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The Tulip Tree
From the first, the old Hudson Valley house with a mysterious and violent history had a haunting impact on young Josephine Watts. Her premonitions of evil began with finding a dead starling in the fireplace. Then Benjy, a menacing and grotesque native, appeared and her dread increased. Soon the exotic and malevolent Clarissa, who lived just down the road, made her sinister influence felt at the house. Slowly the dark spirits of the mansion worked their strange powers on Josephine, and bit by bit the horror, tragedy and mysterious secret of its accursed history began enveloping her in a grip of shattering terror....that threatened her sanity and her life.
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First published January 1, 1963
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About the author
Howard Rigsby
32 booksVechel Howard Rigsby was an American author and playwright. He also published under the pseudonym Vechel Howard.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 26, 2019
Someone once said, “home is not a place…it’s a feeling.”
If this is true of anyone, it’s Josephine Watts.
She’s twenty-six years old, her mother, who the author Rigsby seems to like to refer to as, “Mrs. Cornell” has passed away some time before the opening of the story. Josephine’s father died eleven years before the opening of the story. Early on we learn that the Cornell’s adopted Josephine when she was a baby, and when they were in their late middle age.
Now that both her parents are gone, Josephine finds out that she’s inherited the Duchess County farm that was her home almost all her life.
Soon after we find out that Josephine has been married to a man named Kimball Watts for five years. He’s a hard-working man employed by the Aldrich and Company book publishing firm. Josephine and Kimball have two children, both girls, the eldest being Polly, three and a half, the younger Katherine is eight months old.
Josephine always loved her childhood home, and upon learning of her inheritance, briefly considered an attempt to persuade her husband that they should move into it as their family home. But that, she knew was an impractical fancy, considering how far it was from Kimball’s workplace in New York. So, she lists the farm for sale, and they begin their search for a home to raise their family.
The Watts look at many potential homes, all of which prove unsuitable for one reason or another.
This is where we get our first clue about how much stock Josephine put into her unexplainable feelings and even superstitions when it comes to finding the right home:
“One house they looked at, for instance, made her feel bilious. She could not explain why.”
“Another place was ‘fishy,’ that time she could explain: the way the shingles were put on, looked to her like fish scales.”
She also summoned her superstitions as she evaluated potential homes:
“If she picked up a pin as they were entering, that was good. If, in the same circumstances, there was any loud noise, such as a truck backfiring, or a peal of thunder, that was bad. Only a lunatic would look at a house in a thunderstorm, she declared.”
Finally, after months of fruitless searching Josephine comes across an advertisement for a 15-room country dwelling with five fireplaces and four acres, all of it for a very reasonable price of $27,500.
The property, she learns, is known as Potter Place, located near the Massapoc Village. The place has quite the storied history, beginning when the first colonial house was built on the site in 1760, a second, similarly styled home was constructed nearby ten years later. Then in 1824, an ambitious new owner undertook the building of a central section designed to bridge the seventy-foot gap between the two original homes. One complete, the one structure became a sprawling, rather large residence.
The Watts meet with the real estate agent, soon discovering that he is selling the property for his friends, the current owners named the Duncan’s who are artists who’ve come on hard times and need an infusion of ready cash. It’s just as this explanation comes that Kimball notices that his wife’s eyes are sparkling and she’s wearing the expression of a woman who already owns the house in her mind. This is welcome relief for Kimball as the house searching process is becoming arduous for him.
But to his dismay, his wife’s intrigue with the house quickly becomes dashed as they enter a large room that the agent explains was once the slave quarters. Its construction is impressive, build of heavy ship timbers and the floor is uneven, seemingly conforming to the contours of the ground beneath the house. Just as the Watts are guided through this section Josephine is suddenly startled.
She spots a dead bird in the hearth.
This is a bad omen.
Kimball takes the dead bird outside and buries it, when he returns, he sees his wife busily checking over the features of the room, but to his dismay, she doesn’t make eye contact with him and her face is pale as if she’s seen a ghost.
Despite this setback, the Watts do end up putting down a $1000 deposit on the home. They’ve found a buyer for the farm and the purchaser wishes to move in, so they must find a new place for all the items currently in the house. Later in June, Kimball takes one week of vacation. He, Josephine and the girls travel to the farm to begin sorting and packing possessions. A woman named Tilda Lohnes, the same woman who once cared for Josephine when she was a child, takes care of Polly and Katherine while Kimball and Josephine prepare the items in the house for transport.
Kimball then takes another week off, (he seems to have a generous vacation package), and the family, along with Tilda, drive out to Potter Place to begin unpacking the items that the movers just delivered.
Within the first couple days of their arrival the Watts meet their new neighbors, the Stauffer’s, George, his wife Helen, and their polite, rather distant teenage son Bert. They also meet the Stauffer’s sixteen-year-old housekeeper named Verna Keighley. They are invited to the Stauffer’s home and there they come to understand that the Stauffer’s are somewhat eccentric people, not to mention the senior Stauffer’s, (George’s father and mother), of which his mother is quite vocally prejudiced toward some of the neighbors who are considered outside minorities by her.
Then there’s Miss Keighly, a beguiling creature in George’s mind.
And that’s far from an exhaustive list of the unconventional cast of characters the Watts encounter in their new home. One of them that stands out is Benji Potter, a mysterious black man with an ancient gypsy kind of wisdom about him,
“For a moment then the dark and ancient eyes, once so penetrating, so madly wise and serene, again probed Kimball’s and he felt in that moment that his true essence, something he himself knew little about, was being siphoned from him and examined.”
Even the weather proved to be a formidable character in itself. I first noticed this when Rigsby describes winter’s nighttime arrival at the Watt’s Hudson Valley home:
“The wind had come flying down the river from the pole, screaming down the five chimneys, rattling locks, ruffling rugs. All night the bleak, polar presence had wailed and shrilled along the eaves, slamming icy fists against the windows, prancing, soughing artic night songs in the attic, straining to force the cellar door…in the morning the bitter Norn voice was still in the house, the windows were rimed and there were snow plumes whirling, snow banners streaming along the drive…”
Another feature of the story I found appealing was the way Rigsby detailed Josephine’s highly developed sense of what was going on in the house. In one scene, her husband suddenly realizes that she’s in the same room, and he does so in such a peculiar way:
“On a small portable radio, he was getting music from a New York station. The top halves of the Dutch doors at the east and west ends of the room were open. There were no screens on the doors, flies were wheeling through aisles of sunlight, a bumblebee was exploring noisily along a beam and when he first saw her, he thought Josephine was staring up at the bee. She had appeared in the doorway that led into the long unused kitchen of that original house, and he didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. After and instant, however, he realized she was not watching the bee. She was taut, not looking at anything, simply poised in vibrant quiet upon the threshold, her eyes half shut, as if she were some splendid, entirely sensate organism, with everything the room was or ever had been seeping into her through her pores.”
Also interesting was the way that Howard Rigsby, through certain scenes created a mood in me, then followed it up with concrete confirmation that this was the intended mood. There was, for example, the chilly mood that came over Josephine when she was introduced to Benji, then to her horror, her daughter Polly suddenly burst through the door and ran straight toward the man that Josephine feared, and wished would go away.
“Josephine froze, her eyes widening.
‘Mother’, she exclaimed intently. ‘Don’t move. There’s a butterfly kissing your hair!’
Benji looked at Polly, ‘It mean your mama is blessed.’
Polly said, ‘What’s blessed mean?’
Josephine moved her head. She waved her arm carefully and the butterfly flew away. ‘Nonsense,’ she said.
‘Oh, mother!” Polly’s eyes followed the butterfly.
‘Go in and finish your breakfast, Polly…”
As the rest of the scene progresses, Josephine becomes increasingly agitated. She wants to get away from Benji but will not do so with Polly standing near the man. As the scene progressed, I could feel a colder and colder version of Josephine’s comportment emerge.
Soon after, Rigsby inserts a more tangible representation of cold:
“’You find there are many things to do here,” Benji said, ‘Next month we get the storm windows and storm doors out of the cellar and see what shape they in. Some need putty I know. And they all needing paint.’ He shook his head. ‘Get bitter cold in through here. Wind come down that Hudson right from the North Pole. Got to keep the little ones warm.’
Kimball heard this, having seen the storm windows and doors stacked in the cellar, but not really considering their purpose, or what they meant in terms of effort. He hadn’t even realized such equipment was used anymore…”
The later allusion to the house’s need of protection from the coming cold further accentuated the earlier reference to a mother’s desire to protect her child.
All in all, I was so impressed with the quality of descriptive writing and the development of Rigsby’s most intriguing cast of characters. This novel is the result of a master “word craftsman” and was very entertaining to boot.
Highly recommend.
If this is true of anyone, it’s Josephine Watts.
She’s twenty-six years old, her mother, who the author Rigsby seems to like to refer to as, “Mrs. Cornell” has passed away some time before the opening of the story. Josephine’s father died eleven years before the opening of the story. Early on we learn that the Cornell’s adopted Josephine when she was a baby, and when they were in their late middle age.
Now that both her parents are gone, Josephine finds out that she’s inherited the Duchess County farm that was her home almost all her life.
Soon after we find out that Josephine has been married to a man named Kimball Watts for five years. He’s a hard-working man employed by the Aldrich and Company book publishing firm. Josephine and Kimball have two children, both girls, the eldest being Polly, three and a half, the younger Katherine is eight months old.
Josephine always loved her childhood home, and upon learning of her inheritance, briefly considered an attempt to persuade her husband that they should move into it as their family home. But that, she knew was an impractical fancy, considering how far it was from Kimball’s workplace in New York. So, she lists the farm for sale, and they begin their search for a home to raise their family.
The Watts look at many potential homes, all of which prove unsuitable for one reason or another.
This is where we get our first clue about how much stock Josephine put into her unexplainable feelings and even superstitions when it comes to finding the right home:
“One house they looked at, for instance, made her feel bilious. She could not explain why.”
“Another place was ‘fishy,’ that time she could explain: the way the shingles were put on, looked to her like fish scales.”
She also summoned her superstitions as she evaluated potential homes:
“If she picked up a pin as they were entering, that was good. If, in the same circumstances, there was any loud noise, such as a truck backfiring, or a peal of thunder, that was bad. Only a lunatic would look at a house in a thunderstorm, she declared.”
Finally, after months of fruitless searching Josephine comes across an advertisement for a 15-room country dwelling with five fireplaces and four acres, all of it for a very reasonable price of $27,500.
The property, she learns, is known as Potter Place, located near the Massapoc Village. The place has quite the storied history, beginning when the first colonial house was built on the site in 1760, a second, similarly styled home was constructed nearby ten years later. Then in 1824, an ambitious new owner undertook the building of a central section designed to bridge the seventy-foot gap between the two original homes. One complete, the one structure became a sprawling, rather large residence.
The Watts meet with the real estate agent, soon discovering that he is selling the property for his friends, the current owners named the Duncan’s who are artists who’ve come on hard times and need an infusion of ready cash. It’s just as this explanation comes that Kimball notices that his wife’s eyes are sparkling and she’s wearing the expression of a woman who already owns the house in her mind. This is welcome relief for Kimball as the house searching process is becoming arduous for him.
But to his dismay, his wife’s intrigue with the house quickly becomes dashed as they enter a large room that the agent explains was once the slave quarters. Its construction is impressive, build of heavy ship timbers and the floor is uneven, seemingly conforming to the contours of the ground beneath the house. Just as the Watts are guided through this section Josephine is suddenly startled.
She spots a dead bird in the hearth.
This is a bad omen.
Kimball takes the dead bird outside and buries it, when he returns, he sees his wife busily checking over the features of the room, but to his dismay, she doesn’t make eye contact with him and her face is pale as if she’s seen a ghost.
Despite this setback, the Watts do end up putting down a $1000 deposit on the home. They’ve found a buyer for the farm and the purchaser wishes to move in, so they must find a new place for all the items currently in the house. Later in June, Kimball takes one week of vacation. He, Josephine and the girls travel to the farm to begin sorting and packing possessions. A woman named Tilda Lohnes, the same woman who once cared for Josephine when she was a child, takes care of Polly and Katherine while Kimball and Josephine prepare the items in the house for transport.
Kimball then takes another week off, (he seems to have a generous vacation package), and the family, along with Tilda, drive out to Potter Place to begin unpacking the items that the movers just delivered.
Within the first couple days of their arrival the Watts meet their new neighbors, the Stauffer’s, George, his wife Helen, and their polite, rather distant teenage son Bert. They also meet the Stauffer’s sixteen-year-old housekeeper named Verna Keighley. They are invited to the Stauffer’s home and there they come to understand that the Stauffer’s are somewhat eccentric people, not to mention the senior Stauffer’s, (George’s father and mother), of which his mother is quite vocally prejudiced toward some of the neighbors who are considered outside minorities by her.
Then there’s Miss Keighly, a beguiling creature in George’s mind.
And that’s far from an exhaustive list of the unconventional cast of characters the Watts encounter in their new home. One of them that stands out is Benji Potter, a mysterious black man with an ancient gypsy kind of wisdom about him,
“For a moment then the dark and ancient eyes, once so penetrating, so madly wise and serene, again probed Kimball’s and he felt in that moment that his true essence, something he himself knew little about, was being siphoned from him and examined.”
Even the weather proved to be a formidable character in itself. I first noticed this when Rigsby describes winter’s nighttime arrival at the Watt’s Hudson Valley home:
“The wind had come flying down the river from the pole, screaming down the five chimneys, rattling locks, ruffling rugs. All night the bleak, polar presence had wailed and shrilled along the eaves, slamming icy fists against the windows, prancing, soughing artic night songs in the attic, straining to force the cellar door…in the morning the bitter Norn voice was still in the house, the windows were rimed and there were snow plumes whirling, snow banners streaming along the drive…”
Another feature of the story I found appealing was the way Rigsby detailed Josephine’s highly developed sense of what was going on in the house. In one scene, her husband suddenly realizes that she’s in the same room, and he does so in such a peculiar way:
“On a small portable radio, he was getting music from a New York station. The top halves of the Dutch doors at the east and west ends of the room were open. There were no screens on the doors, flies were wheeling through aisles of sunlight, a bumblebee was exploring noisily along a beam and when he first saw her, he thought Josephine was staring up at the bee. She had appeared in the doorway that led into the long unused kitchen of that original house, and he didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. After and instant, however, he realized she was not watching the bee. She was taut, not looking at anything, simply poised in vibrant quiet upon the threshold, her eyes half shut, as if she were some splendid, entirely sensate organism, with everything the room was or ever had been seeping into her through her pores.”
Also interesting was the way that Howard Rigsby, through certain scenes created a mood in me, then followed it up with concrete confirmation that this was the intended mood. There was, for example, the chilly mood that came over Josephine when she was introduced to Benji, then to her horror, her daughter Polly suddenly burst through the door and ran straight toward the man that Josephine feared, and wished would go away.
“Josephine froze, her eyes widening.
‘Mother’, she exclaimed intently. ‘Don’t move. There’s a butterfly kissing your hair!’
Benji looked at Polly, ‘It mean your mama is blessed.’
Polly said, ‘What’s blessed mean?’
Josephine moved her head. She waved her arm carefully and the butterfly flew away. ‘Nonsense,’ she said.
‘Oh, mother!” Polly’s eyes followed the butterfly.
‘Go in and finish your breakfast, Polly…”
As the rest of the scene progresses, Josephine becomes increasingly agitated. She wants to get away from Benji but will not do so with Polly standing near the man. As the scene progressed, I could feel a colder and colder version of Josephine’s comportment emerge.
Soon after, Rigsby inserts a more tangible representation of cold:
“’You find there are many things to do here,” Benji said, ‘Next month we get the storm windows and storm doors out of the cellar and see what shape they in. Some need putty I know. And they all needing paint.’ He shook his head. ‘Get bitter cold in through here. Wind come down that Hudson right from the North Pole. Got to keep the little ones warm.’
Kimball heard this, having seen the storm windows and doors stacked in the cellar, but not really considering their purpose, or what they meant in terms of effort. He hadn’t even realized such equipment was used anymore…”
The later allusion to the house’s need of protection from the coming cold further accentuated the earlier reference to a mother’s desire to protect her child.
All in all, I was so impressed with the quality of descriptive writing and the development of Rigsby’s most intriguing cast of characters. This novel is the result of a master “word craftsman” and was very entertaining to boot.
Highly recommend.
December 2, 2012
This was definitely one of the stranger books I ever read. I was staying at my grandmother's, and being an avid fantasy reader, I was starting to panic as I'd finished my novel the night before. I was not expecting my grandmother to be able to come up with anything resembling a fantasy novel, but she went into the attic and came back with this. At first I was really excited because the cover looks like a dryad returning to her tree, but the story proved to be quite something else.
This is a kind of psychological, horror/mystery. It was quite engaging and I immediately envisioned it as a film, with Morgan Freeman as Benji, and Whitney Houston as Clarissa Cutler. It was definitely a deviation from my usual sort of book, but it took me in, and left me scratching my head, which was a pleasant new experience.
This is a kind of psychological, horror/mystery. It was quite engaging and I immediately envisioned it as a film, with Morgan Freeman as Benji, and Whitney Houston as Clarissa Cutler. It was definitely a deviation from my usual sort of book, but it took me in, and left me scratching my head, which was a pleasant new experience.
September 3, 2020
The Tulip Tree, convoluted, skim-coated with social ideas, and messy with characters and execution, was difficult to read even accounting for removing my 2020 lens and viewing it through the awareness of the publication date of 1963.
Kimball and Josephine Watts are a young couple, with young children (aged 3 and less than a year), who, after some hemming and hawing perpetuated by the superstitious Josephine (more on that in a bit), purchase an old Hudson Valley home with a mysterious and violent history. Josephine has misgivings from the beginning that only intensify into downright fear— though she is able to brush them aside at times, and Kimball is determined to remain level-headed and in possession of the house. As the story unfolds and the house's history is revealed, other sinister workings seem to be adding themselves into the brew for Kimball, throwing a strain on his marriage and his potential future in his now-beloved house.
There are a whole other host of secondary and tertiary characters, all of whom fall swiftly and solidly into stereotypes or counter-stereotypes. Also, the story (some of it expected given the time and some of it not given the way Rigsby chooses to word his descriptions) contains a strong vein of misogyny and objectification. The former being typical of the period, not that it wasn't eye-rolling and added to the oversimplification of the character of Josephine. But the latter was strangely dealt — as I found many elements within this story, everything that’s weirdly written and out of place is delivered in this manner, to land as if out of nowhere and as though dropped from a great height ... released from overhead by helicopter. Kerplunk.
Even when a wizened woman arrives to bestow the knowledge of the house's history to Kimball (because plot), her part in the tale is not without the otherwise-out-of-nowhere nonsense:
Why on earth does the reader care if this one character at this one point in the story lets go a fart? No one else farts in this book. This is not a book of farts. This is not a scene of farts. A completely unnecessary and random attempt at characterization. Does that help underscore her age? That is unnecessary, because just a few pages back, before she emerged from her vehicle, Kimball notes, "It looked like a corpse come to call, Kimball thought, the furred, still figure on the back seat of the funereal car."
His worst stabs are with women (young or not) Kimball views through a strangely sexual lens. When Kimball is first out exploring his property with his young daughter Polly, they come upon their neighbors, the Stauffers (George, the dad, and Bert, the nine-year-old son) — and their young housekeeper, Verna Keighley (who the Stauffers have hired from the nearby Catholic girls' home).
The one that is perhaps the strangest and more complex of the two over-sexualized females, as written, is Clarissa Cutler. This character is complicated on her own: a Black woman with albinism, descended from an enslaved woman named Martha (Martha was enslaved by the Potters, early (but not the first) owners of the house). Because of this complication in her ancestry, and also part of the story behind the horrors from the house's history involving Martha, Clarissa believes she should own the house.
Rigsby never quite goes where he might with Clarissa's character — and instead turns her into a predictable character — especially by the end — and especially for a modern Black woman. He vaguely covers the idea of reexamining racism (because what is racism if the color of the skin is literally taken away) and the impact on Clarissa of existing outside of both her Blackness and whiteness in society. But he doesn't really talk about either; both have to be whatever you can glean from your own brain, and that doesn't really help Clarissa.
Clarissa, whose skin-tight clothing of her modeling days, represent a modern woman — sexually aware, and yet, she's so foreign and exotic so we can't forget her Blackness, even though it's hidden behind the whiteness of her skin. Here, again, Rigsby chooses a strange way to demonstrate her sexuality, by twice mentioning the men around her noticing her crotch through her pants.
The worst secondary character is the now-overused and pitifully ignorantly wielded Magical Negro trope in the character of Benji Potter. Only there to help the white protagonist get out of trouble and not literally magical each and every time. Sometimes this is through helping the white character realize his own faults and overcome them, but not here. Here it is early in this trope's usage — and what we see in Benji is absolutely the rest for this trope.
He is tied to the land and the house — having been born in one of the rooms. He works the land for free from obligation of being emotionally and spiritually attached to the house. He is so old no one is sure of his age — except the old woman who comes only to communicate the history of the house (and fart once) — but she's a know-it-all racist. His magical or spiritual powers are vague but he communicates directly with spirits or beings named Mombo Ann and Bildado, and is overall "closer to the earth." But most of all, he is patient, wise, and delivers warnings to the Wattses and is seemingly there just to protect them (and the house). And in fact does swoop in — deus ex machina style — at the end to save the day.
This is the type of book where the baddies are really bad, the racists are overtly racist (they use the n-word and emphasize "those people" kinds of phrases), and the nymphets (Verna and her counterpart helping out at the Wattses' house, Marlene) are so randomly placed that you cannot figure out their purpose until the end and that comes flying in out of nowhere, too.
But I still wanted to address Josephine. Poor Josephine. She's often referred to as a child in appearance once she is down to just jeans and her hair pulled back — she's twenty-six. But mainly the characterization of childlike qualities comes down to her superstitious nature and her willingness to allow this to rule her logical mind. Which is all she's boiled down to, anyway. The misogyny that writes Josephine is amazingly backward for a book published in 1963, and yet it's not. It's the bit of last hope that women will remain subservient and allow the men to rule the home. The delivery of this message comes directly from Kimball's mentor and boss, Loring Todd. Todd tells Kimball, in a fatherly and knowing way, of similar troubles with his own wife, now dead. She was "full of all sorts of whims, superstitions, intuitions, and impulses." He goes on to say that his experience with her taught him to never try and reason with her. He says that once he adopted his "tactic of non-reason and acquired other behavioral tricks and techniques," they got on well. He was "gentle and understanding, as with a child, but also firm." And, according to Todd, his wife "came to depend on his firmness, just as she could depend on gentleness and understanding, or rather the semblance thereof." Then he delivers his most predictable sexist nonsense,
So, in the mess of all of this there's supposedly a scary house. It barely registered on the page for me. There were some scenes that almost fooled me into thinking this was going somewhere spooky — but instead we get a horrific history delivered by an old lady with a self-published book about Kimball's house. Sure there are feelings and images but the entire point of all of that is so Kimball can dismiss it all and be ruled by his superior, logical brain and not give in to superstitious nonsense. Bad history, or not.
Kimball and Josephine Watts are a young couple, with young children (aged 3 and less than a year), who, after some hemming and hawing perpetuated by the superstitious Josephine (more on that in a bit), purchase an old Hudson Valley home with a mysterious and violent history. Josephine has misgivings from the beginning that only intensify into downright fear— though she is able to brush them aside at times, and Kimball is determined to remain level-headed and in possession of the house. As the story unfolds and the house's history is revealed, other sinister workings seem to be adding themselves into the brew for Kimball, throwing a strain on his marriage and his potential future in his now-beloved house.
There are a whole other host of secondary and tertiary characters, all of whom fall swiftly and solidly into stereotypes or counter-stereotypes. Also, the story (some of it expected given the time and some of it not given the way Rigsby chooses to word his descriptions) contains a strong vein of misogyny and objectification. The former being typical of the period, not that it wasn't eye-rolling and added to the oversimplification of the character of Josephine. But the latter was strangely dealt — as I found many elements within this story, everything that’s weirdly written and out of place is delivered in this manner, to land as if out of nowhere and as though dropped from a great height ... released from overhead by helicopter. Kerplunk.
Even when a wizened woman arrives to bestow the knowledge of the house's history to Kimball (because plot), her part in the tale is not without the otherwise-out-of-nowhere nonsense:
"Now, as his visitor's eyes sought his face briefly for reaction, disturbed gas could be heard sighing and rumbling in her. She committed a small flatus, then, ignoring or oblivious of the emission, went on."
Why on earth does the reader care if this one character at this one point in the story lets go a fart? No one else farts in this book. This is not a book of farts. This is not a scene of farts. A completely unnecessary and random attempt at characterization. Does that help underscore her age? That is unnecessary, because just a few pages back, before she emerged from her vehicle, Kimball notes, "It looked like a corpse come to call, Kimball thought, the furred, still figure on the back seat of the funereal car."
His worst stabs are with women (young or not) Kimball views through a strangely sexual lens. When Kimball is first out exploring his property with his young daughter Polly, they come upon their neighbors, the Stauffers (George, the dad, and Bert, the nine-year-old son) — and their young housekeeper, Verna Keighley (who the Stauffers have hired from the nearby Catholic girls' home).
"Behind him came a girl, barefoot and carrying a striped rubbed ball about the size of a grapefruit. She was wearing a faded, once blue, now nearly white one-piece bathing suit too small for her. ...The girl was older than he had thought at first, fifteen or sixteen. Her suit was wet to the waist and she had paused, slipping her fingers inside the material high on one plump thigh to pull it free of her crotch. Her mouth was small, but full, and red with lipstick, it looked like two ripe berries conjoined, he thought. ...The girl had paused in front of Polly and through the thin, tired stuff of that wet, adolescent suit you could tell where her navel was, see the plump, dark-shaded, pelvic mound; above, her high young breasts were crushed together."And on it goes.
The one that is perhaps the strangest and more complex of the two over-sexualized females, as written, is Clarissa Cutler. This character is complicated on her own: a Black woman with albinism, descended from an enslaved woman named Martha (Martha was enslaved by the Potters, early (but not the first) owners of the house). Because of this complication in her ancestry, and also part of the story behind the horrors from the house's history involving Martha, Clarissa believes she should own the house.
Rigsby never quite goes where he might with Clarissa's character — and instead turns her into a predictable character — especially by the end — and especially for a modern Black woman. He vaguely covers the idea of reexamining racism (because what is racism if the color of the skin is literally taken away) and the impact on Clarissa of existing outside of both her Blackness and whiteness in society. But he doesn't really talk about either; both have to be whatever you can glean from your own brain, and that doesn't really help Clarissa.
Clarissa, whose skin-tight clothing of her modeling days, represent a modern woman — sexually aware, and yet, she's so foreign and exotic so we can't forget her Blackness, even though it's hidden behind the whiteness of her skin. Here, again, Rigsby chooses a strange way to demonstrate her sexuality, by twice mentioning the men around her noticing her crotch through her pants.
"No, she wouldn't sit! Kimball thought, staring at the jeans. With voluptuous faith the faded denim hugged thighs and crotch and belly, so tightly cinched it appeared that sitting, if not actually impossible, would surely be painful.Clarissa's backside gets some mentioning, too — full and straining the corduroy skirt she's wearing or, "if she had a mole on that can of hers you sure couldn't miss it." All of that to say that Kimball is repelled by her overt sexuality. She's everything — sure-footed and spiteful — that Josephine is not.
...[Alfred] was studying Clarissa Cutler again, his eyes on her crotch."
The worst secondary character is the now-overused and pitifully ignorantly wielded Magical Negro trope in the character of Benji Potter. Only there to help the white protagonist get out of trouble and not literally magical each and every time. Sometimes this is through helping the white character realize his own faults and overcome them, but not here. Here it is early in this trope's usage — and what we see in Benji is absolutely the rest for this trope.
He is tied to the land and the house — having been born in one of the rooms. He works the land for free from obligation of being emotionally and spiritually attached to the house. He is so old no one is sure of his age — except the old woman who comes only to communicate the history of the house (and fart once) — but she's a know-it-all racist. His magical or spiritual powers are vague but he communicates directly with spirits or beings named Mombo Ann and Bildado, and is overall "closer to the earth." But most of all, he is patient, wise, and delivers warnings to the Wattses and is seemingly there just to protect them (and the house). And in fact does swoop in — deus ex machina style — at the end to save the day.
This is the type of book where the baddies are really bad, the racists are overtly racist (they use the n-word and emphasize "those people" kinds of phrases), and the nymphets (Verna and her counterpart helping out at the Wattses' house, Marlene) are so randomly placed that you cannot figure out their purpose until the end and that comes flying in out of nowhere, too.
But I still wanted to address Josephine. Poor Josephine. She's often referred to as a child in appearance once she is down to just jeans and her hair pulled back — she's twenty-six. But mainly the characterization of childlike qualities comes down to her superstitious nature and her willingness to allow this to rule her logical mind. Which is all she's boiled down to, anyway. The misogyny that writes Josephine is amazingly backward for a book published in 1963, and yet it's not. It's the bit of last hope that women will remain subservient and allow the men to rule the home. The delivery of this message comes directly from Kimball's mentor and boss, Loring Todd. Todd tells Kimball, in a fatherly and knowing way, of similar troubles with his own wife, now dead. She was "full of all sorts of whims, superstitions, intuitions, and impulses." He goes on to say that his experience with her taught him to never try and reason with her. He says that once he adopted his "tactic of non-reason and acquired other behavioral tricks and techniques," they got on well. He was "gentle and understanding, as with a child, but also firm." And, according to Todd, his wife "came to depend on his firmness, just as she could depend on gentleness and understanding, or rather the semblance thereof." Then he delivers his most predictable sexist nonsense,
"You wouldn’t want to wreck your marriage over an old house. Nor would you want forever to sour the relationship. Forgive me for meddling. Perhaps I’m thinking of Aldrich [their publishing firm], and what’s good for Aldrich. We all know that in other fields of endeavor an executive’s domestic life is of concern to his firm. Soldiers with high morale fight better. Contented cows give better milk. Many good men have been broken on the matrimonial wheel, and perhaps that’s because American males concede too much these days to the ladies. Surely we must revere, humor, and care for them. They are equal companions and partners, but ought not, in the nature of things, to be chief executive of the family firm. Let us be just and considerate in the marital partnership, but not the weaker partner, eh?"
So, in the mess of all of this there's supposedly a scary house. It barely registered on the page for me. There were some scenes that almost fooled me into thinking this was going somewhere spooky — but instead we get a horrific history delivered by an old lady with a self-published book about Kimball's house. Sure there are feelings and images but the entire point of all of that is so Kimball can dismiss it all and be ruled by his superior, logical brain and not give in to superstitious nonsense. Bad history, or not.
April 21, 2021
misogynistic? or just over sexualization of women & children? not sure. either way, the book wasn’t spooky, and it wasn’t interesting either? it shouldn’t have taken me this long to read but it was just so bad.
September 26, 2013
The Tulip Tree is a book that transports you into a world of portents,signs and superstitions. Howard Rigsby writes with a style that induces your imagination to flower and there is a grace and simple beauty in his descriptions of place and time.
I reread this book whenever I am depressed and looking for a get away to another world .The story flows like a lazy river, taking you along like a leaf that's dropped into it's current.
The subject of racism is raised and examined.The story line has a white family buying an old house in the country only to find that there is a young black albino woman who feels the house is hers by birth right.The fact that she is an albino races the question of just exactly what does color mean.
It's a question that the author leaves you to answer for yourself.
I reread this book whenever I am depressed and looking for a get away to another world .The story flows like a lazy river, taking you along like a leaf that's dropped into it's current.
The subject of racism is raised and examined.The story line has a white family buying an old house in the country only to find that there is a young black albino woman who feels the house is hers by birth right.The fact that she is an albino races the question of just exactly what does color mean.
It's a question that the author leaves you to answer for yourself.
June 10, 2010
Surprisingly good book from "Mom's pile" from the senior center.
January 13, 2013
I really liked this book but the ending fell a bit flat.
June 22, 2021
Not particularly romantic, not very suspenseful. NYC executive moves to semi-rural NJ and old creepy house. Weird neighbors. Wife leaves him over the creepiness. All resolved without much input from him. Overt racism, covert misogyny. Nice atmospheric writing, but story and characters fall flat.
Originally read in 1960s, perhaps as Reader's Digest Condensed. Reread 2018.
Originally read in 1960s, perhaps as Reader's Digest Condensed. Reread 2018.
October 18, 2020
A strange story of a somewhat haunted house, and the people who fall under its spell.
March 5, 2017
Pulled from my vintage book collection with plant or garden themed titles this 1963 published book was a plot surprise for me. I was not expecting the racial turmoil and think this was probably pretty controversial in a truthful in your face kind of way. I think this book may have influenced the writers of Mad Men actually or it would fit right in on the set.
Want to read
July 19, 2013
October 3, 2016
not as bad as i thought it would be but not a good as i had hoped..it has its moments but it is a little to over-the-top at times for me
October 19, 2025
The concept was interesting but not executed well. Tried to be suspenseful but was just kind of strange. It was written in 1963 so maybe it was a thriller back then.
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