A Tennessee Jar

About the Book

When Chris Stone returned from the second world war, he was a mess both physically and emotionally.  After being shot down in North Africa, he was patched up by the Germans for reasons known only to them.  His leg had been severely damaged and they had rebuilt his face with plastic surgery, and, to top it off, between operations, his wife writes him that she is divorcing him.  Not that he could blame her, for he well knew he had not only been unfaithful, but indifferent before entering the service.  In a way, the war had opened an avenue of escape from the arid life he lived in California.

But he goes to see her and the children, only to realize she'd fashioned a life with a new husband and there is no place for him in any of their lives.  He decides to return to his birth place, a small town in Tennessee which he fled with the arrogance of youth to find more fertile pastures when he went off to college.  Somehow he knew if he was ever to find himself, he would have to go back and look at his life carefully.  On the way home, he accidentally runs into a woman in a roadhouse, and in many ways she seems as adrift as he, the victim of the poverty of the South, an abusive husband, and a bleak future.

There really is only one person in his life that he could relate to, his grandmother's housekeeper, Florence, who had been a surrogate mother to Chris while he was growing up.  His grandmother had taken him in when his father and mother died, but she'd remained aloof, alone in her room, reading and listening to her music.  It was Florence who took care of Chris as a boy, and it was Florence who remained the only focal point in Chris Stone's life at that point.  He remembered his youth as bleak, only relieved by those touches of humanity like extra food in his lunch bag or mended clothes on his bed at night, and that had always been Florence's doing.

Yet, when he arrives home, his grandmother is suddenly forthcoming, and he begins slowly to realize that in spite of her reticence, she had cared for him too.  He's drawn to her and she begins to tell him about his family, especially his uncle, also named Christopher, who had been a successful doctor in Chicago, but who gave up his lucrative practice to help the people in the local community, only to be murdered with the consent of a clique of  wealthy locals who saw him as a threat to their ordered lives.

Chris comes to understand the wealth of feelings which surrounded this remarkable man, feelings which grew after his death from simple admiration to reverence, until now his acts were being recorded in a book based on the diaries of several of the people who had known him, and he himself had become the center figure in a church founded at his death because those whom he served could not tolerate staying in the old church after his murder.

With Miranda at his side, Chris begins to feel the richness of his heritage, the unbelievable complexity of the lives of those involved, and how he actually belonged somewhere among them, both a product of events and an actor in the ongoing process.

About the Author

At different points in his life the Claude Campbell has been a seaman, a credit union president, a teacher, a factory worker, an airman, a shoe salesman, a professor, a union official, and a short order cook --- all in preparation for his real occupation of writer. He was born in Chicago in 1929, and immediately the whole country was thrown into a depression. He currently lives outside Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife and four cats.