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Find Carolyn's Individual Books and Audios Here:
For a resource list on polygamy, Utah, tolerance and other related subjects visit this page on this site.
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Excerpts for Your Enjoyment from This Is the Place. Have Fun Exploring a Bit!
Click here for Carolyn's first person essay, "Beating Time at Its Own Game." Click Here for the study guide included in This Is the Place. Rebecca Brown of RebeccasReads.com said, "At the end [of This Is the Place] there is a Reading Group Guide of questions for serious discussion, which transforms this novel into a textbook about closed societies & their impact." Click Here for the prologue and the first chapter of This Is the Place on Nikki Leigh's blog.
This excerpt may be reprinted providing that it is fully credited with byline and tagline and that it not be changed in any way. More are available by contacting Carolyn Howard-Johnson. Learning about Coots An abbreviated excerpt from This Is the Place by Carolyn Howard-JohnsonAuthor of the Award-winning This is the Place andHarkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered and Tracings, a chapbook of poetry 1948-Holladay, Utah Lee, my older cousin taunted me. “Don’t go down in the hollow past the property line. There’s an old coot from the other side of the family who lives over there. If he catches you, he will drag you off.” “Lee, one of these days I’m going,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. But one day I did. I took my brother by his pudgy hand, “Bobby, we’re going to find an old coot.” I had pictured an old geezer of rooster like dimensions, put together like a satyr, with cocks-comb hair and a nose like a beak. “I think a coot is related to us, a kind of Eccles we’ve never seen before.” We slid down the hollow to the creek on our bottoms, embedding clay into the weave of what covered our behinds. The proof of Bobby’s indiscretion brushed off of his Sunday trousers leaving a foxtail or two protruding from the seams. My panties were black and wet so I took them off and put them under a rock to retrieve on the way back. We found stones to step across the boiling creek and plopped an additional river rock where Bobby’s short legs needed an extra one. The shadows of the trout beneath the water were slow and green. Perhaps wild things shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps it was the same with the old coot. But I had a need to do my cousin one better. Being twelve shouldn’t give him all the advantages. Bobby and I pulled ourselves up the other side of the hollow using roots and brush for leverage. “I’m hungry. Maybe we could eat the trout for lunch.” Bobby’s voice sounded like the ice of high notes flowing through a sieve. We had walked a long way and it was getting hot. We sat down on some weeds that were still soft and green reminding me of my delicate condition of undress. I felt helpless. “Bobby, if you need to tinkle you can. No one can see you and I won’t look.” I thought the diversion would be helpful for hunger pangs. We could now see houses but they were a long way off. We scooted under barbed wire fences and over weathered stiles, picked our way around dried cow dung. The houses grew bigger because they were closer. An old truck came along the road and stopped in clouds of tawny dust. The driver stared at our Sunday clothes. “What on earth are you kids doin’ here? Where did you come from?” The woman jumped out of the truck. She looked at the man behind the wheel. “Look at this dress. Expensive.” She picked the fabric of my skirt between her fingers. “And short. I’ve never seen these kids before.” They put us in the back of the truck and drove into the next driveway, rutted like the road but narrower. Their house smelled like babies lived there, wet and sour. A linoleum mat lay askew on the floor in front of the sink, its corners curling. “What’s your name, honey?” The voice was soft but there was a sound of perturbance about it that made me feel shy. “I’m Bobby Eccles and I’m hungry.” The phone got a good working out. “These kids say they’re Eccles but I’ve never seen ‘em at church. I don’t think they’re they're part of our family.” Silence. Then she rang off and called someone else. “Feed the kids, will you?” She sounded cross at the man, like she didn’t have too many words to use. He put two bowls of oatmeal, gray and lumpy, leftovers from the Fridge, on the table. He poured the top, creamy part of the milk from a pitcher onto it. “We don’t have sugar,” the man said. The spoons were big ovals and didn’t match. The lady was saying, “Why on earth would I call the sheriff? She put her finger in the cradle of the phone and turned to her husband. “Why would we want to call the sheriff?”
“Well, because they say they’re Eccles kids
but it’s obvious they aren’t. So how’re we going to figure out even who
to call first. Maybe they are from th' the other side of the crick.”
“We are, we are!” Bobby squealed with his mouth full and milk coming out of the corners of his mouth. “We’re looking for the old coot!” A baby wailed from the other room and other voices shushed it. The man took the phone, said two numbers into the spout at the front of it. “We’ve got two kids here who say they’re Eccles, maybe from the…maybe from the other side of the fam…. You know. Wanna come get ‘em and see where they belong?” He listened a minute. “I’m not calling them m’self!” He turned to his wife. “They got a call four hours ago about these kids. If you could quit meddling we’d’ve had ‘em home a long time before.” I finished the porridge, like Goldilocks. It was good to feel the heaviness in my stomach, warm, even though it hadn’t been when I ate it. I attempted to slide off the chair seat covered with slick, diamond patterned vinyl. My bottom stuck. The lady’s eyes widened. “Mel, this child hasn’t a stitch of underwear on under her clothes!” My humiliation was complete. I wasn’t a Eccles, from either side of the creek. I was exposed. “Can I, can I use your bathroom?” “You most certainly can.” The lady hustled me down a dark hall. I perched on the toilet, my spirit of adventure crushed, worried about what my mother would say about her daughter being out in public without her panties. The lady reached her hand inside the bathroom door. In it was a pair of big underpants, thin and gray and shabby in places like shredded twine drooping from an animated hook. Hanging from the pulled elastic waist was a safety pin, which came in handy. “Thank you. And thank you for the mush.” At least maybe I could get a good report for manners if not for my attire. The sheriff was dressed all neat with a patch of the State of Utah with a beehive in the middle on his sleeve and nice, ironed creases in his shirt. “So you two are my lost Johnssens, huh?” The sheriff grinned. “Do you think Mom will be mad?” “We only wanted to find the old coot,” Bobby said. The sheriff shook his head. He got down on one knee. “When are you kids ever going to stop the bogey man stories about the other side of the family? Polygamy’s over, kids. One side of the creek’s no different from the other side. We’re all cousins--once, twice, three times removed maybe, but cousins. We’d all better be forgetting which is the first wife’s family, which are the basta...which are the other wife’s kids, you know?” The sheriff looked up at the lady, who didn’t say anything about my underpants and the man who didn’t like it but fed us anyway. “Thanks Mr. and Mrs. Eccles. I’ll see they get home.” I followed the sheriff hitching my new, panties so they wouldn’t droop below my good dress. Bobby reached for the sheriff’s hand. “They didn’t look at all like Coots,” he said. ----------- Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s first novel, This is the Place, has won eight awards. Her second book, Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered, is creative nonfiction; it has won three. Her fiction, nonfiction and poems have also won awards and appeared in national magazines, anthologies and review journals. She speaks on Utah’s culture, tolerance and other subjects and has appeared on TV and hundreds of radio stations nationwide. She is an instructor for UCLA’s Writer’s Program. She loves to travel and has studied writing at Cambridge University, United Kingdom; Herzen University, St. Petersburg, RU; and Charles University, Prague as well at the University of Southern California and UCLA. Her website is http://HowToDoItFrugally.com. Excerpted from the BackmatterThis excerpt is part of the backmatter of This Is the Place. I included it because I hoped the book would be used to teach tolerance in schools. I wanted it to be clear to students that though tolerance has improved over the decades, discrimination still exists. The theme that subtle intolerance can be as corrosive as more blatant discrimination runs through This Is the Place but the novel by no means explores only religious intolerance (on both sides of a divided culture, I might add). Readers will also see other threads of intolerance including that of gender. I was heartened to see that Paula Zahn is currently featuring a series on CNN that explores bigotry in the USA today. It many ways it is more virulent than it ever was -- changed but not eradicated.I found the snippet by Hector Tobar covering the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in the Los Angeles Times (3/18/99) some forty years after I left the state to find my own way. Because of free use laws I was unable to publish it in its entirety, certainly hesitated to include it even in an abbreviated form. Still, for the reasons given above, it seemed important to include it. This is how it finally appeared in This Is the Place. Forty Years Later On March 19 of 1999 as I completing This Is the Place, I found an article covering the site of the 2001 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in the Los Angeles Times. That date is some forty years after I left the state to find my own way. It seemed like both an affirmation and an accusation. The headline read, "Salt lake City’s Mono-Cultural Image Gets Multicultural Fix." It definitely caught my eye. The author, Hector Tobar, said this city that would soon be host to the world was famous for its "supposed homogeneity" and that some people still describe it as "alll Mormon, all the time." [This in spite of the fact that the city is now more than half non-Mormon.] A nonprofit developer was intent about providing "real diversity" but believed that the city had "given him the cold shoulder" because his development had become synonymous with that concept. The developer had point out to Tobar that diversity wasn't necessarily considered a positive thing in Salt Lake City, that in those parts, "diversity is a 'D' word." But he also admitted that, as fourth generation Utahan, he is proud of what can be done in the area. Perhaps the Olympics can prod the city toward a more open and accepting future for much still needs to be done. The place I call home is still divided. The promise of change need to be given wings. Click here for Carolyn's short story collection that also explores tolerance and line between fiction and nonfiction.
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Copyright ©2006 Carolyn Howard-Johnson |
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