No one trifles with 14-year-old Mattie Ross.
When hired hand Tom Chaney murders Mattie’s father in cold blood and steals his horse and hard-earned cash, it’s Mattie who sets out to retrieve her father’s body and to track Chaney to the ends of the earth, if need be, and either kill him or bring him to justice. She’s accompanied on the first stage of this journey by a neighbor, the kindhearted Yarnell.
After they arrive in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Mattie arranges to have her father’s body shipped home under the care and protection of Yarnell, then begins her single-minded quest to see that justice is done.
She soon meets U.S. Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn, a former Confederate who had ridden with Quantrill’s Raiders. One-eyed, beefy, and sporting a walrus moustache, Rooster suffers from bouts of malaria, drinks far too much, and is quick with a gun. When the sheriff in Fort Smith describes Rooster as “a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking,” Mattie knows she has found the hunter she requires to track down Tom Chaney.
Joined by a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf, who’s also tracking Chaney, and after a battle of the wills between Mattie and the two men over whether she’ll be allowed to accompany them, the trio set out into Indian territory after their prey. They encounter sleeplessness, hunger, and cold weather before locating “Lucky” Ned Pepper’s criminal gang, which Chaney has joined. By the end of this adventure, Chaney receives the justice due him, though Mattie loses her left forearm when a rattlesnake bite results in gangrene.
The book is Charles Portis’s “True Grit,” and the plot is straightforward. But it’s not the story that makes “True Grit” an American classic.
A Way With Words
In making Mattie Ross the narrator of his novel, Portis has created a teenager unique in American fiction.Though Portis soon lets us know that Mattie is in her 60s when recounting the story of the girl she once was, we realize that the two women are one and the same when it comes to character. Both possess a command of the English language, extraordinary willpower, and a backbone of steel.
The first sentence sets the tone for the rest of this novel: “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.”
Right away, readers understand that they are in the hands of a narrator who is firm in language and purpose. Mattie always makes clear her intentions. Moreover, the voice Portis gives to this girl—the formality, the stiff, flat delivery of words and sentences, the honesty—seems real and true, a vestige of a different time and place.
Here, for instance, Rooster offers Mattie a drink of whiskey for her cold. “This is the real article. It is double-rectified busthead from Madison County, aged in the keg. A little spoonful would do you a power of good.”
Mattie’s reply has more starch in it than a Victorian wingtip collar: “I would not put that thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”
‘I Will See the Thing Done Myself’
After accepting Mattie’s offer of $100 to pursue Tom Chaney, Rooster discovers that she intends to ride along with him. “It cannot be done,” he says, to which Mattie promptly replies: “And why not? You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away. No, I will see the thing done myself.”Later, when Rooster and LaBoeuf try to give Mattie the slip by having her removed from a ferry, she escapes the man assigned to take her to the sheriff in town, dashes her horse toward the river, and swims her horse to the opposite bank. When she follows along behind LaBoeuf and Rooster, keeping her distance to avoid another such incident, the two men finally accept Mattie and even come to admire the mettle she shows in pursuing her father’s killer. Like Rooster, Mattie has a plentiful supply of true grit.
Deadpan Humor
Not only do we sometimes laugh at Mattie’s single-mindedness, but we also smile at some of the droll comments she makes. She’s the perfect comedian in that she herself never laughs—she’s too self-possessed to give way to emotions of any kind except frustration or anger. At one point, for example, when Rooster “was well along to being drunk,” he launches into a tirade against women. Whether he means to include Mattie in these lamentations is doubtful, but even so, she refuses to be drawn into the conversation. “I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”After Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang capture Mattie, they ride away, leaving her alone with Tom Chaney. Even in this dire fix—she’s half-convinced that Chaney will murder her—Mattie keeps her grit and sharp tongue at hand. When she stirs up the fire and puts some coals around a can of water, Chaney asks what she is doing.
“I said, ‘I am heating some water so that I may wash this black off my hands.’
“‘A little smut will not harm you.’
“‘Yes, that is true, or else you and your “chums” would surely be dead. I know it will not harm me but I would rather have it off.’”
The 60-Something Mattie
In the final pages of “True Grit,” we find that the elderly Mattie Ross who has narrated this tale of her girlhood self is now the owner of a bank. It’s 1928, the year before the Great Depression, yet this is one banker we might expect to weather that storm. Certainly she has lost neither her spunk nor her way with words. Of her grown siblings, for instance, she writes: “I have never held it against either one of them for leaving me at home to look after Mama, and they know it, for I have told them.”In 1903, 25 years after her manhunt with Rooster and LaBoeuf, Mattie travels to Memphis to see Rooster, where she learns that he has died and that “there was no one to claim him.” We are not surprised to read that the indominable Mattie has his body disinterred and transferred to her hometown of Dardanelle, where she erects “a sixty-five-dollar slab of Batesville marble” over his grave. Regarding her neighbors’ reaction to this unusual gesture, she then tells us: “People love to talk. They love to slander you if they have any substance.”
Courage and Persistence
In many ways, Mattie becomes “the man of the house” after her father’s murder. Her mother is loving and tenderhearted but lacks Mattie’s gumption and nerve, and her brother is too young to take on the heavy responsibilities that Mattie assumes as her burden.Throughout this story, Mattie exhibits characteristics once deemed part of the American character. Her staunch Presbyterianism functions as a shield against the temptations of the world; her commonsense thinking clears away the clutter and fluff from questions of morality; her willingness to bear discomfort and pain to see a job through to its end is never in doubt.
This portrait of fortitude alone makes “True Grit” worth reading. In our encounters with trials and challenges, Mattie Ross sets for us an outstanding example of a brave heart that refuses to buckle or back down when faced with adversity. “Time just gets away from us,” says the older Mattie at the end of the novel, a rare bit of melancholic reflection as she looks back on her life.
Nevertheless, her grit remains intact.
