History, Reimagined

What started as "43 pages of mess" has become two novels for Steve Yates, a Springfield, Mo., native, a University of Arkansas alumnus and the winner of the 2012 Juniper Prize. Yates will return to Fayetteville to read from the second novel, "The Teeth of the Souls," when the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective meets at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Nightbird Books.

Yates, a veteran of the University of Arkansas Press who is now the assistant director of the University Press of Mississippi, credits Jim Whitehead of the UA writing program for turning his not-so-short story into a novel in the first place.

"It was the last workshop I took at the university," he recalls, "and Rust Hills was there as the visiting writer. I had been toying with this story from my hometown for such a long time, and I turned in this big mess of a 43-page story."

Hills told him some short stories are chairs, some are slightly less developed stools and this was a quilt, Yates remembers. "You've got the ending to your first novel," Whitehead added.

Yates' reaction?

"I was nonplussed," he says.

"I had been writing short stories and publishing them and having a ball doing it. But the notion of spending 400 pages on something was so terrifying. Still, it actually freed me up: 'Big Jim' told me to do this."

Yates left Fayetteville in 1998, and the first novel, "Morkan's Quarry," came out in 2010. The second has just been released. In between, there was an unrelated collection of short stories, "Some Kinds of Love: Stories" -- which Yates says he worked on when he didn't know what came next in the story of the Morkan family.

In the first novel, a Springfield quarry owner, Michael Morkan, is coerced into giving up the mine's black powder to Sterling Price and the Confederate Missouri State Guard. Labeled as a traitor and Southern sympathizer, Morkan is imprisoned in St. Louis, taken from his beloved Cora Slade and his son, Leighton. His son must fight to free his father, keep the quarry and save the family name. While generals from both sides and even bushwhackers make appearances in "Morkan's Quarry," the novel's heroes are preachers, tailors, nurses and limestone miners -- and Yates learned all about mining from a book he found, checked out and kept from the University Libraries in Fayetteville. The 1906 "Rock Excavation: Methods and Costs" by Halbert Powers Gillette cost him $185 in lost book fees, but every time he had a question, "the answer was right there in that book."

"The Teeth of the Souls" -- the title comes from what Judith calls Leighton's limestone, Yates says -- starts in 1865, when Leighton Morkan chooses a marriage of land and convenience with Patricia Grünhaagen Weitzer, daughter of a German banking family, although his heart belongs to his childhood friend and former slave, Judith.

"It's about a lie that became a marriage, and a marriage that became a lie," Yates says.

Both novels owe their roots to historic events in Springfield when a 1906 triple lynching inspired a unique path to peace.

"The story in the shadows, almost impossible to corroborate, was that a white limestone quarry manager gave his black miners the dynamite to mine wealthy streets, Walnut residences or South Street businesses," Yates says. "The violent calculus being brutally simple: stop the second mob, or we blow your castles sky high.

"I know the Marblehead Quarry manager's name, I even know some of his relations, and I'll bet, if the governor of Missouri at the time kept a vigilant diary, there's a pretty remarkable entry around April 14, 1906. But that's not the truth that the novelist needs to be about," Yates concludes. "The novelist is after that slant truth in the shadow, the human heart breaking, and what the human heart's answer might be to the very pit, the Hellish void in that shadow. As Emily Dickinson taught us: 'The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.'"

NAN What's Up on 03/27/2015