Hand Me Down
There’s an obscure movie from the early 40s that centers around a tailcoat. The coat moves from one owner to the next, and each owner is a different story. People are humiliated, betrayed, and shot in it. In its last story it’s stuffed with stolen money and falls out of a plane during a storm. Lands in an impoverished town of sharecroppers, and they believe the money to be a gift dropped directly from heaven. The money is shared among the community, it goes towards tractors and cows and new shoes and warm blankets, until folks remember “Old Christopher,” the poorest of the poor. He lives in a lean-to under a dead oak tree. “What if Old Christopher prayed for all of this money? How could we withhold it from him?” Luke (Paul Robeson, who I know mainly as the guy who sang “Old Man River”) goes to the hovel and reluctantly asks him if he’s prayed for anything lately. Old Christopher says, “Nope. Why should I? I have everything I need.” Luke breathes a sigh of relief and is just on his way out when Old Christopher remembers.
“There is something I prayed for,” he says. Luke braces himself.
“I prayed for a scarecrow.”
It’s a good ending for the coat. If the central question is, “What truth about the world could you possibly draw from a tailcoat?” I think the coat’s fate to hang on a stick is a great answer. You could go down an extra layer and say the coat reveals more than it covers, as seen in one of its earlier stories when a down-and-out musician tries to squeeze into it at the debut of his symphony. The coat rips in the back as he’s directing the orchestra, rips right in front of about a million people who all start laughing (I can’t imagine that genuinely being hysterical, no matter how neutral I try to be.) The man weeps bitterly—it’s crushing to watch. And then suddenly all of Carnegie Hall goes silent. His hero, some world-famous musician, stands up in the balcony and removes his own tailcoat in solidarity.
As you can see, I haven’t said a creative thing in this entire piece. I’ve just parroted the work of someone else, some clever man or woman who thought it’d be neat to track the course of a hand-me-down. Maybe I’ve stumbled upon this film like the minister who finds the coat in a thrift store and gives it to a homeless guy, and you are the homeless guy. “Why can’t I be the minister?” you might be asking. Because that doesn’t make sense. See, the minister is the only character who comes upon the coat and then gifts it to someone else. We have to play the game right.
I’ve hit a dry spell when it comes to writing fiction, but as you can see I have no qualms about retelling someone else’s story. Last year I sipped from the cup of non-fiction and I haven’t looked back. Nowadays I start off with something “made up” and then it reminds me of an actual thing that did happen. I find that, of the two, between making/convincing and observing/repeating, I prefer the latter. Even if observing/repeating involves someone else’s hard-wrought making/convincing.
I know writing doesn’t split that cleanly. It’s just how it works in my head. I spent nearly a year trying to scrape together the fictionalized version of a young girl who makes a deal with her dad to sell all her dog’s puppies in exchange for being allowed to join her school’s basketball team, and all the different experiences of driving around town with her grandmother as they work together to offload the dogs. But in the end, I don’t see how it can beat the fact that it really happened. This might also be a defense mechanism. If a critic were to say, “This particular angle to your story doesn’t seem possible,” I can push my non-existent glasses up to my face and say, “Ahem. It not only is possible, but I witnessed its happening. Now tell me I’m brilliant.”
Rather than a spinner of tales, I think I’m more of a tattle-tale. I catch wind of something and I rub my hands together and think, “You just wait till I tell…anyone.”
If you’d like to keep the coat going, figuratively speaking, you can watch the full movie here, and then you can, at last, be the minister and tell the story to someone else. But until then, you’re the homeless guy (who has a drinking problem and also used to be a dirty lawyer.) I did not make up the rules.
A brief note on paid subscriptions. To those of you who have generously contributed to the coffers, this is a quick thank-you. Also, I thought you’d like to know that I’ve sent out my first community art. The spinny-wheel of fate has decided the recipient, and she received her print this morning. When, through your paid subscriptions, I accrue enough funds to buy another work of art from one of my artsy friends, the spinny-wheel of fate will turn again, and maybe the next recipient will be you.
Anyway, shout out to this particular artist friend of mine, Sam Clark, potter and painter based out of Madison, MS. You can see more of his awesome stuff on his website here.
And now, in your creative retelling of this tailcoat movie, you’ve created something new. No one else could have told it this way! Keep on spinning these tales, Sara.
The obsession with “new” stories is a modern convention in writing. I would imagine that many if not most fiction writers are injecting bits of other stories, real life, and personalities that they know in real life in their writing. Half of my Habit stories (making up statistics on the fly here) contain elements of my real life. Occasionally I just change the names and retell what happened. Other times I start with something that happened and I feel the story morph as a write.
I am deeply enjoying your pieces, both fiction and non-fiction. If you have it in you, I still want to know how your summer short story ends. I saw some commemorative spoons at the Parthenon in Memphis this summer and I thought of you.