An Elephant
in Tennessee

Elaine Neil Orr

Time is  . . . a kind of climate in which things are, and when a thing happens it begins to live and keeps on living and stands solid in Time like the tree that you can walk around.
-Robert Penn Warren, “Blackberry Winter”

Chocolate cream pie was a favorite dessert when I was growing up in Nigeria, a daughter of missionaries. This pie wasn’t made with Jell-O pudding but was cooked on the range, poured into a homemade crust, topped with whipped meringue, and toasted to a light brown in the oven. Then it was cooled until meal time. There might have been a day when we ate chocolate pie and my father didn’t tell the story of the circus elephant but most of the time he did. 

“I don’t eat chocolate pie without remembering the elephant,” he would say.

Whether or not we encouraged him, we looked at him, my sister, mother, and I. “The circus was coming to town. The store windows were full of posters.” My father’s story-telling wasn’t original in language or complex in sub-plot. It was direct and simple. What was original was his own enjoyment, the way his face came alive, the way he held his hands up, as if he were spreading hundreds of posters on the storefronts and fences of small town Tennessee. When I was a young girl first hearing this story in Nigeria, I could tell my father was enchanted, so I was too.

“Daddy took me,” he said.

This three word sentence is important. Being taken was a sign of blessing in the 1920s when my father was a boy, and it was a sign of blessing for me. One was taken to Kingsway to shop or to the river to swim or even to a rural church where Coca-Cola was substituted for wine in the Eucharist.

My father was the oldest child in a family of six. He would have had two younger sisters at the time this story takes place. The first, Dorothy, might have been three when he was five. But she doesn’t figure in the narrative. Only my father, his father, an elephant, and his mother play a role.

“The day came,” my father says. “Well, we found a spot on the road where the circus would pass. People were lined up. The first thing I heard was the band.”

Even though I was sitting at a table in a sunny breakfast room in Nigeria, I could imagine it. The street wouldn’t look like a Nigerian street with open markets and boys rolling tire cylinders with sticks and young girls balancing a tray of oranges on their heads as elder men walked by in flowing robes. It would look like a street in my picture books, with neat rows of houses and tidy gardens and someone’s puppy running loose and a little white girl in a yellow wagon being pulled by her mother and a white boy holding a red balloon. I could see the band being led by a man with a large stomach, holding a flag. There must have been a trombone and a drum and a trumpet or two. It was all quite vivid, straight out of the books.

“Well” (my father used “well” often), “we were right there in front.” 

For some reason I imagined a garden wall behind them, perhaps a stone wall, though I don’t remember my father mentioning one. 

“Finally I saw the clowns.”

I don’t, in fact, remember ever learning the name of the town where this story takes place. It was Any Town, USA, my only frame of reference being those children’s books. I probably first heard the story when I was three or four, near my father’s age in the story, and it was thereafter fixed in memory and unchanged even when I heard the story at age forty. Only recently have I wondered what town my father’s family lived in when the circus came. He went to first grade in Louisville, Kentucky, while his father was at Southern Seminary. Much later, he told me a story of walking with his dad down to the Ohio to place hand-made boats in that great river. I don’t think the circus memory comes from Louisville. Louisville was too large. The story my father told conjured a smaller setting. Recently, I’ve come to believe his family may have been in Athens, Tennessee, where they lived before going to Louisville and only six miles from Niota, Tennessee, where my father was born premature and put in a shoe box filled with cotton and warmed by a light bulb to keep him alive.

Athens, the largest town in McMinn County, has a population of thirteen thousand now. It might have been nearly as large in 1923. It would have claimed at least several thousand residents when my father was five. Textile mills, flour mills, and timber mills dominated the county’s industry and by the 1920s, furniture and appliance factories had arrived. It was a busy town, though most people would have been working class. Even tiny Niota, where the family lived when he was born, had a depot, so in his earliest years, my father might have taken the train with his family to Athens. Etowah, another town in the county, had a Carnegie Library by 1915, though I doubt my father visited at that young age. On the historical register of buildings for McMinn County, I find a two-story white wooden building with a weathered General Merchandise sign above the door. It’s more likely he entered a store like that and often. I find several Victorian homes and a few colonial style, large and imposing. These were the homes of the wealthy, the factory and mill owners whose yards might have included a garden wall. The impressive red brick churches of McMinn County feature square towers and severe arches. 

In the picture of the Carnegie Library, I see hills in the distance. Etowah, Athens, and Niota are situated amidst a series of narrow, elongated ridges and low hills. Though I can’t say why, I did imagine the town of the circus story as hilly, my father and his father at the base of an incline, the street rising behind them. I always pictured the circus coming around a bend and heading up that hill, surprising them. And that might be because of the climax of the story.

“Well, then there were jugglers and a monkey.” 

One of the many books my sister and I shared as youngsters in Nigeria was the Golden book, Winky Dink, copyrighted in 1956, when I was two. Winky Dink goes to the zoo. I have it in my hands now, marred by age and a few Crayola marks on the title page. Winky Dink begins on a beautiful sunny morning when blond-haired Winky decides to visit the zoo. In the first pages, he visits a lion and tiger inhabiting the same cage and two monkeys in a cage. Being alone, he wishes someone were with him and along comes a red balloon. He grabs it. The next thing you know, Winky Dink sees a set of bears and then an elephant. By this point in the story, the balloon is carrying Winky Dink up into the air, from one cage and set of animals to another. On the last page, Winky Dink is happily sitting in the lap of a large brown bear. No doubt this is one book that supplied me with mental images for my father’s tale.

I don’t remember my father narrating all of the cages that must have passed by carrying the various animals that circulated in circuses. I don’t remember any mention of trapeze artists or circus horses or dainty ladies.

The Cherokee were living in McMinn County when Europeans arrived. The village of Pumpkinton (a corruption of Potemkin town) was located two miles east of present-day Athens. In 1836, General John Wool arrived in Athens to help coordinate the Cherokee Removal. Initially voluntary, the operation became a forced removal in 1838 when many Cherokee refused to leave. The removal culminated in the forced march west that became known as the Trail of Tears. Wool set up his headquarters at the Bridges Hotel, located across the street from the McMinn County Courthouse.

The county was divided during the Civil War, sending twelve units to the Union army and eight units to the Confederate side.

That such a small town in an insignificant county in eastern Tennessee could be the center of so much history surprises me. That my father might have seen the circus there in 1923, against such a history, unsettles my picture-book image of the story. None of these details emerged in my father’s telling, though I expect if he were still alive, he would affirm that he had at least a whiff of these accounts. He was an observant man, often quiet, except when he told his stories. 

Let’s say I supplied some of what my father left out: trapeze artists, a slew of clowns, an entire band, a lady standing on a horse as it trotted along. The story seemed to take a while and wind around like the street. “Finally,” my father said, “here came the elephant.” He would pause significantly with every telling. “Well, it kept coming and got closer and then.” We all took a breath. “Then it seemed to veer off the street and come straight for me.” Another pause, my father’s face full of delight in his drama. “I was so scared, daddy picked me up and put me on a tree limb just above us. And I watched the elephant go by.” The story of Zacchaeus was a handy reference here. I could see my father out of harm’s way, looking down. He’d end the story with a chuckle. “We went home and had dinner and mother had a chocolate pie for dessert. Every time I eat chocolate pie, I think of that elephant.” He chuckled again, delighted more in his memory than in our response, which was largely silent but benevolent because we loved him. The feeling I had when he told the story was that he was loved. The story was a parable, not of elephants or American streets or hills and valleys. It was a parable of The Benevolent Father, The Benevolent Mother, and the Chosen Son.

The father delivers the boy into the branches of the tree.

The mother feeds him the most delicious food possible to imagine.

I have the recipe for the chocolate cream pie my mother made in Nigeria. I typed it onto an unlined index card at the family dining table before I left Nigeria in 1970. I’m sure my Grandmother Neil’s recipe was similar if not identical. 

Chocolate Cream Pie

1 C sugar

6 T flour

½ t. salt

2 C milk

2 squares unsweetened chocolate

2 eggs, separated

1 T butter

1 t. vanilla

4 T sugar

Baked pie shell 

 Mix sugar, flour, and salt. Blend in milk. Add chocolate. Cook over boiling water, stirring, until thickened. Beat egg yolks and blend in a little of the hot mixture. Combine all and cook, stirring, three min. Remove from heat, stir in butter and vanilla. Cool slightly before pouring into cooled pie shell.

Top with meringue made of egg whites and 4 tablespoons sugar. Brown meringue in 400 degree oven.

But what about the elephant? In the wild, elephants walk up to thirty miles a day while constantly foraging for food and water. They live in matriarchal societies and are active up to eighteen hours a day; they don’t develop the arthritis and food diseases that are prevalent in zoos and circuses due to standing on hard surfaces for long hours. In circus training, elephants were sometimes shocked, often in the stomach on the way to perform. Elephants in their natural habitats live over seventy years unless poisoned or killed by poachers, while captive elephants are usually dead before the age of forty. Elephant calves are dependent on their mother’s milk for up to four years, are loved and protected by the entire herd, and when separated from their mother, cry tears of misery. Circus elephants are chained by at least one foot more than half of every day. They sway when mentally distressed or weave when they walk. 

I have always credited my father’s crisis in the story—his belief that a rogue elephant was veering off the road and heading toward him—to his childish imagination. He saw the largest animal he had ever witnessed, much larger than a cow, and it frightened him. But perhaps the elephant was attempting to veer off. The longer I look at this story of childhood innocence the more difficult it becomes.

I have imagined that the point of Dad’s story was the chocolate pie, the happy ending. Isn’t that why he chuckled at the denouement? But what if the point of the story is the middle, the elephant, the fear, my father’s fear: that life might throw him a curve ball, that he might not be as protected as his parents’ love suggested he was or that he might not rise to the occasion when sorely tested, that every moment is full of contingency? In that case, the chuckling might have been the chuckle escaping Moses’s lips at seeing the burning bush even if he enjoyed some goat stew later in the day. The chuckle of awe in the face of the sublime. And the sublime, by the way, isn’t a field of daffodils. The sublime is the Grand Canyon, Mount Blanc, Ahab’s whale, even, perhaps, a circus elephant.

But what happens when the sublime suffers? The glaciers melt, the polar bear starves, the Danube is polluted, the elephant loses its mind? The elephant, my father’s elephant, may have been beaten, even kicked in the stomach. Its ear may have been tattered, its feet painful to walk on, its hide raw.

And what, if anything, did my father know about the Cherokee and their displacement? Did any clues of their existence remain? His extended family was not wealthy by any means. They were mill workers or farmers. They lived modest lives in small cottages. In early photographs of my father in Tennessee, taken not when he lived there but when he visited, he and the other children are barefoot. The name “Niota” originates from a fictional Native American chief in a dime novel.

In 1923, the year in which I place this story, Calvin Coolidge was president. The first Yankees stadium opened its doors in the Bronx. The Hollywood sign was inaugurated. James Dickey and Hank Williams were born. And my father was kindergarten age though he was not in kindergarten as there was no kindergarten in American schools then. After graduation from Carson Newman College, my grandfather must have served as a Baptist preacher before going to seminary. My father would have been in the care of his mother every day. He had extended family all around him. Once my grandfather went to Louisville and the family moved there, they never again resided in Tennessee. They landed in South Carolina, first Great Falls and later Fairfax, where my father and mother met. 

In Nigeria where my father was a career missionary with my mother, he studied lizards in the early hours of the day, as others might watch birds, while he drank his coffee before the rest of the house was awake, sitting on the back porch or the water tank. According to my mother, he knew their territories, their habits, what they ate, how they regrew their tails if severed, how they fought and mated. He was the gardener in the family, coaxed into it early by his mother. He ended up on a mission field in an area that was a natural habitat for elephants though human populations had decimated the herds and driven them to more remote areas. He and my mother did see a herd once emerge from the trees and cross the road at their leisurely pace. My parents remained in their Toyota as the elephants passed. At the end of my parents’ first tour, some fellow missionaries voted not to invite them to return for a second tour because they found my father insufficiently “spiritual.” He might have been insufficiently evangelical but he was not lacking in spirituality. He intuited the rhythms of nature. He meditated daily, drinking coffee and communing with whatever wildlife might visit: hummingbird, lizard, deer, pelican or ibis, when he was at a North Carolina beach. An elder missionary set things straight and my parents spent their professional lives in Nigeria and Ghana.

The more I think of it, the more I imagine my father felt the elephant’s distress, its displacement. The elephant did veer off. It was trying to escape. While it’s fanciful to imagine the elephant felt my father’s sympathy, it may have seen the child as a gateway out of its misery. I can’t say with any certainty that my father had first-hand knowledge of Cherokee displacement. But he was likely aware of his own impending removal: from rural Tennessee to Louisville, from his mother’s circle of care to public school.

He may have been in a year of limbo. According to a cousin, by 1922, the family had already moved to Louisville and in 1923, our grandmother, my father’s mother, returned to Athens to have her third child. This would mean that my father and his first sister had traveled with my grandmother back to Athens and McMinn County, leaving his father behind. It’s highly plausible that the circus came at some point in that limbo when his father came to visit, perhaps to collect them and take them back with him to Louisville. By now my father was established as the eldest, the blond-haired boy of whom much would be expected because he had been chosen.

My father would go on to have a happy childhood in Louisville, Kentucky, and Great Falls, and Fairfax, South Carolina. He was a star athlete, though he with some friends decided that if seventh grade was as hard as they’d heard, they would fail on purpose and they did. Later, in high school, my father often deserted his family in Fairfax and went to live with a family full of boys in the country, the Lightsey clan, including his best friend, Ralph Lightsey. The two of them enlisted to fight in World War II. Ralph didn’t come back. My father did. I always believed he had some survivor’s guilt. I have also always believed that a direct line connects my father’s survival and his decision to join my mother as a missionary. I don’t think he was as interested in saving souls as he was in “doing some good” after that war. Perhaps in this way he was not suitable missionary material.

I hazard a more impressionist notion and that is that a line connects the wayward elephant, my father’s upheaval from Niota and Athens, his life as the eldest child of a Baptist preacher, his sometimes dilatant teenage and young adult years, his return from battle in which he served as a tail gunner, and his mornings of lizard communion in Nigeria. Else why tell the story of the circus elephant over and over, so often, in fact, that it became my father’s signature story.

McMinn County likely offered a veneer of calm and stability to a small white boy in the early 1920s, but it was a fractious place. Imagine the splittings caused by the Civil War, the removal of the Cherokee. And then there was the everyday labor and challenge faced by those struggling white families like my father’s extended family, laboring for bread and likely no roses. Though there was chocolate pie. 

That elephant followed my father all of his life until he died of a brain aneurysm when he was eighty-three. It followed him like that vagabond followed the young protagonist in Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter.” In that story, a narrator looks back on the incident from a child’s point of view, narrating a stranger’s passage through his rural Tennessee yard. The boy is preparing to go out. There’s been a flood. He wants to see the creek and the damage. His father has gone out ahead of him. Dressing, he resists putting on his stockings and boots, telling his mother “It’s June.” His mother, calling from another room, says “It’s June, . . . but it’s blackberry winter.”

“I had lifted my head to reply to that, to make one more test of what was in that tone, when I happened to see the man,” the boy narrates. 

By the boy’s calculation, the man is coming from the wrong direction and he doesn’t belong in rural Tennessee. He’s wearing “khaki pants, and a dark wool coat with stripes in it, and a gray felt hat. He had on a gray shirt with blue stripes in it, and no tie. But I could see a tie, blue and reddish, sticking in his coat-pocket. Everything was wrong about what he wore . . . Those clothes, . . . didn’t belong there in our back yard, coming down the path, in Middle Tennessee, miles away from any big town, and even a mile off the pike.” 

The boy shuts his eyes, desiring the oddly loping man to disappear. But the man keeps coming.

The boy never learns who the stranger is, though his mother comes out and offers to feed him in exchange for some clean-up work in the yard. Later, after the boy has seen the flood, he will return to the house. His father will be there. He will pay the vagabond for half a day’s work. The boy follows the man out of the yard. Eventually the stranger turns around, leans down, and says to him: “’Stop following me. You don’t stop following me and I cut yore throat, you little son-of-a-bitch.’”

“That was what he said, for me not to follow him. But I did follow him, all the years,” the narrator tells us.

So I must make a correction. The elephant didn’t follow my father. My father followed the elephant. Whatever the trauma or exhilaration or awe my father experienced seeing the circus elephant, he carried it all of his life. The chocolate pie isn’t the point. The delicious reward isn’t the point. The chocolate pie is the vehicle for the point, which is the inexplicable elephant in Tennessee.