Excerpt: 'Evolution of Calpurnia Tate'

July 1, 2009— -- Twelve-year-old Callie is more into exploring the river, watching animals and all things outdoors than needlework, which disappoints her mother. The story of a preteen growing up in rural Texas in 1899, "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" explores how Callie's interest in nature creates a bond with her previously distant grandfather and fosters her desire to become a scientist.

Read an excerpt from "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly below.

Chapter 1: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

When a young naturalist commences the study of a group of organisms quite unknown to him, he is at first much perplexed to determine what differences to consider ... for he knows nothing of the amount and kind of variation to which the group is subject ...
—Darwin, The Origin of Species

By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat. The heat was a misery for all of us, but it was a special ordeal for Mother in her many petticoats and corset. I was still a few years too young for this singular form of feminine torture. That summer she temporarily gave up her hairpieces, the crimped false fringe and the rolled horsehair rat, platforms on which she daily constructed an elaborate mountain of her own hair. Next she took to sticking her head under the kitchen pump and letting Viola, our quadroon cook, pump away until she was soaked through. We were forbidden by sharp orders to laugh at this unprecedented and astonishing entertainment. As Mother gradually surrendered her dignity to the heat, we discovered (as did Father) that it was best to keep out of her way.

Yes, the heat was a misery, but it also brought me freedom. From noon until three, while the rest of the family lay down in the dim, high-ceilinged rooms of our shuttered house, I headed for the river and enjoyed three whole hours every day of no school, no pestiferous brothers, and no Mother.

My name is Calpurnia Virginia Tate, but most everyone called me Callie Vee. That summer I was eleven years old, the only girl out of seven children. Can you imagine a worse situation? I was spliced midway between three older brothers, Harry, Sam Houston, and Lamar, and three younger brothers, Travis, Sul Ross, and the baby, Jim Bowie whom we called J.B. The younger boys did manage to sleep at midday, sometimes piled atop one another like damp steaming puppies. My Father doused himself with a bucket of tepid well water on the sleeping porch and fell onto his rope bed as if pole-axed. Mother loosened her stays and sprinkled her sheets with cologne but this was only refreshing for a minute or two.

While everyone else tossed and dozed, I made my way down to the banks of the San Marcos River. I got away with this because I had my own room at the far end of the hall from my parents. My brothers all had to share rooms. As far as I could tell, this was the one advantage to being the only girl.

Our house was separated from the river by five acres of wild uncleared growth. It would have been an ordeal to push my way through it except that the other regular river patrons–dogs, deer, brothers–kept a narrow path beaten down through the treacherous sticker-burrs that rose as high as my head, snatching at my hair and pinafore as I folded myself narrow to slide by. Then I spent part of my daily freedom stripped down to my chemise, floating on my back with my shimmy billowing around me in the mild currents, luxuriating in the coolness of the water flowing around me. I looked up at the filmy homes of the webworms high above me in the lush canopy of oaks bending over the river. The webworms seemed to mirror me, floating in their own balloons of gauze in the pale turquoise sky. I was a river cloud, turning gently in the eddies; the webworms were low-lying clouds caught in the trees.

That summer, all the men except for my grandfather Walter Tate cut their hair close and shaved off their thick beards and mustaches. They looked as naked as blind salamanders for the week or so it took to get over the shock of their pale weak chins. Strangely, Grandfather felt no distress from the heat, even with his full white beard tumbling down his chest. He claimed it was because he was a man of regular and moderate habits who never took whiskey before noon. His smelly old swallow-tail coat was hopelessly outdated by then but he wouldn't hear of parting with it. Despite regular spongings with benzene at the hands of our maid SanJuanna, the coat always kept its musty smell and the strange color that was neither black nor green.

Grandfather lived under the same roof with us but was something of a shadowy figure. He had long since turned over the running of the family business to his only son, my father Alfred Tate, and spent his days engaged in "experiments" in his "laboratory" out back. The laboratory was just an old shed that had once been part of the slave quarters. When he wasn't in the laboratory, he was either out hunting specimens or holed up with his moldering books in a dim corner of the library where no one dared disturb him.

I asked Mother if I could cut off my hair, which hung in a dense swelter all the way down my back. She said no, she wouldn't have me running about like a shorn savage. I found this manifestly unfair, to say nothing of hot. So I devised a plan: every week I would cut off an inch of hair–just one stealthy inch–so that Mother wouldn't notice. She wouldn't notice because I would camouflage myself with good manners. When I took on the disguise of a polite young lady, I could often escape her closer scrutiny. She was usually swamped by the constant demands of the household and the ceaseless uproar of my brothers. You wouldn't believe the amount of chaos and commotion six brothers could create. Plus the heat aggravated her crippling sick headaches and she had to resort to a big spoonful of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, known to be the Best Blood Purifier for Women.

That night I took a pair of embroidery scissors and, with great exhilaration and a pounding heart, cut off the first inch. I looked at the soft haystack of hair cupped in my palm. I was striding forth to greet my future in the shiny New Century, a few short months away. It seemed to me a great moment indeed. I slept poorly that night in fear of the morning.

The next day I held my breath coming down the stairs to breakfast. The pecan flapjacks tasted like cardboard. And do you know what happened? Absolutely nothing. No one noticed in the slightest. I was mightily relieved but also thought, well isn't that just like this family. In fact, no one noticed anything until four weeks and four inches went by and our cook Viola gave me a hard look one morning. But she didn't say a word.

By late June it was so hot that for the first time in history Mother left the candles of the chandelier unlit at dinner time. She even let Harry and me skip our piano lessons for two weeks. Which was just as well. Harry sweated on the keys so that they turned hazy along the pattern of the Minuet in G. Nothing Mother or SanJuanna tried could bring the sheen back to the ivory. Besides, our music teacher Miss Brown was ancient and her decrepit horse Juniper had to pull her gig six miles from Prairie Lea. They would both likely collapse on the trip and have to be put down. On consideration, not such a bad idea.

Father, on learning that we would miss our lessons, said, "A good thing, too. A boy needs piano like a snake needs a hoop skirt."

Mother didn't want to hear it. She wanted seventeen-year-old Harry, her oldest, to become a gentleman. She had plans to send him off to the university in Austin fifty miles away when he turned eighteen. According to the newspaper, there were five hundred students at the university, seventeen of them well-chaperoned young ladies in the School of Liberal Arts (with a choice of music, English, or Latin). Father's plan was different; he wanted Harry to be a businessman and one day take over the cotton gin and the pecan orchards and join the Freemasons, as he had. Father apparently didn't think piano lessons were a bad idea for me though, if he considered the matter at all.