Christmas Tales of Alabama Read Online Free Page A

stories could evoke such complicated emotions.
    One of the most enduring of these beloved writings was “A Christmas Memory,” which first appeared as a short story in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956 and was eventually published as a slim volume, along with the short stories “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “One Christmas.”
    â€œA Christmas Memory” is a love story, though not in any typical sense. It tells of the pure love between a small boy and his naïve and childlike elderly cousin, who was simply called “friend” in original publications but who was later identified as “Sook.”
    Sook was the nickname of Nanny Rumbley Faulk, one of the many relatives who lived with Truman’s mother’s cousin, Jenny Faulk, in Monroeville, Alabama, in the 1920s and 1930s. Jenny owned the family’s dry goods store on the downtown square, which was the extended family’s sole means of support. Whenever family members were in dire straits, orphaned or abandoned, Jenny would bring them to the rambling family home, where she was living with her three unmarried siblings: Sook, Callie and Buddy. She had reared Truman’s mother, Lillie Mae, after her parents died. Truman lived with Jenny and the cousins until he was seven years old. Lillie Mae, who was seventeen when Truman was born, soon divorced his father, Archulus Persons. Lillie Mae left her young son in Monroeville and went to New Orleans, where she would meet her second husband, Joseph Capote. Joseph would adopt Truman and give him his name, but the relationship was always strained. After Truman went to live with his mother and stepfather, he continued to visit Monroeville each summer, spending time with Sook and a neighbor named Nelle Harper Lee, who also would find fame as a writer.
    Truman was a prodigious child who taught himself to read before he attended school and began writing at age eleven. Truman’s busy mind, sensitivity and sense of abandonment would isolate him. Many years later, Truman told a reporter he felt like “a spiritual orphan, like a turtle on its back.”
    He considered Sook his truest friend. With her childlike manner, she and Truman spent their days in innocent pursuits, such as killing flies in the house for a penny-each bounty, flying kites and searching for the perfect Christmas tree.
    Their main activity each Christmas was baking fruitcakes—as many as thirty—to give to people who caught their fancies or showed them kindness. One year, one of Sook’s special fruitcakes was sent to President Roosevelt at the White House; another went to missionaries to Borneo. The year of “A Christmas Memory,” Truman, referred to in the story as “Buddy,” and Sook add another fruitcake recipient, Mr. Haha Jones, the bootlegger who sold them the whiskey to make the cakes. Truman’s love of Sook and his childhood home shine through, making the story sparkle in the simplicity that overlays a hard truth: traditions, even comforting and happy ones, come to an end, leaving only memories in their wake.
    Truman would become famous, though, not for short stories about the South but for books such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the genre-bending In Cold Blood . Though Sook died when Truman was still a child living in New Orleans, many of his other cousins and aunts remained part of his life through adulthood. In later years, Truman would work on a book with Marie Rudisill, his mother’s sister, whom he called Aunt Tiny, one of the orphans who had lived in the Faulks’ Monroeville home. Rudisill and Truman had discussed writing a book of Sook’s recipes, which Rudisill called “receipts,” but before it was completed, Truman became a world-renowned author caught in a busy social whirl. Then, in 1983, Rudisill wrote a book about Truman’s childhood that angered him, along with many Monroeville residents.
    Finally, Rudisill completed Sook’s