But the Unicorn Stayed Behind & The Inside of the Rainbow:1982 and Beyond

By James Austin Whitten

"From out of the South

a song arises

of a worth

that lies above wealth.

For a man is a man

whatever he has.

See only what

he is."

 

Soldier. Father. Whistleblower.

Abuser. Destractor. Cheater.

 

James Austin Whitten was a man of extraordinary intelligence who lived a life of contraditions. Born in Arkansas, he was forward-thinking during one of the US's greatest civil rights movements, objected to the cavalier way his fellow soldiers' lives were spent in the Korean War, and uncovered corruption in food flavor production at Nestle. He was also a serial adulterer who did not spare the rod on his three sons.

 

Within these pages are his legacy: the poetic reflections of his life, spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s. These detail how love, loss, and abuse shaped him, and give us insight into a complicated man and the hard-learned lessons he has for us to take forward.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: TJ Schongar
• Release date: Nov 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781957085999

Book preview

Forward

When I was a child, my mother told me my favorite story about my grandfather, James Austin Whitten. When his first son, my father, was born, he approached every member of his Southern-based family with an ultimatum: say one racist or bigoted thing around his boy, and they would never see him or his family again. With that firm stance, he ensured that my father could grow up in Marianna, Arkansas, amid civil rights boycotts, and break free from the prejudices that had run deep through generations of Whittens before his.  I always respected my grandfather for that. He broke with tradition for the sake of what was right. He wasn’t afraid of the consequences others might try to exact on him, because he knew human lives, no matter the color, were worth respecting and protecting, and he wanted his children to know this, too.

When I was an adult, my mother told me about one of her early memories of my grandfather. It was when she was dating my father in high school. He’d brought her to his home, and when my grandfather came upon them, he immediately punched my father straight in the face. His reason?  Jim, his firstborn whom he’d worked to protect from ill ideas, had failed to fill the car with gas. For that offense, my grandfather told my father, You don’t deserve my name.

That is the dichotomy of James Austin Whitten. A brilliant, violent, thoughtful, cheating, articulate, captious man. This book of poems is a reflection of thirty years of his life, formative decades that forced him to confront who he was, what he valued, and what was worth taking action on. For him, these poems were an outlet. For me and others who are descended from him, they are insights into a man we can respect for the good he did but are also confounded by for the ill he visited upon his family.

––––––––

BUT THE UNICORN STAYED BEHIND

James was born in 1933 in Helena, Arkansas. He came from a long line of proud rednecks who fished for crawdads out of a dilapidated bus forever parked in a local bayou. They taught him to