The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon,

By Chance Harvey

"[Harvey's] use of Saxon's letters . . . provide a unique and objective way of analyzing this fascinating individual while allowing Saxon to speak for himself." -Louisiana Libraries

"Pays him the respect he deserves and uncovers the essential loneliness of the most convivial of men." -New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Saxon's life makes an interesting story and Harvey's prose brings it fully to life." -Brookhaven Daily Leader

Here is the first full biography of the legendary writer known as Mr. Louisiana and Mr. New Orleans. Lyle Saxon's life was colorful, busy, and full of contrasts. He presented himself as the perfect Southern gentleman, but he grew up fatherless in modest circumstances. As host of a French Quarter salon, Saxon dispensed drinks, anecdotes, loans, and advice to many friends, including William Faulkner, Oliver La Farge, and Sherwood Anderson, yet he was often lonely and retreated to his solitary cabin at Melrose Plantation. While Saxon was ambivalent toward his work with the WPA Writers' Project, begrudging the time it took from his own writing, the Louisiana division was, under his direction, the most productive in the United States. Though Saxon's history books bought him fame and a place in New York literary circles, he was deeply insecure about his talent and mourned his inability to write novels.

A Southern-literature scholar and a longtime fan of Lyle Saxon, Professor Harvey has researched the facts behind Saxon myths and presents the reality behind his legend. This volume also contains excerpts from Saxon's correspondence with family and friends, including letters from Grace King, William Spratling, and Sherwood Anderson.

Lyle Saxon wrote history books, Father Mississippi, Old Louisiana, Fabulous New Orleans, and Lafitte the Pirate; a novel, Children of Strangers; and a memoir, The Friends of Joe Gilmore. He was a coauthor of the folklore collection Gumbo Ya-Ya. All are available from Pelican.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2003
• ISBN: 9781455607365

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Preface

In April 1920, New Orleans-born novelist and playwright Fannie Heaslip Lea published a short story in Harper's Bazaar entitled Yellow Roses. During a mid-May visit to New Orleans, the young heroine—Lila Gayle—wanders into the vacant courtyard of an old residential building on Royal Street. The curious Lila pays an obliging servant to lead her up the adjacent stairway to the third-floor apartment. Lila enters the drawing room, struck by its simple elegance. She imagines the absent owner a dark-haired, thick-lashed, dreamy-eyed man who lounges about smoking cigarettes on any given evening. Lila identifies with the spirit of this bohemian charmer; impulsively, she unfastens the bunch of yellow roses pinned to her dress and places them on a table, along with the book of verse she happens to be carrying. Later that evening, Lila dines at Antoine's, where she meets the owner of the Royal Street rooms, Bob Fortune, and accidentally reveals that it was she who left the roses and poetry. Fortune is enchanted, positive that he has found his soul mate, and the story ends with Lila and Bob engaged in an ice-melting kiss.¹

The setting of Lea's story is 536 Royal Street, and, in 1920, it was the residence of Lyle Saxon. Here, over the next four years, Saxon entertained the writers and artists who had begun to fill up the French Quarter. Indeed, his house was known as the place to meet, and, on a typical night, the crowd might include newspaperman Roark Bradford, artist Bill Spratling, writers Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, any number of hangers-on, and Saxon, coming in late from working at the Times-Picayune to entertain his guests.

Saxon was among the first to help restore the French Quarter, and he transformed the property at 536 Royal from a rundown old building to an elegant home typical of wealthy Creoles living in the 1830s. The successful imitation is reflected in the details of Lea's story. Lila steps from the banquette or sidewalk through great wide doors into an arched carriageway, at the end of which is an open courtyard. The carriageway and courtyard are walled in gray, time-tempered stone² of Spanish mortar. A wrought-iron lantern with sides of misty glass³ hangs at the entrance to the courtyard; in one corner grows a single date palm next to a green-painted iron bench. A moonflower vine with cream-colored buds climbs one of the walls. Lila observes the windows of the second-floor slave quarters in this mysterious building of cathedral-like proportions.⁴

The rooms upstairs are romantic and exotic⁵ with their black-framed Spanish windows, mid-Victorian furniture, and faded French prints. In the expansive drawing room facing the courtyard is a black marble fireplace, a gleaming mirror hung above it. Lila glimpses a piano in one room and a great four-poster bed in another; she decides that the home is the perfect haunt of romance.⁶

In mid-April of 2002, I, too, visited 536 Royal Street. I had driven to New Orleans via the Causeway from my home in rural Mississippi to meet my friend Cheryl Grevemberg for lunch at Galatoire's. (Cheryl and I became friends when we both worked for New Orleans attorney Harvey C. Koch in the 1980s, and we have maintained our friendship over the years with sporadic but memorable lunches at Galatoire's.) Cheryl and I ordered our favorites, Crabmeat Yvonne and Oysters en Brochette, along with rolls of warm French bread. After lunch, we stepped into Bourbon Street, determined to walk it off with a stroll to Joe De Salvo's Faulkner House Bookstore in Pirate's Alley. At St. Louis Street, we crossed over to Royal, passing on our right the historic salmon-colored and gray-shuttered building that had belonged to Lyle Saxon.

I had walked by the house many times before, but on this day, I felt compelled—like Lila Gayle—to explore this perfect haunt of romance. Ever ready for an adventure, Cheryl agreed to join me. Saxon's former address is now claimed by Carriageway Gallery. Unfortunately, the carriageway and courtyard have lost their quaint charm. The original flagstones pave the floor of the old carriageway, but the walls sport sheets of orange-red pegboard upon which hang the French Quarter scenes of artist Myrl D'Arcy. Strings of tiny white Christmas lights blanket the arched roof. The courtyard is used as storage: cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, old plants and a bulky air-conditioning unit fill the small space. Time has worn away the gray Spanish mortar of the walls, exposing the red brick beneath. Gallery manager Michael Badinger tells us that the vine Lyle Saxon planted had finally covered one wall, edging under the roof. They tore the vine down. Saxon's palm tree died one winter in a hard freeze.⁷

Cheryl and I peep through the glass of the Spanish door leading to the elegant winding staircase within, eager to see the rooms on the third floor. As in 1920, they are privately rented and not open to the public. Unlike Lila, Cheryl and I are not fictional characters in a magazine story, and we cannot buy our way in.

Disappointed, I turn toward the street and, observing tourists wandering in and out the carriageway of orange-red pegboard, silently lament that no vestige of Lyle Saxon remains at 536 Royal Street, and not one tourist knows who had once lived here. I voice my concern to Badinger, and to my surprise, he says, If it had not been for Lyle Saxon, this building and many others in the Quarter would not be here today. Badinger proudly points to the iron lantern suspended at the entrance of the gallery and shows us the old iron firebox he has carefully preserved in a box in the courtyard, both of which probably belonged to Saxon. Sure, he admits, it's tacky selling pictures here. But, you know, the Quarter's still here, the buildings are still here, and that's the important thing.

I was heartened to learn that the gallery manager knows the history of 536 Royal and is well aware of Saxon's role in preserving the French Quarter as well as his significance as a writer. However, few residents of New Orleans and fewer tourists share that knowledge. The contribution that Saxon made as preservationist, writer, and catalyst in the creative development of others has indeed suffered undue neglect.

Lyle Chambers Saxon (1891-1946) held during his lifetime a considerable reputation as a writer of Southern regionalist fiction and Louisiana history. His novel, Children of Strangers (1937), a depiction of life among mulattoes in northwestern Louisiana, was extravagantly praised by American and British critics. His four histories, Father Mississippi (1927), Fabulous New Orleans (1928), Old Louisiana (1929), and Lafitte the Pirate (1930), received highly favorable reviews: throughout the country, the author was hailed as New Chronicler of the South; in his native region, he was deeply respected to the extent that his name became synonymous with that of the city and state about which he wrote. As director of the Louisiana Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, he was instrumental in the production of the New Orleans City Guide (1938), Louisiana: A Guide to the State (1941), and Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945). When the Project closed in 1942, the author was selected by the Washington office to compile a summary report of WPA activities in all forty-eight states. Although his literary efforts were curtailed by his WPA duties, he began in the early forties his memoirs, The Friends of Joe Gilmore, published posthumously in 1946.

Saxon's most important work, however, lay in his lifelong dispensation of money, companionship, and reassurance to fellow writers. If he never fulfilled the potential for artistic greatness displayed in his early fiction, he contributed, at least, to the development of writers who were to become more famous than he. Along with Sherwood Anderson, Saxon befriended the young William Faulkner during his sojourn in New Orleans and, later, provided financial assistance when he went to New York. Saxon also extended help in the early twenties to Hamilton Basso, Roark Bradford, Ada Jack Carver, John McClure, and Oliver La Farge. When he became firmly entrenched in the literary circle of Greenwich Village and could number among his friends such people as Edmund Wilson, Ben Wasson, Paul Rosenfeld, Elinor Wylie, Stark Young, and Irita and Carl Van Doren, he frequently used his connections to aid his Southern friends in the publication of their manuscripts.

Because the significance of Lyle Saxon as a personality exceeds his importance as a writer, I believe that his life warrants closer examination than it has received. When we look beneath the mask of bon vivant that Saxon often wore, we find a man compelled to reinvent himself in order to hide the facts of his unhappy childhood and family background, his struggles with alcoholism, poor health, and depression, and the loneliness of his solitary life. The basis for this biography is the letters that Saxon wrote to family, friends, acquaintances, and literary and publishing figures. The letters reveal that the images of Saxon as Southern gentleman, genial host, and raconteur were self-created ones, designed to disguise his deep sense of alienation. The glimpse into his inner being that the letters thus afford is helpful in learning why Saxon gave so much of himself to others: his capacity for sympathy and generosity resulted from his own endurance of pain and suffering.

Saxon's sense of futility stemmed, in part, from his doubt about his artistic ability. From those letters that plaintively voice his fears emerges a portrait of an artist obsessed with the need to write but demoralized by the struggle. In his repeated statements in his letters about the writer's art, Saxon reveals the kind of anguish and travail that Faulkner would later note.

Aside from providing psychological insight and biographical details about the author, the letters offer a valuable commentary upon the literary scene in New Orleans in the early 1920s and in Greenwich Village in the latter half of the decade. The letters of Saxon to Sherwood Anderson reflect, for example, the spirit of camaraderie and mutual good will that bound the diverse members of the loosely structured literary colony in the French Quarter.

Thanks to Pelican Publishing Company, most of Lyle Saxon's books, including the popular collection of Louisiana folklore, Gumbo Ya-Ya, have recently been reissued. I am grateful to Pelican for continuing to honor Lyle Saxon by bringing out this biography and selected edition of his letters, a book that, for me, is the bouquet of yellow roses I leave at his doorstep.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Tulane Graduate Program in English and for the opportunity to work in the Special Collections division of Tulane's Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, where I first came across the letters of Lyle Saxon. In particular, I wish to thank Prof. Andy P. Antippas for suggesting that Saxon's life and letters were worthy of a book and for encouraging me to pursue this project. I would also like to thank Prof. Donald Pizer for his active interest and expert guidance. I am also grateful for Tulane's John T. Monroe Fellowship, which provided financial support for my research.

I am indebted to others who lent their time and expertise in helping me to complete this book, including Wilbur E. Meneray, Mary Lynn Wernet, and Kathleen Hutchison. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ivy McLeod for her intelligent and meticulous work in the preparation of my manuscript and for her steady, cheerful spirit. I also wish to thank those colleagues who have inspired and heartened me over the years, including David Aiken, Glenn Carson, Joan Wylie Hall, and Carolyn Tipton.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents for their moral and material support; my brother Tyler B. Harvey, pilot and sailor, for setting an example of excellence in work and play; my cousin, Carl (Chip) Durley, for his selfless and tireless assistance in everything from advising to typing and editing; and my calico cat, Daisy, for her warm and comforting presence.

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The Solitary Spirit and the Comic Mask

In March 1926, Lyle Saxon achieved his first success as a writer of fiction with the publication of Cane River, a local-color tale that was later included in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1926.1 Upon reading Cane River, Grace King sent a letter of praise to Saxon, declaring the story perfect. I congratulate you, she wrote, "but more I congratulate the Dial for recognizing its force and beauty. You have arrived."² A year later Saxon received a similar recognition from Sherwood Anderson, the American writer whom he admired most.³ We may assume, however, that even Anderson's tribute failed to evoke in Saxon the same thrill he must have experienced in reading the words of Grace King.

Although few of her books were purchased or read in New Orleans during the twenties, Grace King still reigned as literary lioness of the city and as literary heroine of the state.⁴ The novels and short stories of George Washington Cable, her contemporary, had indeed made the Creoles and New Orleans famous, but his group of essays, The Silent South (1885), had bitterly antagonized Southerners. Unlike Cable, King represented the Louisiana establishment; as historian, it was she who had captured the laurels of Gayarré.5

In 1926, Grace King was in her seventies but participated fully in the cultural development of New Orleans. She lectured occasionally at Tulane University; served as first president of Le Petit Salon, founded in 1924; and contributed to the rejuvenation of the Louisiana Historical Society. Grace King was also known for her salon, her Friday afternoons when she would welcome friends for conversation and tea at her residence at 1749 Coliseum Street.⁶ This Greek Revival home, replete with columned galleries and a high-ceiling drawing room with elaborate Victorian rosewood furniture and dazzling prisms, attracted interested locals as well as prominent visitors to the city. Lyle Saxon frequently attended the Friday afternoon teas, and he introduced his hostess to Sherwood Anderson and Edmund Wilson. In a 1924 letter to King, Anderson says he was afraid to come to tea at first, for fear she would think him terrible; in his shy response to her invitation, he praised her as a sincere craftsman. Edmund Wilson, another admirer, thanked her in a letter written in 1926 not only for information about the South she had imparted in her books but also for her dramatic communication of the spirit and ideas of society.⁷ Lyle Saxon had long revered la grande dame of New Orleans. As early as 1917, when his career as a newspaper reporter had just begun, Saxon wrote to King expressing his admiration for her novel The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard (1916). 'You have given us a piece of permanent literature, Saxon said, a big book that will carry New Orleans (the real New Orleans) on to the coming generation."⁸ Later, in 1923, when Saxon had gained some fame as literary critic for the Times-Picayune, he pronounced King's Madame Girard a book that belonged in every Southerner's library because it gives so clear a picture of the life which has passed never to return.⁹ Grateful for his kind review, King presented Saxon with a copy of Madame Girard, inscribed with this message, dated June 1923:

I am very much touched by your pretty notice of M. Girard in the T.P. yesterday. I believe you really like it— and me—if you will excuse my saying it. Good book reviews are what we have always needed in New Orleans. 'Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances with them.'¹⁰

Saxon did not fail to remember his early source of inspiration and encouragement. He dedicated his second book, Fabulous New Orleans (1928), to Grace King, and upon her death in 1932 served as pallbearer and delivered a eulogy at her memorial service, naming her our greatest writer and our greatest woman.¹¹

It is fitting that the first letter, dated 1917, in the selection at the end of this book is one in which Saxon pays homage to Grace King. For it was she who would, nearly ten years later, pass the mantle to the young writer who was to follow her in the long line of Martin-Gayarré-Cable-King.¹²

If the first letter collected here foreshadows the position of Saxon as regional writer and Louisiana historian, then the second letter, written in the same year from Chicago, indicates that quality of his existence that manifested itself in the treatment of his subject matter. For the first time in my life, Saxon laments, I feel lonesome: it's hell to be on a frozen island on Christmas, without even a nigger man Friday to say 'Christmas Gif to.¹³ The parallel Saxon draws by playfully identifying himself with Robinson Crusoe is appropriate, for both experienced a form of alienation. Unlike Crusoe, who was separated from others only by time and distance, Saxon was spiritually isolated from the rest of society; and, unlike Crusoe, Saxon was never rescued.

As a child, Saxon was deprived of the security of growing up with a complete family circle. Although he had the devotion of a mother who loved him so¹⁴ and the attentions of a kindly grandfather and two aunts, Saxon never knew his father.

The history of the relationship of the author's parents, Katherine Chambers (1868-1915) and Hugh Allan Saxon (1869-1945), is somewhat obscure. In his critical biography of Saxon, James W. Thomas mentions that some of Saxon's contemporaries didn't believe that the two were married when Saxon was born on September 4, 1891.¹⁵ Early in my research of Saxon's life, I heard similar doubts expressed by people who had known him. I checked the Marriage License Index for Orleans Parish and found that the two were married in New Orleans on December 10, 1890.¹⁶

Katherine Chambers was a great-granddaughter of Capt. Jacob Chambers, a Revolutionary War veteran from South Carolina who had brought his family by way of Tennessee to Louisiana in 1814 in search of farmlands. Settling near Baton Rouge, Captain Chambers built a home on the Amite River; dismayed that his family had no place to worship, he built the area's first Methodist church and called it Old Salem. In her sketch of her family's history, Katherine Chambers Saxon recalls hearing two of his grandsons preach from that old pulpit.¹⁷

Apparently, Katherine Chambers' father, Michael Chambers, did not pursue the profession of these two of his brothers. He is remembered for having laid the foundation of Claitor's, one of the largest bookstores in Louisiana.¹⁸ Michael Chambers' original shop was located on Third Street in Baton Rouge, where it was for years an institution.¹⁹ Two of his daughters, Maude and Lizzie, never married and remained in Baton Rouge all their lives. Because Saxon was reared in the household of his grandfather and often visited his maiden aunts in later years, it is assumed that he was born in Baton Rouge.

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Thomas C. Atkinson, who boarded in the home of a close friend of Saxon's mother during his college days at Louisiana State University, told me that Saxon was born elsewhere. When Hugh Saxon came to Baton Rouge, Kittie Chambers fell in love with him, and she went with Hugh to the West Coast, either Washington or Oregon. In a few months, she returned with the infant. ²⁰

When I first began my study of Lyle Saxon's life, I was puzzled by the conflicting stories about the author's place of birth. My research gradually yielded bits and pieces of information that, collectively, led to the probable conclusion that Saxon was indeed born in the state of Washington. For example, Katherine Saxon's notebook contains a brief sketch of a visit she made to Victoria, British Columbia, in the spring of 1891. Although she does not refer to her husband by name, she mentions that we left from Whatcomb (sic).²¹ No doubt the purpose of their trip to Whatcom, Washington, was to visit Hugh's mother, Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, who was residing there in 1891.²²

In looking at another one of Katherine Saxon's books, a tiny volume entitled A Lent with Jesus: A Plain Guide for Churchmen, I found pressed among the leaves a pansy, a religious poem clipped from a newspaper, and a business card of a doctor of obstetrics.²³ The card lists the doctor's address as Los Angeles, California. Apparently, Katherine was in an early stage of pregnancy during her journey through California to Whatcom.

Finally, in researching the final phase of Saxon's career, I came across a letter that solved the mystery of his birthplace. The letter, dated August 6, 1938, is written by Calvin Fixx to Saxon. Fixx served at one time as secretary to the author, and his letter is a response to one received from his former employer. Toward the end of his letter, Fixx remarks, No, I'm sure you never mentioned that you were born in Bellingham.²⁴ Bellingham is a city situated on Bellingham Bay in northwest Washington; it was established in 1903 upon the merger of the towns of Whatcom, Fairhaven, and Sehome. During a recent trip to Bellingham, I visited the State Archives and discovered proof of Saxon's place of birth. The September 4 entry in the 1891 birth records for Whatcom County reads, Saxon, Lyle, child of Kittie Chambers, 23, LA, and "Hugh A. Saxon, 23, Corespondent [sic], LA."²⁵

Katherine Saxon came home to Baton Rouge with her son. Hugh apparently returned to Los Angeles, where, according to Muriel Saxon Lambert (Lyle's cousin), he later remarried and lived the rest of his life. In 1891, Hugh Saxon was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Herald and, in 1901, city editor.²⁶ By age fifty, Hugh Saxon had begun a new career as screen actor. From 1919 to 1934, he played bit parts in twenty-four movies, including the Charlie Chaplin classic The Circus (1928).²⁷

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Lyle never forgave his father for abandoning him. Mrs. Lambert said that at least twice Uncle Hugh visited New Orleans 'dying' to see his son, but Lyle refused to meet him. Although Lyle told many delightful tales about his mother,²⁸ he was unwilling to discuss Hugh Saxon. His cousin, along with many others with whom I talked about Lyle Saxon, does not recall his ever mentioning his father.

Another revealing comment upon Saxon's attitude toward Hugh Saxon is reflected in one of the author's unfinished manuscripts. An omniscient narrator begins the story of a little girl, Mary Nelson, by describing through incident the character of her father and, through dialogue, her mother's disgust with him. The story is basically autobiographical, as the mother, who is named Kitty, dies of cancer, as did Kittie Chambers; Mary's two aunts quarreled with her mother because she had married Nelson,²⁹ as Maude and Lizzie may well have argued with Kittie Chambers over Hugh Saxon. Mrs. Lambert had no doubt that, just as I heard family gossip when I was small, Lyle must have heard all his life what a bum Uncle Hugh was. Saxon portrays Mary's father as an egotistical, insensitive man who has stopped caring [about Mary] long ago. When Mary is raped by a Negro, Kitty blames Nelson, since his own lack of morals has allowed their daughter to go unsupervised. I may have loved you once, she says, but I hate you now.³⁰

Saxon himself probably bore the feeling he attributes to Kitty Nelson in his story. Lyle hated his father, Mrs. Lambert explained, because he adored his mother. No doubt Saxon shared, in part, the hardship his mother endured as a result of her unhappy marriage. Even as a child, Saxon was possibly aware of the irregularity of his family situation and, therefore, of the difficulty of maintaining a normal social life within a small Southern community in the early 1900s. The Chambers family tried to save face by having Katherine Chambers Saxon listed in the 1905-6 Baton Rouge city directory as the widow of Hugh A. 31

In later years, Saxon would call himself a native Louisianian.³² By the time he died in 1946, many felt that his immortality among Louisianians and those who love Louisiana was assured because his personality was so closely woven into the fabric of his own state.³³ Saxon achieved the status of symbolic cultural figure by adopting certain phases of Louisiana's cultural history as his own. The first four chapters of Old Louisiana (1929) and the first six of both Father Mississippi (1927) and Fabulous New Orleans (1928) are first-person accounts detailing, respectively, summers spent on the family plantation near Baton Rouge and a trip to New Orleans in the early 1900s.

Many of those who wrote of Saxon after his death took quite literally the introduction to Father Mississippi, wherein Saxon describes his uncle's plantation, a little community comprising four thousand acres of land, peopled with six or eight white folks and three hundred and sixty negroes.³⁴ There Saxon would spend his summers; in winter, he says, I had to go to school in town (6). Edward Dreyer, one of Saxon's intimate friends, included this part of Saxon's background in his biographical account of Saxon,³⁵ and many of his friends whom I interviewed asserted that the plantation was not mythical. For example, Tess Crager believed that Saxon embroidered upon the truth, as the family plantation was just a small place.³⁶ Mrs. Lambert, who claimed no knowledge of any such homestead, pointed out that Walter Saxon, Lyle's uncle, did own Stella Plantation in the early 1900s. However, since Stella is located a great distance downriver from Baton Rouge, and since the home to which Saxon alludes has a Chambers family connection, it is unlikely that Saxon is referring to Stella in his description.

Others doubted that the plantation existed at all. Thomas C. Atkinson, who first met Saxon in 1929, claimed that Saxon just made it up, having heard him laugh about this piece of fiction many times. The description of the plantation in Father Mississippi does bear some elements of truth, however. Although most of the names Saxon mentions do not correspond to any member of the Chambers family, at least two of the names are not fictitious. Aunt Julia, one of the Negro women in the chapter entitled Aunts' and 'Uncles,' refers to ole Mistah Jacob, who was, she tells Saxon, yo' grampa (32). As mentioned earlier, Saxon's great-great-grandfather was named Jacob Chambers. In the same chapter, Saxon says that, during days spent on the plantation, he was watched over by his body servant, little black Lawrence, who taught Saxon to swim—in the Mississippi River (24-25). The dangerous Mississippi was the main attraction, and so, Saxon writes, it was to the river we would go, riding our ponies to some distant sandbar (25). In The Friends of Joe Gilmore, Saxon recounts an episode involving Gilmore and Lawrence Lange, whom Saxon identifies as a mulatto and former employee of Michael Chambers. Lange tries to impress Gilmore with stories of Saxon's childhood and brags that he taught Mr. Saxon to ride on a pony.³⁷

The story of the pony is further substantiated by a card postmarked July 4, 1900, on which the eight-year-old Saxon wrote to Kittie Saxon in Baton Rouge: Dear Mother / I want to stay a little longer[.] How is Ben pony[?] I am going to play in the sand[.] goodbye / Lyle³⁸ This card lends credence, in fact, to Saxon's whole story of having spent time as a child on a plantation. The back of the card is stamped Devall, Louisiana, a small West Baton Rouge Parish community that lay near the banks of the Mississippi River.