James Lee Burke Quote
This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives. That green-purple field of new cane was rooted in rib cage and eye socket. But what of the others whose lives had begun here and ended in other places? The ones who became prostitutes in cribs on Hopkins Street in New Iberia and Jane’s Alley in New Orleans, sliced their hands open with oyster knives, laid bare their shin bones with the cane sickle, learned the twelve-string blues on the Red Hat gang and in the camps at Angola with Leadbelly and Hogman Matthew Maxey, were virtually cooked alive in the castiron sweatboxes of Camp A, and rode Jim Crow trains North, as in a biblical exodus, to southside Chicago and the magic of 1925 Harlem, where they filled the air with the music of the South and the smell of cornbread and greens and pork chops fixed in sweet potatoes, as though they were still willing to forgive if we would only acknowledge their capacity for forgiveness. Tolstoy asked how much land did a man need. Just enough to let him feel the pull of the earth on his ankles and the claim it lays on the quick as well as the dead.
This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives. That green-purple field of new cane was rooted in rib cage and eye socket. But what of the others whose lives had begun here and ended in other places? The ones who became prostitutes in cribs on Hopkins Street in New Iberia and Jane’s Alley in New Orleans, sliced their hands open with oyster knives, laid bare their shin bones with the cane sickle, learned the twelve-string blues on the Red Hat gang and in the camps at Angola with Leadbelly and Hogman Matthew Maxey, were virtually cooked alive in the castiron sweatboxes of Camp A, and rode Jim Crow trains North, as in a biblical exodus, to southside Chicago and the magic of 1925 Harlem, where they filled the air with the music of the South and the smell of cornbread and greens and pork chops fixed in sweet potatoes, as though they were still willing to forgive if we would only acknowledge their capacity for forgiveness. Tolstoy asked how much land did a man need. Just enough to let him feel the pull of the earth on his ankles and the claim it lays on the quick as well as the dead.
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About James Lee Burke
Wirt Williams, reviewing Burke's first novel, Half of Paradise (1965), in the New York Times, compared his writing to Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway, but concluded "Mr. Burkes' literary forebear is Thomas Hardy."
Burke's 1982 novel, Two for Texas, was made into a 1998 TV movie of the same name. Burke has also written five miscellaneous crime novels (including Two for Texas), two short-story collections, four books starring protagonist Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, four books starring Billy Bob's cousin Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland, and two books starring Weldon Avery Holland, grandson of legendary Texas lawman Hackberry Holland.