{"id":31397,"date":"2012-05-24T17:00:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-24T21:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=31397"},"modified":"2012-05-25T07:09:12","modified_gmt":"2012-05-25T11:09:12","slug":"reconstructing-harry-crews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/05\/24\/reconstructing-harry-crews\/","title":{"rendered":"Reconstructing Harry Crews"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Rough South of Harry Crews<\/em>.<\/p><\/div><\/center><\/p>\n

I was making a film about a local author when I met Harry Crews. He was not my subject; he was my subject\u2019s inspiration. \u201cYou oughta <\/span>put a camera on this guy,\u201d the local author urged. \u201cGet him while you can.\u201d \u201cWhile you can\u201d meant \u201cwhile he\u2019s sober.\u201d Evidently Crews had been especially lucid lately, not drinking and willing to talk. So we set up a day, loaded our cameras and drove nine hours south from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to a gridded section of suburban Gainesville. When I knocked on his door, he yanked it open, eyes wide, like I\u2019d caught him in the middle of some desperate act.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou Hawkins?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

He threw his arms out like a flagman on an aircraft carrier.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got a pisser on either end of the house. You can set up out back. Let\u2019s go.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always thought of interview as dance. Someone leads, someone follows, and we more or less do it together. Not so this day. Crews led, followed, led again, followed, all rapid fire and to the point. I\u2019d ask a question and he\u2019d toss it aside, preferring instead to ask himself the more interesting question, the one I should\u2019ve asked. I said very little, and after an hour and fifteen minutes he abruptly closed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell I don\u2019t know when I\u2019ve had a more pleasant afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe interview\u2019s over?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure is, bud.\u201d<\/p>\n

I turned to my crew: \u201cThe interview is over.\u201d<\/p>\n

We wrapped and left town. Total time, less than two hours.<\/p>\n

When I reviewed the footage I realized that of the time he\u2019d given me, a full hour was interesting enough to present to audiences untouched. Crews on writing: \u201cWriting is a moral occupation, practiced by not necessarily moral men and women.\u201d Crews on violence: \u201cI wrote this piece called, The Violence That Finds Us<\/em>. This young boy cut me for nothin\u2019, and I said in the piece, \u2018It\u2019s a good thing my ball of wax wasn\u2019t bigger because he might have felt it necessary to kill me.\u2019\u201d On sports: \u201cThe thing about sports, if you tell me you got 4.2 speed in a forty, we\u2019ll just put some watches on you. If you tell me you can bench four hundred pounds, we\u2019ve got a bench and we\u2019ve got four hundred pounds. You cain\u2019t bullshit.\u201d Roll credits. It would\u2019ve worked.<\/p>\n

It would\u2019ve worked, but I\u2019d read half of Blood and Grits<\/em> on my way to Gainesville and the stories had hooked me. This was my kind of writing: first-person accounts with no hiding behind objectivity; edgy scenarios in which the author is wounded\u2014physically, psychologically, or both\u2014by the subject he\u2019s there to investigate. Every mission, whether a trip to the Pipeline Club in Alaska or to a pit bull fight in Boca Raton, or even to a speaking gig at the University of Texas, the assignment reshaped itself into a predicament and the reportage slipped into a confessional.<\/p>\n

I tackled the books next, but it wasn\u2019t until I reached page six of the eighth book that I found what I needed: \u201cWhat has been most significant in my life had all taken place by the time I was six years old.\u201d The line is from Crews\u2019s autobiography, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place<\/em>. I read Childhood<\/em> in a couple sittings and found my blueprint there. The poor son of a sharecropper in Bacon County, Georgia, Crews amused himself by making up stories out of a Sears & Roebuck catalogue and holding blackbirds captive in a spare room in his house. At night, he walked in his sleep, sometimes deep into the cotton field, and suffered the most horrible visions. One night he even saw himself burn up a school bus full of children. When he contracted infantile paralysis, a former slave named Auntie told him that he had fallen ill because of the trapped blackbirds, that one had gotten loose and spit in his mouth while he slept. Horrified, the young Crews had the birds released, and gradually he recovered.<\/p>\n

The structural conceit of A Childhood<\/em> relies on a shoebox full of yellowed photographs. \u201cI reach into the shoebox, \u201c Crews writes, \u201cand I take out a picture of Uncle Alton \u2026\u201d When I asked Crews for the shoebox he told me it had burned up in a house fire. I\u2019m not sure I believed him, but it didn\u2019t really matter. If he couldn\u2019t provide the imagery I\u2019d dream it up myself.<\/p>\n

I found an old, abandoned farmhouse in a rural township called New Hope (dubbed No Hope by the locals). Our first big shot there was an image of Auntie gazing into the bird room. Around noon we released about a hundred grackles into the bird room and waited for our Auntie to arrive, but she didn\u2019t show. An hour later we were beset with gale-force winds, a storm so intense we were forced to remove the interior doors from their hinges and nail them to the window frames to keep the panes from blowing out. The winds died down. Still no Auntie. So at sunset we released the grackles and drove home. I learned that night that my actress had suffered a stroke on her way to the shoot. Her granddaughter called from the hospital and left a very nasty message: \u201cIf anything happens to my grandmother,\u201d she said, \u201cI\u2019ll own your butt and your television station\u2019s butt, and \u2026\u201d I began to wonder if maybe the original Auntie wasn\u2019t right. Maybe there is something fundamentally, metaphysically wrong with keeping blackbirds in your house.<\/p>\n

I went looking for another Auntie and found her in my own hometown\u2014Thomasville, North Carolina\u2014at a grocery store called Trotter\u2019s. I walked in and said to the cashier, \u201cYou\u2019re gonna think I\u2019m crazy, but do you know a ninety-five-year-old black woman who weighs ninety-five pounds? I\u2019m making a movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

She turned to the store and yelled, \u201cHey! Ya\u2019ll know a ninety-five-year-old black woman who weighs ninety-five pounds and wants to be in a movie?\u201d<\/p>\n

The store yelled back, \u201cLucille Epps.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCome on,\u201d a customer said, \u201cI\u2019ll take you down there.\u201d<\/p>\n

I sat with Miss Epps and offered her this deal: \u201cYou come with me Saturday to a house in the country and yell at a boy for keeping blackbirds in his room, and I\u2019ll pay you two hundred dollars cash.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said if I\u2019d throw in a six-pack of tall boys, she\u2019d do it. I told her no problem. But those tall boys were almost my undoing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Rough South of Harry Crews<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

We drove Lucille to No Hope and stocked the bird room with another hundred grackles and got our shots, but somewhere along the way she came a little unhinged\u2014which is to say, she became<\/em> Auntie. The first time I called \u201caction\u201d she worked herself into a frenzy and stayed there. When I called \u201ccut\u201d she ignored me.<\/p>\n

An hour or so later we escorted an agitated Auntie out of the house and drove her home. I don\u2019t know who bought her the tall boys or if she bought her own, but late that night Auntie Epps wandered out of her house in a bathrobe and started screaming at oncoming traffic. The next morning I got another nasty message, from a son this time: \u201cIf you ever<\/em> bother my mama again \u2026\u201d There had to be easier ways to build these dramatic reconstructions, I thought, without everything getting so damned Crewsian.<\/p>\n

Eight months into the process we found ourselves in need of voice-overs, so we paid Crews another visit. We drove nine hours to his house and knocked on his door, but the man who answered it this time was sixty pounds heavier and sporting a Mohawk. I\u2019d heard that Crews was prone to slip into new identities the way the rest of us slip into and out of our clothes, but I hadn\u2019t imagined anything so drastic. When I asked why he\u2019d affected a road-warrior look, he said it was because he\u2019d begun to feel too loved in Gainesville, like too much of a mascot. \u201cWhen folks see me now,\u201d he said, \u201cI can feel the hate comin\u2019 off \u2019em like heat off a stove.\u201d<\/p>\n

We set up in his back yard and began to talk, and that\u2019s when I realized that something was fundamentally different now. The laser focus and rapid-fire delivery were gone. I\u2019d raise a topic and he\u2019d address it, then he\u2019d digress, then he\u2019d digress from that digression, moving further afield until he grew bored and rolled to a stop. If the first interview was a lean, mean final draft, the second was a meandering first draft.<\/p>\n

After four hours I ended the interview, and we recorded the voice-overs. At this point Crews came alive and delivered an elegant, energetic reading of his own work. He\u2019s not just a brilliant writer, I thought, he\u2019s also an enormously talented actor.<\/p>\n

We returned to No Hope for the burning bus shot. This would be our most elaborate undertaking. I found the bus in a soybean field near a Little League baseball field, almost hidden from the main road. When I asked the owner if I could burn his bus he said, \u201cSure, just don\u2019t hurt it any.\u201d I consulted a few effects experts and they assured me that burning a bus without hurting it any is easier than it sounds. First you coat the bus with rubber cement, insulating the surface from the flame, then you add a coat of kerosene for a long burn, then you dowse the whole thing with high-octane gasoline just before ignition. The petroleum products burn off, they assured me, in layers of descending intensity.<\/p>\n

It took me the better part of the day to paint the bus. A few of the locals dropped by to ask me what I was doing, and by late afternoon word had gotten out that a bus would be burned that night. By sundown a considerable crowd had gathered: bored teens, beer-drinking couples in jeeps, tobacco farmers, and a self-appointed fire marshal to make sure the burn didn\u2019t spread. When the ball game let out, a bunch of ten-year-olds showed up, and with them, a trained deer named Pistol who chased them around the bases.<\/p>\n

At nightfall my camera crew rolled in. I climbed to the top of the bus and dowsed it with the kerosene and the gas and we lit the bus. Up it went, with a big swoosh. Two minutes later the big burn died and the party was over. The locals drove away, a bit disappointed, followed by the crew, and soon I was alone again, watching the rubber cement burn off. It was lovely: the surface simmered a translucent blue that stretched and flickered like heat lightning. I lost myself in the eerie flux of the blueness, the quiet of the field, the expanse of sky. At times like that, when nothing was happening, I felt closest to my subject. I\u2019d connected more to the boy than to the man: a sleepwalking child conjured a burning bus one night, and a half century later a grown man has abstracted it into a soft, blue glow. For a moment, I was standing in Bacon County, just me and the bus. Then somebody licked my ear. I whipped around and saw Pistol galloping away.<\/p>\n

A year or so later we finished the show and sent it to Crews, and he liked it. When I expressed partial regret over the need to fictionalize the characters from his Bacon County childhood, he said, \u201cNo, no, man, it might as well have been those folks. Might as well have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Crews died, a few from my former crew asked me if I\u2019d stayed in touch with him over the years. I hadn\u2019t, and I don\u2019t have a good reason for it. Maybe The Rough South<\/em> is what we were meant to do, and once it was done we were done with each other, too. The Rough South<\/em> belies an intimacy that Crews and I never shared. When I added up our hours together, they only came to six. \u201cThere\u2019s only one thing a writer has,\u201d Crews warned me the first time we met, \u201cand it\u2019s not money. It\u2019s time.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n