer, in 1969. It’s possible that Taps at Reveille had been shelved in the publisher’s office by one of the Boyds and that it had remained there for more than 30 years. When the paper was purchased by Ragan, the book was included as part of the transaction. Since Sam Ragan was the driving force behind the establishment of the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, he would have returned Taps at Reveille to Weymouth, except that he fell ill and died in 1996. When the family sold off the estate, Ragan’s library was purchased by a rare book dealer. Taps at Reveille went with the collection.

In 2008, a Weymouth board member queried the book dealer in writing about the status of the Boyds’ copy of Taps at Reveille. When a response was not forthcoming, a phone inquiry was made, and an assistant to the dealer stated that the book had been donated to a college library, although “he [the dealer] can’t remember which college.” In all probability, the Boyds’ copy of Taps at Reveille exists today in a safe deposit box or on a collector’s bookshelf or in a rare book room at an unidentified college. It’s hoped that the volume, so much a part of the Boyd history, will eventually find its way back to the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

As for Mrs. Boyd’s diary, its disposition is less definite. Katharine Boyd died in 1974, and members of the family claimed what furniture, books and papers they wished to retain. The remaining contents of the house were auctioned off by Sandhills Community College. When Jim Boyd, James and Katharine’s eldest son, moved back to Southern Pines in the late ’90s, the trailer containing his possessions collided with an abutment on the interstate and its contents burned, destroying many of his mother’s personal papers. The diary may have been among the papers that were lost. Since the return of the diary to Katharine in the early ’70s, no one has come forward with information as to its whereabouts.

Time might have soothed Fitzgerald’s bruised ego, but five years after his visit with the Boyds, he died in Hollywood at the age of 44. His unfinished manuscript of The Last Tycoon was compiled and edited by critic Edmund Wilson, and Perkins mailed a copy of the novel to Boyd, who responded with predictable grace and candor: “I can’t feel that the book would have been a triumph for him, but the notes are fascinating. As so often with . . . him, the means by which he strove to arrive were more significant than the destination. The exception, of course, is Gatsby, which I just re-read before my operation. I believe it’s the best piece of writing we have produced between the wars.”  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

By Nan Graham

We scrambled flat on our stomachs, wrestling the bulky cardboard box from under the looming four-poster bed. My cousin Anne and I are not teenagers . . . we’re not even middle-aged . . . so it was a grim spectacle of struggling grayheads, who risked never getting vertical again, to do this.

The musty papers and letters of one of the most colorful of our relatives, our great-aunt, Martha Strudwick Young, a diminutive professional writer, born the year after the War Between the States began, contained some surprising new information. Cousin Anne had never looked in the boxes since her mother’s death in 1970, some 40-plus years ago. We were only a few miles from Martha Young’s birthplace in Hale County, Alabama, at a place called The Pillbox a few miles out from Greensboro, Alabama, and my visit had prompted questions about the writer’s childhood. We were well into the second round of iced tea when Anne remembered the flat coat box stored beneath the bed.

We knew from family stories that Martha’s early years were spent riding in the carriage with her father, Dr. Elisha Young, through the Hale County countryside as he made his rounds and tended to his patients. A surgeon in the Confederate Army stationed at Fort Morgan in Mobile — and imprisoned in New Orleans after the fall of Mobile — Dr. Young returned to his little family after the war to practice medicine in Greensboro, Alabama. A born storyteller, the doctor entertained the little girl with stories of making quilts with his black nurse as a young boy, eyewitness accounts of battles on Mobile Bay, and starving troops in the Alabama countryside as the father and daughter roamed the county in his buggy on house calls. He told of performing the first ever successful cutting and suturing of a carotid artery on a man stabbed and brought to his kitchen table in the middle of the night. The patient survived the procedure in the makeshift operating room. Dr. Young said that early quilt-making, common among young Southern boys in the 1860s in the county, gave him his surgical skills.

Martha had a quick ear for the rich dialect of the black folks at home and in the rural countryside. She was spellbound with their musical language and loved their tales of witches, wicked spells and ha’nts, and stories of talking birds. She absorbed the speech, its cadence and energy, of the black storytellers. Martha took mental notes on the actual calls and songs of birds of her native Hale County along the wooded roads. She was a good listener and had an excellent ear for mimicry.

She began to write and craft the oral tales told to her by blacks in her household and those she knew in the small community of Greensboro. She listened to the musical calls from the men and women who peddled fresh butterbeans and field peas ( “Fe-ull Peeas. Yas. Freee-sh Pleeeez . . .”) from carts on the dusty streets of her neighborhood. She listened to the ghost stories of the cook Chloe in the family kitchen house and to the animal stories of Isham, who helped with the horses and cows. She wove the tales into lyrical and haunting stories about sparrows’ chatty conversations with crows and baby robins squabbling among themselves. And useful warnings that picking peaches from the tree after sundown would kill the tree. Martha added her own keen observations of nature in Greensboro and the countryside around it, and incorporated the sounds of the birds and creatures as an integral part of her stories.

Being the oldest child of the eight siblings (of whom only five survived), Martha as a young adult in her 20s inherited the role of caretaker of the family at her mother’s early death in 1887. Her physician father could never have managed without his eldest daughter’s capable and no-nonsense discipline of her younger, motherless brothers and sisters. Martha practiced her bird calls and storytelling skills on the younger children, who were enthralled at their big sister’s tales of the talking buzzards, singing bats and swamp witches. Amazingly, she continued her writing despite being mistress of a large household and surrogate mother to a brood of children ages 7 into pre-teen.

And after raising her younger brothers and sisters, Martha, or Tut (rhymes with foot), as the family called her, decided that the single life was the life for her. As she always replied to inquiries about her marital state: “No, I am not married. I shall stay . . . forever Young!” (Her early sibling-rearing may explain the decision of the many spinsters out there, especially around the turn of the century.) Granddaughter of an Alabama anti-Secessionist, she had a college degree and was encouraged in her writing by her family. She started her career under the pseudonym Eli Shepperd, since young women from the South were not usually accepted in the male-dominated literary scene.

She began submitting her dialect bird stories to the New Orleans Times-Democrat, which first published her work in 1884, a Christmas story titled “A Nurse’s Tale.” Other Southern newspapers published the prolific writer’s stories.

The creator of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, Joel Chandler Harris, gave high praise to the dialect writer, according to one newspaper account and even collaborated with Martha on one of his Uncle Remus collections. Joel Chandler Harris himself wrote: “Her dialect verse . . . is the best written since Irwin Russell died. Some of it is incomparably the best ever written.”

Her first book, with the catchy title Plantation Songs for My Lady’s Banjo and Other Negro Lyrics and Monologues, was published in 1901, still under the pseudonym Eli Shepperd. The originator of Brer Rabbit contacted the writer under that name. Joel Chandler Harris invited “Mr. Shepperd” to join him at a small hunting lodge at his Georgia home, Eagle’s Nest, to work on a collection of folk stories. It was a secluded spot and Harris felt it would be a productive collaboration. Naturally, Martha revealed her identity as a lady and responded that she hardly thought that Mrs. Harris would approve the plan. The two writers did eventually collaborate, but not in the secluded setting first suggested to Eli Shepperd!

More books followed Plantation Songs: Plantation Bird Legends (1902), Bessie Bell (1903) (later re-released as Somebody’s Little Girl in 1910), When We Were Wee (1912), Behind the Dark Pines (1912), Two Little Southern Sisters (1919), and Minute Dramas: Kodak in the Quarters (1921). Another Martha Young book, Fifty Folklore Fables, was reviewed and mentioned in publicity releases but is unable to be located. Plantation Bird Legends and Behind the Dark Pines are both illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings by J.M. Conde, the artist used by Joel Chandler Harris. Besides her eight published books, numerous articles and stories by Martha appeared in such magazines as Woman’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan and Christian Advocate. Cosmopolitan, begun in 1886, was a family magazine at the time (a far cry — not even in shouting distance — from the modern Cosmopolitan) and featured such established writers as Jack London, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser and later H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. (In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, revamped the family magazine of Martha’s day, zeroing in on women’s issues, becoming the familiar magazine we know today as the sexy Cosmopolitan.)

Martha Young reached her literary peak in the first decade of the 20^th century. Her whimsical bird stories in African-American dialect were a runaway hit. Her books were a smash across the country, North and South. The Pittsburgh Gazette was among those who raved about her Plantation Bird Legends: “What the Grimm Brothers did, taking from the lips of unlettered peasants the folktales of the foretimes and setting them down for the delight of the after age, has now been done by Miss Young.” Martha’s other animal tales included such titles as “Why Brer Possum’s Tail Is Bare,” “Mr. Bluebird’s Debt,” and “Why Mr. Frog Is Still a Batchelor.”

Martha even performed live at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1906, reading stories and poetry in dialect from her published books and actually performing bird calls and trills to the audience’s amazement and delight. Other “musical numbers by prominent artists,” not mentioned by name, were also to appear on the evening program. She became a popular speaker in the East and almost all reviews of her events laud her delivery and lively presentations with comments about her distinctive voice.

OK. It WAS a different era, but I like to think Martha was an early Susan Boyle — without the bad hair — an unlikely candidate for public success having been raised in the tiny town of Greensboro, Alabama. Tickets for the performance were $1, the equivalent of about $27 in today’s currency, when the 1906 worker’s wage was about $300 per year and the average hourly wage 22 cents an hour.

Her Waldorf-Astoria poster shows the studio photograph of the petite 28-year-old Martha in an elegant pose. Reality was that in 1906, Miss Young was well into her 42nd year and a bit more stout (as they say in the South) than the slender young woman pictured.

Tut even had an offer to perform in vaudeville in New York, but politely demurred. (I am certain her lips were pursed when she did.)

She was quite prolific: plays, novels, stories for education journals and poetry, some even feminist. The poem “Uncle Isham” written under her pen name is narrated by an African-American to suffragettes who laughingly says ladies, don’t bother. He complains that he got the vote, but it didn’t change a thing . . . so never mind!

Hollywood called early on. One of her books, Somebody’s Little Girl, caught a Hollywood mogul’s eye. His office called the author Martha Young. As it turned out, it was not her story they were interested in, it was the title. Could they purchase the title alone, they asked. Martha was mortified at the idea. “Of course not,” she replied. “I would just as well sever my child’s head from its body as sell my title from its story.” (It does make you think of Gloria Swanson’s has-been character in Sunset Boulevard when she thinks Cecil B. DeMille wants her for a movie comeback, when he actually only wants to borrow her vintage 1929 Isotta-Fraschini touring car.) Hollywood went elsewhere for a title, and unfortunately, we do not know which movie resulted after these failed negotiations with Martha.

One family story centered around Martha’s ferocious love of coffee and her prodigious consumption of the drink. She downed a dozen or more cups a day, but one Lent she decided to deny herself her most precious beverage. She announced what she was giving up for Lent with an unseemly pride to family, friends and neighbors: No coffee for 40 days and 40 nights.

About a week into her extreme Lenten abstinence, her brother came to see her. The door was open; he called . . . no answer. He wandered through the empty house until he heard a tiny voice from the closet. “In here, Elisha.”

He opened the door and saw his sister sitting on a straight chair in the darkened closet, drinking a cup of coffee.

“Tut,” he chastised, “Don’t you know the Lord can see you, even in this closet?”

“Of course I do,” she said, taking another sip. “But the neighbors can’t.”

Her Presbyterian brother closed the closet door and left her to her secret sin.

Tut became the family eccentric, a standout in a host of relatives competing for the title. Martha Young never voted in any election, even after women won the right to vote. She had been born the year Alabama seceded from the Union. Alabama came back after Appomattox . . . Martha never did. She was of the notion that she was not a citizen of the United States and accordingly, was not an eligible voter.

Her tiny feet were a particular source of pride. And with reason. In Martha’s day, Birmingham was where you shopped when you wanted something grand. It was Alabama’s answer to Paris. Passing the city’s finest shoe store, Tut stopped to read the display sign:

TRY ON CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER

You Might Be the Lucky Winner of a Pair of Shoes of Your Choice!

Tut strolled into the shop and sat while the salesman slipped the crystal slipper on her foot with ease. A perfect fit! She selecting the most cunning — and expensive — shoes on display. With shopping bag in hand, she waltzed out to meet her family for the triumphal return to Greensboro. Needless to say, she and her feet were the envy of every female in town. In all her photographs from that day forward, she managed to display her Cinderella foot peeking out from her floor-length dress.

Also vain about her small hands, she always posed them prominently in every picture. At one dinner party, she took a stroll in the garden at her host’s home at dusk. When she reached to touch a flower, she was bitten by a small garden snake. She rushed to the house, where she dropped to the sofa, crying, “My hand! My beautiful little hand. Ohhhh!” She held her hand aloft for inspection. As the guests gathered round, Martha put on a performance her fellow guests never forgot. Sarah Bernhardt would have been proud. Talk about how to sabotage a party. Tut’s uber-vanity quickly became part of the family history.

Local lore in Greensboro claims that Margaret Mitchell came calling on Tut in the 1930s. She was looking for advice on African-American speech patterns and dialect on a certain book she was writing. There is no evidence of this research visit by the author of Gone with the Wind except three local Greensboro sources who have heard the story handed down.

In 2006, a call came from Hollywood asking if I had or knew of any recordings of Martha Young’s voice. Production was beginning on a new film about Zelda Fitzgerald. They had heard of Martha Young’s work and were anxious to hear her Deep South accent for resource material for the film. Alas, although there is mention of her recordings in several writings about her, none could be tracked down.

The aging author did not mellow with age. One of my favorite stories about Tut was about her later years, when she developed diabetes in her old age and would not go to the doctor for follow-up visits.

“But Martha,” her friends insisted, “You need to get your blood checked.”

“I certainly do not,” she replied, drawing herself up imperiously. “I can assure you, I have the very best blood in Alabama.”

As the century rolled on and literary styles changed, Martha turned from writing lively animal stories to religious poetry and full-length plays as her next endeavors. It was an unfortunate career move. Martha’s religious poems are excruciatingly bad, but despite that fact, they continued to appear in magazines and newspapers. A few of these poetic gems’ titles: “Buddha’s Lilies” (Tut was an avid Episcopalian) and “Sermon on the Mule,” “Blessings of the Magnolia,” and “Sermon Against Bad Language.” The tedious plays (my personal favorite was Dice of Death) and her novels were never published, thank God, and now languish in a library’s special collection archives.

In the late 1930s, Walt Disney contacted Martha’s agent, according to correspondence found under that bed. The Disney studio was interested in animating her bird characters and stories. The elderly author had almost stopped all writing by now, but her agent’s letters were wildly optimistic. Disney, flush with the huge success of the 1937 release of Snow White, was working with Martha’s bird stories and had come up with some ideas on using them in a Disney full-length animated feature film.

“Oh no,” wrote Martha after reading one Disney adaptation, “Sis Sparrow would never say such a thing! No, no, Brer Crow could not possible perform such a dance . . . it’s all wrong. Wrong!” The imperious author was unyielding to the siren song of Hollywood.

Negotiations broke down after several years, the letters reveal. The headstrong Miss Martha Young proved a tough cookie. Five years later, Disney came out with Song of the South, the mix of animation and real film characters. Aunt Tut died in 1941 and the correspondence recording the futile negotiation with Walt Disney was stashed under that poster bed in Hale County, where it remained until a few summers ago.

Sis Sparrow could have been singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” while Bruh Crow and Martha Young’s other bird characters danced, if only Proud Martha had not been so mule-headed. She coulda been a contenda . . . maybe!

Acknowledgment for the culture and dialect of the black stories is a growing movement in the literary world. Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, the true story of a survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, was refused by editors in 1927 because of its dialect narrative and is now published with a scholarly introduction.

Aunt Tut is not completely forgotten. Almost all her early works have been republished by academics and folklore enthusiasts with original titles and author Martha Young’s name. And so the original stories remain in print.

Virginia Hamilton, a noted African-American author, read some of Martha Young’s folktales, rewrote them (it is almost a translation from the dialect) and had famed Barry Moser illustrate the stories. When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing, published in 1996, is a beautifully illustrated book of Martha Young’s stories that are a joy to read today. ( My only complaint: The book is titled by Virginia Hamilton. As an academician, Hamilton surely knew that the correct way to title the book would be: By Martha Young as retold by Virginia Hamilton.) There is a brief explanation of Martha Young on the last page of Hamilton’s book. The beautiful new version of Martha Strudwick Young’s fanciful tales of talking sparrows and dancing crows is thankfully preserved.  PS

Nan Graham is a regular Salt contributor and has been a local NPR commentator since 1995.

By William Irvine   •   Illustrations by Steven Guarnaccia

It all started when I discovered the mysterious connection between TUMS and SMUT. This childhood revelation (and the fact that I can read backward, a talent which I inherited from my mother) has led to a lifelong interest in collecting and inventing palindromes, words and phrases that read the same way forward and backward.

The cult of the palindromes owes its existence to Sotades of Maroneia, a Greek poet and satirist of the third century B.C., who invented palindromic verse and coined the term. The last century has produced J.A. Lindon and Leigh Mercer, British palindromists of rare accomplishment, as well as part-time palindromist and full-time humorist James Thurber. (One of his best: HE GODDAM MAD DOG, EH?)

The secret to constructing a fine palindrome is to start with a promising middle word with well-spaced vowels and consonants (FALAFEL or ASPARAGUS or ARUGULA spring to mind) and build outward, rather than starting with an end word (a mistake common to beginners). Punctuation is suspended; the only poetic license. Only a small number of palindromes make any sense without a frame of reference. So, unless you know you are reading a note from a New Guinean decorator, R.E. PAPUA ETAGERE GATEAU PAPER doesn’t mean much. Or AMARYLLIS SILLYRAMA (a comedy club for flowers?) Or how about SATAN, OSCILLATE MY METALLIC SONATAS?

For some reason, there are many good palindromes that incorporate the names of Republicans and dictators: DRAT SADAM, A MAD DASTARD; WONDER IF SUNUNU’S FIRED NOW; NORIEGA CAN IDLE, HELD IN A CAGE IRON. And consider this fine Sarah Palin-drome: WASILLA’S ALL I SAW.

Some of the best palindromes are remarkable in their brevity and simplicity: EVIL OLIVE, for example. Or the exquisite GOLDENROD-ADORNED LOG. But these pale in sophistication when compared with one of my all-time favorites, composed by the British author Alastair Reid:

T. ELIOT, TOP BARD, NOTES PUTRID TANG EMANATING, IS SAD. “I’D ASSIGN IT A NAME: GNAT-DIRT UPSET ON DRAB POT TOILET.”

The artist Steven Guarnaccia and I have been palindrome pals for a very long time. (In fact, so far back that when we began collaborating, the internet was something in a galaxy far, far away.) So in response to those youngsters who say, “Can’t you just look all these up on the Internet?” I gently reply that many of my earliest efforts were actually the result of countless hours with pad and paper, thumbing through dictionaries and collecting word lists of likely candidates. It sounds quaint, now, doesn’t it?

The following drawings are from our latest collaboration, DO GEESE SEE GOD? A Palindrome Anthology (available on Amazon). I hope you enjoy these plums of our palindromic plundering!   PS

When he is not indulging in logology, William Irvine is the senior editor of Salt.