Charlotte Dean Stark, IWSG, Being Thankful

Posting the First Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer's Support Group, is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. YOU can sign up HERE to participate.

Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.

Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts: Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles!

This month's question is: Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

This is a difficult question to answer because there were/are so many people I admired when I was a child. My mother and father, my grandmother, and several older ladies in the small community of St. John in the Virgin Islands where I grew up, like Miss Meada, Miss Myra, Miss Agnes, and Miss Lucy.

My grandmother (left)
and Charlotte

But I have settled on Charlotte. What follows is a brief look into who she was and just one "small" lesson she taught me. 

Charlotte (left with dove)
and my mother.

Charlotte and my grandmother were best friends. Charlotte had been a part of our family from the time my mother was a young teenager, so we're talking since the late 1920s, early '30s. I loved her dearly and spent weekends at her home. Her patient, wonderful husband, Gus, would vacate their bedroom so I could sleep with Charlotte. Because she was a writer, there were times when I had to be quiet and keep myself occupied. Her bookshelves were a cornucopia of delightful reads like: a collection of Charles Addams cartoons, The Secret Garden, Oscar Wilde's fairytales, Grimms' fairytales illustrated by Arthur Rackham, A Doorway in Fairyland by Laurence Housman with incredible engravings by Clemence Houseman, and others (many of which she passed on to me and that I still have.) 

Gus and Charlotte

Charlotte Dean Stark was my first best friend. Besides being an author, she was a book reviewer for the New York Times, as well as their first woman poetry editor. She had been a Suffragette and, rumor had it, she had been part of the Vicious Circle at the Algonquin Round Table.

What follows is story about

Mr. Davis and Tom

 

Mr. Davis lived in a 10 X 15 foot shed behind Charlotte’s house. He had, at one time been a talented artist, who made etchings (two examples can be seen here) but both my mother and Charlotte said he had always been cantankerous and difficult to get along with.

 

What he did in that shed all day is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he read. Perhaps he sat in a chair and mumbled to himself about how badly life had treated him. Perhaps he slept. What he didn’t do was art.

For me, at eight years old, Mr. Davis was a scary and mysterious person.

 

When I visited Charlotte it was understood, when it came time to feed him breakfast, lunch or dinner, I wasn’t to show my face.

Off her kitchen, a wide covered porch ran the length of her house. By the kitchen door was a small round table and a single chair. Charlotte would set the table and have a plate of food with beverage in place. Then, in her thin high voice, she’d call him.

 

“Yoo-hoo! Wilber! Dinner!” She alone called him by his first name.

 

A minute or so later Mr. Davis would appear out of the depths of his self-imposed exile. A large, imposing figure, he always wore the same thing, no matter the time of year or weather or that fact that he lived in the tropics: dark trousers, dark long-sleeved shirt, and often an ancient and filthy knee-length over-coat. Sometimes a battered fedora was perched on his head. He’d stump the 30 or so feet to the back porch, eat in sullen silence, get up, and return to his dark den.

 

Charlotte alone spoke to him. Did he want more? Would he like a glass of water? A cup of coffee perhaps? He’d reply with a simple gruff, yes or no.

 

When Charlotte called Mr. Davis for dinner, she also called in a wild tomcat. She had several tame cats, but she fed the wild cat when she fed Mr. Davis dinner. She’d put out a dish of food in the same place every evening and in her high, thin voice she’d call him.

 

“Yoo-hoo! Tom. Yoo-hoo! Dinner, Tom!”

 

Out of the tangle of thorn bushes that grew behind the house would come slinking a great battle-scarred, orange tomcat. Part of one ear was chewed off, and his fur was scraggly and lumpy with cuts and scabs and scars. He’d come slinking in, wary of anything different or any movement that was not part of his frame of reference, eat his bowl of food, then slink back into the bush.

 

Old man and old cat ate their meals together in hostile, untrusting silence.

 

Mr. Davis ate without looking around as if he might see something which would then necessitate an acknowledgement.

 

Tom crouched in tense expectation that he might have to bolt at any moment. After each gulp of food his head swiveled from side to side, taking in his surrounding, making sure nothing had changed.

 

They were the same kind of creature. Life had dealt them blows which had caused them to retreat into isolation. Mr. Davis had chosen his while Tom had been born to it.

 

Yet between them they had Charlotte, whose sweet face, quiet voice, and non-judgmental manner, brought the two together each evening.

 

Was it because the wounds they’d suffered and the scars they bore were momentarily soothed by her ministrations? Those moments were not enough to civilize the misanthropic old man or tame the wild old tomcat, but they were enough to keep them coming back.

 

Daily they came to that borderland of civilization, the neutral zone that was the back porch. They could have come inside the house any time and been welcomed, but the porch was as close to the smell of humanity as either of them cared to get.

 

I caught occasional glimpses of the old wild man and old wild cat as they made their journeys to the edge of that reality where they couldn’t endure to live. I dared to take peeks at them, hoping they would notice me and see me as harmless and thus allow me to befriend them. But I was also terrified, if they did see me, they would run away and never come back or yell and hiss at me for scaring them.

 

I walked a thin brittle line. Common sense, instinct, or some part of my unconscious knew not to intrude and cause a break in the fragile connection Charlotte had with them.

 

Perhaps in that time with Charlotte, a memory was made which lingered like a salve, easing some of the pain. Perhaps it was the lingering trace of that memory which kept them coming back. Her calm, quiet, unhurried, demeanor taught me that even the most damaged or wild of creatures can be coaxed out of the darkness and into the light, even if only for a moment.

***

Has my opinion of Charlotte changed now that I am older than she was when I was 8? Not one little bit. I love her as much now as I did then.

Me on Charlotte's lap. L to R clockwise:
Friend, Ed, my sister Erva Denham, friend Milaine,
and Ed's brother, John. 

Being Thankful

I'm thankful I knew Charlotte.