Jo Carson Jo CarsonJo Carson's stormy relationship with
Kate, an 11 year-old mare, is evoked
in the play Whispering to Horses,
which premieres Wednesday at 7 Stages. photo by Murray Lee
By Dan Hulbert, Staff Writer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, May 11, 1997
Johnson City, Tenn.
Jo Carson loves to ride her horse Kate along the fire roads of the East Tennessee mountains because of the surprises they find but a black bear - rearing up on its hind legs about 50 feet ahead of them - was not exactly what the playwright had in mind.
The bear did, however, provide the ultimate test of Carson's horse-whispering skill.
"Kate comes to a stop and looks at the bear, and he's looking back," says Carson, a writer and storyteller whose work twangs with the genuine voices of mountain hollows and factory towns. "I know Kate can smell him because I can. She's anxious but does not try to bolt. This is a horse that once got scared to death by a puffed-up mama turkey but now she's listenin' to me. I lean down and whisper, 'Whoa baby easy, easy.' So we just stood there, and the bear gets down on his fours and walk into the woods. All this takes six seconds, but that's a very long time under the circumstances."
Atlanta audiences can meet Jo and Kate in Carson's play, Whispering to Horses making its world premiere Wednesday At 7 Stages (404-523-7647). Or rather, audiences can encounter their spirits in the guises of a character named Pat and a puppetlike sculpture named Kate, formed from wisteria vines. The heartwarming drama (which was begun before 1995's "The Horse Whisperer" and bears little resemblance to that novel) traces a woman-horse relationship from all-out war ("she ran backwards into things just to knock me off') to an understanding so intimate that the 11 year-old buckskin mare will now run to the rhythm of whatever Carson is singing.
"That horse loves her old Hank Williams," says Carson, a small, slender woman of 50. She has a shy, twinkly way of glancing sideways to see if her jokes are landing, as if she were peering around the edge of herself.
Whispering is much more than a middleaged "My Friend Flicka." It contains another, darker, parallel love story, involving Pat and her father, Price. It's not precisely the story of the playwright and her fattier, Pierce Carson - a former cash-register salesman who used to read Shakespeare to his children at bedtime - but the similarities are striking.
"What worries me is that some people will think this is family history and I was an abused child, which I absolutely was not " Carson continues in the croaky voice that sounds like everyone's ideal of a back-hollow storyteller. "Corporal punishment was the fashion of the '50s, and I was a nasty and dangerous liar - a child who would lie even when the truth would get more for her."
Then comes the perfectly timed pause that made Carson a beloved raconteur on National Public Radio.
"It was good training for a fiction writer."
Canon lives in the house where she grew up alone except for Fudora (as in Welty), her venerable black dog. It's a modest bungalow decorated with friends' artwork and the occasional skulls and feathers she's picked up on rambles with Kate.
Filling a big chunk of sky -l ike a green curtain pulled behind the sooty factories and warehouses of Johnson City - is the face of Buffalo Mountain. Carson brags that it takes only 15 minutes for her three-quarter-ton pickup to haul both her horses (Kate and Farley, a younger gray stallion) to the top.
A few blocks in another direction is the Cottage a favorite haunt, the kind of vanishing corner tavern where salt and pepper shakers are neatly paired along the length of the bar because homecooked plates are as big a draw as the beer. Carson says she quaffs "way too much" of her preferred Corona while talking horses and literature with Al Benrz, her horse keeper, unofficial editor/critic and longtime friend.
"There's no cheap sentiment or easy tricks in Jo's writing, just solid storytelling," Benrz says. "When Swamp Gravy [Carson's collection of Colquitt oral histories told by citizens of the South Georgia town] went to the Kennedy Center, the place was packed with Washington big shots and sophisticates. No one knew how they'd respond. By the end of the evening, Jo's writing had them all singing 'Amazing Grace' at the top of their lungs. "
Carson says "fixin' to" when she's about to do something; she can put a party on the floor with hog jokes. Yet back in her 20s, when people thought that artists only exist in New York, Carson moved up there and lasted about a year.
"I was homesick for the mountains. These guys . . . ," she waves her hand up toward the ragged green peaks "get in your blood. Coming home was the best move I ever made. I began to hear stones in a way that I never could when I couldn't wail to leave."
Carson was broke, discouraged and 40 when "Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet," her collection of poem-like vignettes based on conversations she overheard around Johnson City, was finally published in 1989. She had spun fine cloth from the rough muslin of local speech. Today, proverbial wild horses couldn't drag Carson out of her beloved "J.C."
"I'm one of the few people I know who lives where they started out. Literally. My work is very tied to this place. I have comfort here. I can take risks here."
Risk was the word for Daytrips, Carson's first play, a harrowing, often weirdly funny account of caring for a mother with Alzheimer's. When Daytrips won the 1989 Kesselring Award for the best debut work by a playwright, Carson floored a crowd at New York's swanky Player's Club by declaring that the $10,000 prize represented a year's income. With the success of Gravy, Carson has become a virtual oral-history factory, with commissions from around the country and an income that more justly reflects her talents.
But it's in her original plays that the risk - emotional, even more than financial - remains high. She recalls the day when the self-exposing idea for Whispering came to her.
"Kate was a terror, kicking and biting, so I found myself one afternoon laying into her with a piece of PVC pipe. In that moment it washed over me that I'd got the horse I deserved, every bit as mean and willful as I had been. Suddenly I knew why my dad got so mad . . . why I never thought I'd get closer to him than the business end of a switch. It didn't work with me, so why should I expect it to work with the horse?"
In the play, the ghost of Pat's grandmother steps out of a mirror to tell the old Native American trick of calming a horse with whispers. In real life, the writer tried it with Kate and, "For the first time I really got her attention: She put her ear to my mouth. It started a whole new relationship. Kate is still a 'boss mare,' but now she thinks I'm one step up the horse ladder."
In the play, the aging father Price no longer a shouter, grows close to the middle-aged Pat as they care for a dying wife and mother. Over games of cribbage, he explains his old fear that without the switch, his feckless, ever fibbing daughter would have lost touch with reality.
"I have to be a little scared," says Carson, "or I'm not getting to the heart of what I'm writing about. The main thing to understand is that when I speak of my father today, I speak of my best friend."
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