Long after the rest of the house has gone dark, one weak lamp is still burning. Miss Sook is propped up in bed with a heap of napkins in her lap, squinting as she darns tablecloths that were a wedding present to her mother eighty years earlier. They have been used perhaps twice a year since, and they show it. She treats them as if they were spun on heaven’s looms anyway, because her mother taught her that even a meal of well water and cold cornbread deserves a properly laid table. When the boy in the next room wakes and scolds her for staying up, she admits that the thought of all the coming company makes her head whirl. The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote keeps returning to that lamp: to the private, slightly frightened labour that goes into a public feast, and to the woman who does it.
A Household Ruled by Breakfast
The world of the story is drawn in a few strokes and an enormous amount of food. Breakfast in this rambling country house is served at half past five and is the meal that matters: fried chicken, ham, catfish, squirrel in season, grits and gravy, collards, biscuits and pound cake, laid out for Uncle B. and as many as fifteen hands from his cotton farms. Sook cooks it all, with the narrator and a small terrier as her assistants.
The boy is living here because of a custody fight elsewhere in the family, and he is being raised, in practice, by a cousin in her sixties whom the town considers simple. Capote does not argue with the town. He shows Sook marvelling at a lake called Titicaca in the boy’s geography atlas, crowing over “our” report cards, and talking to herself in the manner of solitary people, and lets the reader work out that her innocence is a kind of clear sight. The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote is one of the most affectionate portraits of an eccentric in American short fiction.
The Call on Molly Henderson
The sharpest scene is a visit. Sook, who has never paid a social call in her life, puts on a straw cartwheel hat trimmed with faded velvet roses and walks to the house of Molly Henderson, mother of the boy who has been tormenting her young cousin at school. She comes back two hours later, drained, and reports a home scrubbed clean and bitterly cold, with a tin roof and no fire, where she declined coffee because she suspected there was none to offer.
What she says next is the story’s real argument. Sook does not feel pity. She feels shame, and she is careful to explain whose. “We really all of us ought to have everything we want,” she decides, and the shame belongs to anyone who holds something extra while neighbours go without. Capote sets this against the pride of the Hendersons, who refuse the school’s free lunches and, in Molly’s case, an offer of spare quilts. Hardship of the kind the Great Depression brought to Alabama sits under every page of The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote, and the story is unusually honest that charity can wound the people it means to help.
The Day the Thanksgiving Visitor Came
The holiday chapter is a small masterpiece of crowd management. Guests arrive hours early because most of them live on isolated farms, river hamlets and lumber camps and are starved for company. A tiny centenarian in a red bonnet turns up before nine. One family arrives furious after two blowouts in thirty miles. The men inspect a mint-green Chevrolet as though it were a museum piece, the women fill the parlour with talk and perfume, and the four Conklin daughters take turns at an untuned piano. Later, alone before a mirror, the old lady powders her cheeks and compliments herself out loud, and the boy, watching unseen, cheers up at once.
Underneath the comedy runs dread, because the guest the boy fears most has been invited, and The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote builds the tension through the parlour games and piano songs with real patience. What happens when Uncle B. finishes saying grace is best met unprepared. It is enough to say that the boy’s plan is clever, that the story’s sympathies shift in a way he does not expect, and that Sook later finds him, saves him a drumstick and the pulley bone, and says something he spends the rest of his life coming to understand.
The faults of The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote are real but brief. The narrator’s household depends on Black workers who appear only as unnamed helpers described in the vocabulary of 1932, and that blind spot is impossible to miss today. The visiting boy is more emblem than person: his gentleness at home is reported rather than shown, and his choices at the party are left almost wholly unexplained. And a reader new to Buddy and Sook will feel some of the story’s last notes less keenly, since they lean on an ending that belongs to the earlier tale. Content-wise, expect childhood cruelty, corporal punishment, poverty and a fleeting thought of self-harm.
Truman Capote Goes Home
Truman Capote (1924-1984) spent part of his boyhood in Monroeville, Alabama, handed over to his mother’s relatives, and his next-door friend there was Harper Lee, who later gave his likeness to the character Dill. By the time this story appeared he was famous for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and for In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and the return to that Alabama kitchen reads as a deliberate retreat from celebrity into memory. The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote is the middle of three tales about Buddy and Sook, and it can be read alone, though it gains a great deal from knowing the first. The prose is plainer than the lush early Capote, closer to the clean line of the Kansas book, with the comic timing of a born raconteur.
Not everyone in the family welcomed it. One of Capote’s aunts complained that he had invented an unhappy childhood for a decent, comfortable household, which says something about how freely he shaped memory into fiction. When the story was filmed for television, the crew worked at a historic house in Pike Road, Alabama, with Capote and a crowd of friends and relations watching.
Where It Leaves You
The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote ends not at the table but on a later autumn evening, with Sook sending a gift of chrysanthemums down the road and warning the bearer, half seriously, that they are lions. It is an odd, perfect last image for a story about how kindness can bite. Read it the night before the holiday, ideally aloud. Readers who want a longer, rougher Thanksgiving should try So Far Gone by Jess Walter, where a family argument over the holiday table detonates a whole life, and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, which shares Capote’s feel for a lonely Southern child in a kitchen full of grown-up secrets.