It's Good Weather for Fudge. Sue Brannan Walker

during the weekend there were references to Out of Africa. On Sunday, when I was leaving, they very quietly put Out of Africa in my lap, without words. My husband was driving so I was free to read. . . . We started driving in the early afternoon and I was so dazed by the poetry and truth of this great book, that when night came I continued reading Out of Africa with a flashlight. At the end of the book . . . I knew that sublime security that a great, great writer can give to a reader. With her simplicity and “unequalled nobility” I realized that this was one of the most radiant books of my life.

      . . . Because of Out of Africa, I loved Isak Dinesen. . . . I had read Out of Africa . . . with so much love that the author had become my imaginary friend. Although I never wrote to her or sought to meet her, she was there in her stillness, her serenity, and her great wisdom to comfort me. In this book, shining with her humanity, . . . her people became my people and her landscape my landscape.

      My initial response to reading McCullers was not unlike McCullers’s first reading of Dinesen. I encountered McCullers when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the early 1980s. I recall telling a friend that I felt McCullers had somehow anticipated my own life, especially adolescence, and written her work, in advance, for me to experience when the time was right. Reading her was a sort of literary déjà vu. I felt a common sense of experience—growing up queer in the South, feeling from my earliest moments of consciousness a sense of isolation from those around me, a sense of antipathy to the place I was born, a desire for something greater than myself that I first found via music then via literature, and perhaps strongest of all, a profound sense of loneliness. I recall the strength of my identification with McCullers herself and the characters she had created. Thus began what has been a passionate desire to explore her work and thus my own psyche.

      Reading Sue Walker’s “It’s Good Weather for Fudge” was/is an emotional experience for me, as was/is Walker’s reading of McCullers. Walker’s poem not only augments my personal feelings for McCullers and her work, but it also provokes a new response of association to Walker’s life and work. I recognize myself, again, in McCullers’s work and see myself reflected in Walker’s life as well. We—Sue, Carson, and I—are part of a nexus of identification, association, and love. We are “imaginary friends,” as McCullers wrote of her literary relationship with Dinesen. I like to think that McCullers was comforted by the idea that her readers might respond with love, or at least empathy, to her work. And I know that Sue and I have responded with love and recognition to this notion and in turn have felt comforted by it.

      “The places of our childhood mold who we are and stick in our memories as if we had a glue pot and had pasted them inside the scrapbook of our brains.”

      Sue Walker, “It’s Good Weather for Fudge”

      I feel a similar sense of associative identification when I read “It’s Good Weather for Fudge.” My identification with McCullers and Walker has an address, a religion, and a soundtrack. The connection is explained in part by the particulars of the South in which we three grew up, and part of it is explained by the universal experience of loneliness. I feel a wonderful and frightening similarity in McCullers’s experience of her hometown of Columbus, Georgia; Sue Walker’s experience growing up in Foley, Alabama: and my own experience growing up in Garrison, Texas, in the most Southern-identified part of Texas. Although Carson and I fled the South, “the South is where [our] bones belong,” as Sue writes in her poem.