We Called Him Kilgo – Remembering A Special Teacher

By Tom Poland
April 11, 2013

Spring commencements send new waves of students into life and work. Eventually some will recall a special teacher who changed their life. Too often it will be too late to thank them.

DOES LIFE HAVE A SECRET PLAN? … Is one’s destiny planned all along? When one too many meaningful coincidences take place you get the feeling something mysterious is at work. Call it fate. Call it predestination. Attribute it to God. Whatever the force, it reveals your true path. Such was the case with my most memorable teacher at the University of Georgia. It was mystifying how the man kept coming back into my life … even after he died.

It’s the spring of 1968 at the University of Georgia. A windy morning. Dogwood petals blow about. Inside a Park Hall classroom James Kilgo, in a blue-and-white seersucker suit, is reading from William Faulkner’s The Bear, that classic story in Go Down Moses. Main character Issac McCaslin is lost deep in woods when he undergoes a pivotal moment.

As Kilgo reads and the wilderness coalesced, I glance over my shoulder through a dogwood-shaded window to see Peggy Culbertson walking up the North Campus sidewalk. It was a curious juxtaposition. The moment refuses to die: two passions—my high school beauty and English literature—merge amidst a flurry of dogwood petals. But other things made that English 102 course memorable, chiefly the aura of James Patrick Kilgo. We called our professor one name. We called him Kilgo.

Kilgo had auburn hair, an auburn beard, and cut a striking figure in those seersucker suits. The girls adored him. I liked his passion for literature. His eyes held fire. Not one moment in his classroom was devoted to tedium and yet I made a miserable showing. I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it and life kept pricking me with reminders.
 
All those years ago little did I know that coincidences, parallels, and connections with Kilgo would occur in the decades ahead. Sitting in James Dickey’s living room in 1989 Dickey mentions a book … I read a book I like a lot. The title had something to do with ivory bills, he said.

Deep Enough for Ivorybills, I said. James Kilgo wrote it.

He’s good, said Dickey. He’s good.
Deep Enough for Ivorybills began as a column for the Athens Banner-Herald that shared Kilgo’s hunting, fishing, and outdoor stories from the Pee Dee swamps of Darlington County South Carolina. Compiled and rewritten in book form the columns revealed his hunt for a place in the soul and heart spacious enough for beauty and mystery—a sanctuary deep enough for ivorybills.

All the many years later I wanted to know more about my old professor. The New Georgia Encyclopedia told me this: Trained as a scholar in American literature, Kilgo wrote his doctoral dissertation on novels about World War II and taught courses in American and southern literature. From an early point in his life he tried his hand at woodcarving, sketching, and other creative activities; his friends also knew him as an able storyteller. Dissatisfied with scholarly writing, Kilgo began to write creative essays in the late 1970s, at first in the form of hunting columns for a local newspaper. Pleased with these early efforts, he began to write longer essays.

Kilgo didn’t write creatively until he was in his 30s. A late start. I began at 28. One of the hardest things in the world is to write seriously while holding a full-time job. You run out of time and energy. Kilgo’s nemesis would be time. He had plenty of drive and a love for language to which I could relate. Words are free; words are powerful, and words gild ordinary life: they are the poor man’s Heaven on earth.

I remembered how Faulkner inspired Kilgo. I recall too that he loved the opening lines to Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, calling them sublime. Even now I see him cock his head back and read: I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

Our paths crossed. In the 1980s, I served as the managing editor for South Carolina Wildlife magazine. Years after I left a striking brunette, Caroline Foster, took that position. Her uncle? Jim Kilgo.

Our paths crisscrossed. There was that moment with Dickey. In 1995, just four years before Kilgo retired he taught my daughter, Becky, just as he had taught me a few years into his career. Daughter and father—on opposite sides of his continuum—shared a connection and would recall his classes years later. We agreed he was unforgettable.

This evening as the sun drops I hold in my hands a large book, the kind that receives the unkind label coffeetable book. Unkind because such books require a special kind of art. Any writer who does one knows some critics will skewer him as being non-scholarly and commercial. That didn’t stop Kilgo just as it didn’t stop Dickey with Jericho, The South Beheld. Kilgo’s book is The Blue Wall – Wilderness of the Carolinas and Georgia. Kilgo collaborated with photographer Thomas Wyche to write a book about the wilder aspects of our beloved Southland. Yet another connection.

The only time I saw him after that one course so long ago in Athens was at the South Carolina Festival for Books. It was March 22, 1997. I brought Deep Enough For Ivorybills, which he inscribed To Tom with memories of good times at UGA.

I wanted to say No my memories are those of disappointing you and myself but it seemed silly. I let the moment pass.

I brought too The Blue Wall within which he wrote, For my friend and former student, Tom Poland—those splendid hills—warm regards, Jim.

He was looking forward to retiring he told me because he could devote more time to his writing. He said that life conspired at every turn to rob him of the time he needed to write. I understood. A short while later I bumped into Caroline Foster who told me of his passing. Life’s conspiracy robbed him all right. He retired in 1999 and died three years later. The trail didn’t end however. It never ends with writers of note for their work lives beyond their time.

And now the calendar brings me to the spring of 2012. Kilgo reaches from the grave to touch me again. Robert and I are spending an afternoon with wildlife sculptor Grainger McKoy. As Robert composes photos of the artist we talk. Upon hearing I graduated form Georgia, McKoy asks, Did you know Jim Kilgo?

McKoy hands me a lavish booklet, The Brilliance of Birds. It features Grainger’s work and distinguishing it is an essay by James Kilgo, The Art of Grainger McKoy. My old teacher had done much the same as I had. Writing of nature and art’s commingling. Kilgo I’d learn had sat in the same chair I was sitting in when McKoy handed me The Brilliance of Birds. I felt a long irresistible pull back to that classroom and the fluttering dogwood petals.

I doubt any of what I’m writing matters to you, the reader, but it does to me. You see as much as I loved Kilgo’s English 102 course I only earned a C. My brain had not caught fire yet. I had yet to learn to learn and furthermore to love to learn. I would do most anything to bump into my old professor one more time. I’d like for him to know that I figured things out. I’d like for him to know our meeting was no coincidence. That I too would feel the need to put words on paper. And I would ask him just what set him on fire in his youth as a literary outdoorsman. But because that was impossible I did the only thing left. I went to the swamps and forests of his native land.

October 2012. Robert Clark and I are exploring the swamps fringing the Pee Dee River in Darlington County. We follow a band of horsemen and one intrepid woman in my all-wheel-drive Honda. We go through sloughs past silky green waters where snakes weave serpentine paths through duckweed. When we can drive no more we get out on foot and trudge through tangled undergrowth. We dodge teenage cypress knees that would trip us. Deeper and deeper we go fighting off vines and shrubs. We pass a cemetery born of antiquity, so old its tombstones are made from bricks: so old a governor sleeps there in an unmarked grave. Something tells me a youthful Kilgo passed by this ancient burial ground. And then a feathery flash of white flits through the canopy. It’s a large bird … it couldn’t be … could it?

Onward we trudge …. At last we surface on a bluff overlooking the Great Pee Dee River. A snowy egret stalks the shallows on the Marlboro County side. We are deep enough for ivorybills but none can be found. Amidst cypress knees and cherrybarks I want to think I literally walk in Kilgo’s steps. Visions of him in Athens and here merge in a strange dreamlike way. I sense what a youth among these woods did to him when he had to assume the role of professor. He had to make a reckoning of it all. He had to find a way to merge two separate lives. What we were—and what we become. I sort out a few mysteries. Things clarify.

Though we met in a classroom in 1968 and only met once more in 1997 our lives were symmetrical. Kilgo grew up in rural South Carolina and ended up teaching and writing in Georgia. I grew up in rural Georgia and ended up teaching and writing in South Carolina. We were country boys who loved books and the outdoors and found a way to blend both. If only we could have seen the future back in 1968 … eons ago. I’m certain we would have become fast friends.

Throughout my career I have tried to make amends to Kilgo for my poor classroom showing. I like to think I would earn a higher grade today were I to repeat his course; that we would have much to discuss and much to share after many years of trudging through swamps and dictionaries.

We lose so damn much in this thing called life. He’s gone. Peggy Culbertson is gone and I have no doubt the dogwood by the window of that Park Hall window is gone too. I had fifty-four professors at Georgia. Most of them are gone. I remember a handful but I can’t forget Kilgo.

As columns go it’s closing time. Sunday, December 8, 2002 friends sang hymns outside Kilgo’s hospital room. He was 61. In 2011 he was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

The man lives on in my recollections. I see him in his seersucker suit holding a book high as he reads to spellbound students. He’s reading from Faulkner who describes the woods of Mississippi’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which not only were deep enough for ivorybills but deep enough also to turn a man from academic writing to words that resonate and transform the destiny of others.

We called that man Kilgo.

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