She is bound by honor, which can make a person do a lot of wild things. I love the specificity this sentence-it’s not just that her father has been killed, but that he has been robbed “of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.” The list of the robbed items tells us something very particular: that either Mattie is most engaged with the principle of the thing (as opposed to the loss of a beloved father, say), or that she’s desperately trying to be. Then she repeats her age-the repetition betraying her (and/or the world’s) preoccupation with it-and tells us the reason for her story. As she will put it in the last line of the novel, this is her “true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s Blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.” There’s also the hint of meta-narrative in this first line: the framing of “I will say it did not happen every day” suggests that Mattie is aware of her own telling, and that this is a fictionalization of someone telling a true tale. But the reader is already pretty sure that she is not ill-suited, having been inside her head. She is fourteen, after all, and a girl, which means that most of the other characters in this book consider her ill-suited for chasing after her father’s murderer. We also get, primarily via that single skipped comma, a sense of Mattie’s breathlessness. Everything we’ve suspected (or over-read) in that first “credence” is underscored here. She’s a teenage girl, her father has been murdered, and she’s going to avenge him. But then we move on to the rest of the sentence: “that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood, but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” Well, okay, now we’ve really learned something. We have some sense of what we’re working with from the very first phrase: “People do not give it credence.” The word “credence” alone signals a non-contemporary voice the phrase is also a little formal, perhaps even snooty. In two sentences, we know exactly who this character is and what she’s up to-though we don’t even know her name yet. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. Here is how the book begins in my copy (an early 2000s paperback published by Overlook Press): As Ed Park once put it, Mattie’s “steadfast, unsentimental voice-Portis’s sublime ventriloquism-maintains such purity of purpose that the prose seems engraved rather than merely writ.”Īnd Portis has Mattie’s voice and character nailed from the very first lines. There may be action and adventure between these pages, but Mattie Ross’s voice is what makes this novel unforgettable. If you haven’t read the novel, I will tell you that-even for someone who doesn’t typically go in for Westerns-it is wonderful, due in large part to its narrator, Mattie Ross. It had entered into the murky realm of cult literary classic when it was adapted to film for a second time (with Jeff Bridges!) in 2010, and now I’d rate it as Pretty Famous. ![]() It was reprinted in book form by Simon & Schuster later that year, adapted into a movie (with John Wayne!) the year after, and became a bestseller. Fifty years ago today, the first installment of Charles Portis’s True Grit was published in the Saturday Evening Post.
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