photo by David Snow

Demopolis natives (L-R) Bert Hitchcock, Rusty Goldsmith and Billy Cobb discuss literature of the South at Lyon Hall on Sunday.

Demopolis natives talk about their hometown's influence

By David Snow (Contact) | Demopolis Times

Published Wednesday, March 18, 2009

DEMOPOLIS — As part of the Southern Literary Trail three Demopolis natives and writers spoke to a packed house at Lyon Hall about the influence that the city has had on their writing.

William “Billy” Cobb, Bert Hitchcock and the Rev. Rusty Goldsmith spoke about how they use the people they knew while living in Demopolis and transform them into characters in their works.

“Demopolis has helped to provide me a setting for most of my work,” said Cobb, the author of “Coming of Age at the Y” and “The Hermit King.” “I change the name of the town, and I change the name of the people — and I don’t always write about real people — but it’s a place that I know.

“I know how the sidewalk smells in the summertime, and I know what it’s like to get caught in a blackberry bush. All of the experience that I had here, I know; that’s a part of my memory.”

Cobb is the son of the late Sledge Cobb. He graduated from Livingston State College (now the University of West Alabama) in 1961 and began teaching at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) in 1963.

“The characters, the people, are personified for me as the basic human types, the universal characteristics — Biblical and otherwise,” said Goldsmith, “I know a person that I may not be able to close my eyes and say, ‘OK, now, who is greed?’ but if I think long enough, there is going to be somebody who pops up that I can use their image, their actions, their history that helps me flesh out what that is about.

“When I think of human nature, I usually don’t think about the modern people, the people that I currently know. I think about the people that I experienced that impacted me as a young person.”

Goldsmith is a minister at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, having lived in Demopolis until 1961.

During his time as rector at St. Mary’s-on-the-Highlands in Huntsville, he delivered a series of famous sermons inspired by Demopolis.

“I’m more of a scholar than a writer,” Hitchcock said, “but I think it is the sense of history I got from Demopolis that affected me. There was a past, and I’m not talking about the antebellum, white-column history, because I disagree with a lot of that. There were non-American events. The French were here, and I think there was a certain awareness of history and the cosmopolitanism that existed in this little place that I would not have gotten in any other place.

“I’ve become a literary historian. I do a lot of research in history. Some of that can be traced to growing up among this little group of people.”

Hitchcock is the Hargis professor of American literature at Auburn University. He attended Demopolis High School in the mid-1950s.

The panel was asked what kind of advice they would give to people from Demopolis who would want to become writers.

“I would say it’s very fertile ground,” Cobb said. “William Faulkner, when he went back to Oxford to live — he’d lived in New Orleans and Paris and New York — he said, ‘I realized that I had everything I needed to write about in this one little postage stamp of soil.’ And that’s what he did for the rest of his life: he wrote about those people around Oxford, Miss. He called it Jefferson, and he changed the name of the county to Yoknapatawpha, but he continued to write about those people.

“I think that’s pretty good advice for somebody who wants to write. You don’t need to go out and get a lot of experiences. You don’t have to work as a longshoreman or something like that because you can find stories everywhere you look, because there are people everywhere you look.”

“Agatha Christie’s character, Miss Marple, is the same thing,” joined Goldsmith. “In her detective work, she says the people serve the same need in this timy little town as they do in London or anywhere else.

“I had the same experiences here that I would in Calcutta! The other thing about Demopolis that is different is that we knew everybody: black, white, young, old, poor, rich — what they were up to, their good points and their bad points and how they had acted over the years. Families were known for generations.”

“And you run into them later in life,” Cobb added. “Like Jim Haskins, a writer who came from Demopolis who lived in New York until he died a couple of years ago. It was fun getting together with them. I knew them when they lived in Demopolis. It was fun to compare the way we looked back on Demopolis! He wasn’t bitter about it or anything. He had a great attitude towards it; it was his hometown.”

“At one time, the standard advice for young writers was that they should read a lot before they learn to write,” Hitchcock said. “In fact, that is how they will learn to write is by reading.

“In this atmosphere, there was a sense of the importance for the written word here, and Jim talked about that as well. Education was taken fairly seriously, and literature was talked about. So, when you got ready to see what you could write, you had something to put up against that. It makes a big difference.”

“Don’t flinch from the horrors of the past, but don’t sugarcoat it, either,” said Dr. Alan H. Brown, who moderated the panel discussion. Brown is a professor at the University of West Alabama and an author in his own right. “That’s one thing I admire in the works of these men is that they try to do that, they try to provide a well-balanced portrait of what it was like to grow up in these Southern towns, in rural Alabama back in the ’50s and ’60s.

“We need to resist the temptation to give the public what we think they expect, and that usually takes form in stereotypes. Portray people as they really were, and be as true to your memory as you can, and don’t let any outside influence color that portrayal.”

During the panel discussion, the authors praised their English teachers from Demopolis, Wynell Gantt and Minnie Barnes, saying they were also a good source for understanding literature.

When thinking about Southern literature, people general consider William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Harper Lee and Truman Capote.

Writers like Billy Cobb, Rusty Goldsmith and Bert Hitchcock who grew up right here in Demopolis, walked our streets and attended our schools, help bring a part of us into their writings and possibly influence others here in town to give writing a try as a profession.

Christy Kyser Truitt has already published three novels, earning an award recently for her latest work, “Where the River Bends.” Others from Demopolis may soon follow in her footsteps as well.

In reading novels, we can imagine characters from many different places, but in the works of these three authors, we can see ourselves cast in settings wide and varied, but with the shadow of Demopolis past firmly embedded in the pages.

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