1Introduction

I am, by instinct, a global vagabond. I cannot rest from travel. Glamour of the unknown has lured me thrice up and down and around the world. Alone, I have shared the home life of exotic peoples in extremes of latitudes, longitudes and altitudes. I have tented on arctic snows beneath the Northern Lights with fur-clad Laplanders who follow the reindeer, have supped with gentle Fiji Islanders, and tattooed Maoris, and have breakfasted on seaweed in the grass huts of the hairy Ainu. I have worshiped in a Malay Snake Temple at sea level and joined Buddhists at prayer on lofty Fujiyama. Restrictions imposed by a world at war foreshortened my horizon, guided my eager footsteps south to Mexico.

—Neill James, Dust on My Heart (1946)

These words belong to a twentieth-century Mississippi woman whose remarkable life and noteworthy accomplishments have nearly vanished from both memory and history. Nell Neill James (1895–1994), fearless, globetrotting, independent woman from the rural, unincorporated community of Gore Springs, Mississippi, left the state after graduating from the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College in 1918 (since 1974 known as Mississippi University for Women, or MUW) and moved to Washington, DC. A career with the government followed, taking James to both cosmopolitan urban centers as well as the remotest corners of the globe. For the most part, she traveled alone. Occasionally accompanied by a friend, James never journeyed to cities and countries as a member of an organized expedition or on a guided sightseeing tour. In four entertaining travel books published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and edited by famed editor Maxwell Perkins—Petticoat Vagabond: Up and Down the World, Petticoat Vagabond: Among the Nomads, Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land: Up and Down Eastern Asia, and Dust on My Heart: Petticoat Vagabond in Mexico—James recounts her amazing, adventure-filled life, surviving, she writes, by “[finding] or creat[ing] without great difficulty jobs in Canada, the South Seas, Hawaii, Japan, Germany, France and Central America” (Petticoat Vagabond, [1937], 1). These exotic exploits, all published between 1937 and 1946, brought her a multitude of readers during this time. In addition, she was a popular magazine writer and radio personality.

Her literary legacy is not the only reason to remember Neill James. During her final trip, where she traveled “all thirty-nine corners of Mexico” (Jonson), she suffered two debilitating accidents and needed a place to recover not far from the hospital where she had received care. She settled in Ajijic, on the banks of Lake Chapala just south of Guadalajara, never thinking it would be her permanent home for the next fifty years. However, the salubrious climate and generous people convinced her otherwise. There she became a leader in transforming the village into an artistic hub and an even-more popular expat community than it already was, and her impact in Ajijic continues to this day.¹

2Previous Research and Neill James’s Early Years

Learning the complete story of Neill James is a complicated endeavor, and others before me have attempted the task. For Mississippians, the most familiar name is Patti Carr Black, whom many know from “her more than twenty books about Mississippi art, history, literature, and culture, and for her long career with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History” (“Patti Carr Black”). Black first heard of James in college as she, like James, also attended MUW. Black traveled to Ajijic with a friend in 2002 to begin research for a biography of James, but when she arrived, she quickly learned that a family member of James’s already was working on one. Black abandoned the project right then and there but never ascertained whether a biography of James was published by James’s relative.

Doing some digging myself, I discovered that the mysterious family member that Black had heard about was, in fact, not a family member at all; he was a gentleman named Stephen Preston Banks, a professor emeritus of the Psychology and Communication Department at the University of Idaho. In an email to me, Banks shared that he had found out about James in 2002 when he visited Ajijic while “doing fieldwork for a research project on the expatriate community there.” During this trip, Banks had met Tod Jonson, a longtime resident of Ajijic and historian of the Lake Chapala Society who wrote a regular column for the local magazine El Ojo del Lago.² According to Banks, Jonson “had created a small museum devoted to [James] at the Lake Chapala Society property.” Banks wrote to me, “The stories I heard about her from Tod and others at the Lake Chapala Riviera stayed with me, and after my retirement from academe she became the subject of my first [postretirement] writing project.”

Banks had hoped to write a biography of James, but after ten years of research he concluded that he could not. He describes his writing struggles and decision to abandon a straightforward biography of James in the author’s note to the fictional account he eventually wrote instead:

At first I tried to write Neill’s life story as a conventional biography. Ultimately, I decided I would never know enough about her to succeed in that way. The difficulties I faced led me to question whether any biographer ever knows enough about his or her subject (Banks, Kokio, 239).

Yet I could not let her just go into the dustbin of history. Something about both the available remnants of her life and the critical missing parts insisted that I reconstruct a plausible life for her, as if she were part of my own heritage. It might have been the passion of her elderly admirers in Ajijic that drew me on and demanded a mediating story (238).

Neill James was a bold, passionate and accomplished woman, and she lived an exceptionally long and adventure-filled life. Most of the broader events depicted in this book I believe are true, though I have embellished them with details, fictional characters, and subplots to tell a story. I followed Neill’s exact itinerary, from birth to her final rest (240).

Banks may have felt he needed to abandon writing a straightforward biography of James, but he did excellent research for this fictionalized history nonetheless: first, in ascertaining the facts regarding her background and ancestry, and second, in setting straight some of the inconsistencies regarding her early life. In his 2016 work, Kokio: A Novel Based on the Life of Neill James, Banks states that despite the word novel in the title, the narrator of the opening chapter is “speaking for [Banks] and [his] research. The family saga [the narrator] tells in the first chapter reflects the true genealogy of history of the James clan as I could determine it” (241). Much of his research on the early years of James’s life is corroborated by a third scholar who has written extensively about James: Tony Burton, author of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic.³ Much of Neill James’s life can be found within the pages of Burton’s book, but she is not his focus; she is part of the greater story of Ajijic and one of several “trailblazers” he writes about.⁴

James did not write about her early life in Mississippi in her travel tales except for this brief reference on the first page of her first book, Petticoat Vagabond: Up and Down the World:

I saw the light of day on a cotton plantation, and grew up in an atmosphere of smug convention and ancestor worship, tinged with the smell of sweet magnolias and wild honeysuckle. My mother died in childbirth a few years later, and I went to live with my maternal grandmother in a great white Colonial house at the end of an avenue of tall pungent cedars, backed by a thirty-acre orchard in the heart of “town.”

This passage illustrates the difficulty in ascertaining truth from fiction in the story of Neill James. Her prose is florid and often embellished. Here, for instance, she says she was born on a “cotton plantation” and later moved in with her grandmother into a house that, described in this paragraph, sounds quite fine and hints at a background of some wealth. The facts are far different: She was born on January 3, 1895,⁵ to Willie Anna Wood and Charles Campbell James, a couple who lived and farmed in Gore Springs, Mississippi, just east of the town of Grenada. James’s mother came from cotton farmers (not a plantation), but her father, known as Charley, was a farmer and a county agent. He worked both jobs in order to supplement his meager farm earnings. Neill (known as Nell at this time) was the sixth of nine children. Despite being eight years apart, she was closest to her youngest sister, Jane, who was born in the summer of 1903. It had been a difficult birth, and Neill’s mother never recovered from it, dying a few weeks later in early fall.

After Willie’s death, Banks writes, “Charley found it difficult to bring his usual energy and focus to his government responsibilities while tending to his children and farm” (Kokio, 14). He was voted out of his county agent position, and the only place he could find steady work was at a lumber mill in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, three hours away in the southern part of the state. And the only way to work in Hattiesburg and care for his motherless children was for Charley to have his oldest son remain on the farm in Gore Springs, to take the two older daughters with him to Hattiesburg so they could finish school, and to leave the youngest ones in the care of his mother-in-law, which included Neill. In 1907, two years after Charley moved to Hattiesburg, Neill and the younger children finally joined their father. (According to Banks, it was around this time that Neill insisted she be called by her middle name.) Her father would pass away four years later, in 1911, and Neill’s oldest sister would take over the running of the household.

Neill went right to work after graduating from high school in Hattiesburg, but she was not satisfied simply working. She found the means to attend the Industrial Institute and College in Columbus, Mississippi, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1918. Instead of returning home to help with the younger children back in Hattiesburg, she left Mississippi for good and moved to Washington, DC.

Banks’s first chapter ends with Neill’s move to DC. He continues Kokio as fiction because he found inconsistencies while researching her life story that did not add up. For example, why would “a successful travel writer give up her career so suddenly? She left no papers, no diaries, and only a few letters and photos” (237). She also claimed she was married, but Banks notes that “no evidence of the marriage has been found, not by me and not by James family members or other researchers” (240).⁶ And stories related to him by residents of Ajijic claimed “she had received visits from such luminaries as D. H. Lawrence, Amelia Earhart, George Bernard Shaw, and the publishers of Time and Life. Yet no evidence has surfaced that any literary celebrities came to see her” (237–38).⁷ Banks did not think these claims were true, writing, “I know Lawrence and Earhart had died long before Neill James first arrived in Mexico” (238). In an email to me, Banks wrote: “I feel compelled to warn you that her entire life story is constructed with a veneer of exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies.” His theory for the inconsistencies and lack of evidence, Banks argues, might be explained by an alternative theory: that Neill James’s “travel books papered over a second, secret career” (240). In Kokio, Banks suggests that she was covering up a life of espionage, working as an intelligence agent for the US government. Here is his reasoning:

Two persons, complete strangers to each other and living a continent apart, told me they believed Neill James had been a spy. . . . Scant evidence is available about her intelligence work, and my conclusion that she had been a spy is based on patterns of her activities, suggestive government documents and interviews with persons who had come to the same judgment as mine (238).

Banks entitled his novel Kokio: A Novel Based on the Life of Neill James because he concocted Kokio—a species of hibiscus native to Hawaii, where James lived for a number of years—as her alias. He then proceeded to compose a story of James’s life as a spy thriller, with James traveling to the same locations in the exact order that she lays out in her travel books, but this time undertaking multiple spy missions and working undercover. Banks once said that he believes

James began spying for the U.S. after college in 1918 when she landed a job in Washington, D.C., at the Department of War [as a stenographer]. She was 16, 19 or 23, depending on who she told. Stenographers were valuable because they could keep a verbatim record of what they were listening to and other people couldn’t read it. At first it appears she did “negative intelligence,” spying domestically on Americans who might be Nazis or communist sympathizers. . . . After World War I her passports showed trips behind enemy lines. Undercover as a travel writer she could witness troop movements and other threats. [. . .] [I]t’s the most plausible explanation for the pattern of her travels, the work she did and why Scribner’s would have published her in the first place” (Bauer).

Banks’s theory that James engaged in espionage is intriguing, and he is not alone in his theory.⁸ Tony Burton writes, “These trips to far-flung places were incredibly ambitious trips for a woman of limited means and with no obvious connections . . . [and has led others] to conclude that the Petticoat Vagabond was almost certainly living a double life with her travel writing providing the cover for spying assignments on behalf of, first, the Military Intelligence Division, and, later, for more than 20 years, for the Navy’s office of Naval Intelligence” (“Neill James,” 6). However, no concrete evidence exists to support it.⁹ Thus, what we do know about Neill James’s life can only be gleaned from her travel books, correspondence, personal papers, and items she donated that today comprise the Neill James Archive in Ajijic, which, according to those who came before me, are, unfortunately, scant and less than forthcoming. It all goes to show the confusion surrounding her story and the challenges in writing anything definitive about her.

3A Global Vagabond

In Neill James’s four travel books, James styles herself as the “Petticoat Vagabond” in the titles as well as in reference to herself in the text.¹⁰ As stated previously, all were published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and edited by Maxwell Perkins, who is famous for working with such well-known writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others. James’s first travel memoir, Petticoat Vagabond: Up and Down the World, is an entertaining romp recounting a plethora of adventures traveling all over the globe. A sampling of chapter titles takes the reader on a worldwide odyssey: “Waikiki Nights,” “My Japanese Home,” “The Technique of Riding a Camel,” “Korea—Land of Morning Calm,” “Alaska—Land of Midnight Sun,” “North to Fiji,” and “Job Hunting in Moscow.” The opening chapter, entitled “Woman Alone,” displays her courage and confidence as she travels by train from Mississippi to Washington, DC, following college graduation. It is, in her own words, the “longest” journey she has ever undertaken:

[O]n a borrowed $50 I set out on my first long train ride, my first experience in spending the night in a sleeping car. I have since travelled alone up and down and around the world twice, once following the equator and once crossing Siberia in latitude 60, but even the interminable voyage to the South Seas rocked in the cradle of the deep for twenty-five days out-of-sight of land, does not compare with that journey from Mississippi to Washington, D.C. It was the longest trip I ever took!

But I was not afraid. . . . [N]ever for a moment did I fear or worry whether I would be able to hold the job which had dropped so unexpectedly and opportunely into my small lap. Being fresh out of college, I had never held a job, and therefore had no inhibitions about the business world. It was confidence born of ignorance (Petticoat Vagabond, 3).

What impelled this first trip was a chance opportunity, the first of many chance opportunities that seem to fall into James’s “small lap.” Chance is a frequent friend to James and a ubiquitous theme of all her travel narratives:

I received an urgent telegram from the War Department appointing me to a post in Washington at a salary of $1100 per annum, peremptorily requesting me to report immediately. It was signed by the Quartermaster General. It was an unexpected aftermath of a Civil Service examination I had taken at college on a dare. A classmate wagered a dollar I couldn’t pass the Civil Service, and to prove my point it was necessary to take the written examination (3).

James passes the exam and quickly advances from the stenographer pool to managing the quartermaster general payroll. For the most part, life in DC is full of fun and friends, with James moving into “cramped quarters” with three girlfriends from college (3). When a problem occurs with the payroll and theft is suspected, her roommate suggests she go to the office of a male superior to seek assistance, as Neill fears losing her job. She receives that and much more, describing a sexual assault in his office that ends with her slapping the “pig” and escaping when he is distracted by his “injured jowl” (11–12). There is no further mention of the assault in the book, but James’s response to it establishes quite early her quick thinking and courage in dangerous situations. The first chapter ends when, a few months after the attack, she, along with another female friend, puts in a request for a transfer to Seattle in order to see more of the country. As luck would have it, the transfer is approved. With this new government job and a move to the West Coast, James embarks on an exciting life of travel thanks to, in her words, being “a modern business girl imbued with an insatiable desire to see all of the world . . . [and] lofty ambition” (1).

Petticoat Vagabond: Up and Down the World then takes off at a rapid pace as James journeys across multiple countries and continents. And what an incredible journey it is. From one city, country, or continent to another, James always seems to land on her feet, finding work that utilizes her easily transferable secretarial skills (along with other business skills that she acquires on the way), enabling her to find employment without much difficulty. She also makes friends wherever she goes and is budget-minded when seeking accommodations. Her experience in Paris, for instance, is quite entertaining: She is honest about the language barrier, about her difficulties in finding a job, and about navigating the French cultural landscape. After comically struggling in the City of Light for a few months, she learns by chance that the American Legion would be holding its annual convention in Paris: “Without losing any time, I found out who was in charge of preliminary arrangements, and the next day I landed a job as secretary at $100 a month” (191). The remainder of the chapter reads as an engaging tourist diary: James enjoys much of her time in Paris with a female friend, Gerry, with whom she shares her many adventures, such as seeing Josephine Baker perform, betting on horses at Saint Cloud, and “spend[ing] delightful evenings dining at petite French restaurants and sidewalk cafes” (193).

So how did James follow up a book that takes the reader all around the world? For her second and third books and her one children’s book, White Reindeer (1940), she trades in the bon vivre of Paris and glamorous globetrotting for a completely opposite experience: living among the most remote peoples on the globe, the Laplanders in northernmost Finland and the Ainu of Far East Asia. In Petticoat Vagabond: Among the Nomads and Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land: Up and Down Eastern Asia, she is a fearless and intrepid traveler, one of the first women not only to travel there solo but also to live alongside these reclusive people.

In an article in The Family Circle from February 7, 1941,¹¹ she describes her extraordinary adventures with the Ainu as an experienced anthropologist at the time might: their physical features, their daily rituals and way of life, and their language and beliefs (22). She provides colorful description of their speech: “The Ainu families are friendly, and I soon learned that every Ainu is a poet. They never simply say, ‘The sun’s up,’ but rather ‘The disk of gold floats warm above the mist.’ And it was very nice to be addressed as, ‘O woman of the graceful tread’” (23). She also explains how she managed living among the Ainu with the significant language barrier, while at the same time indirectly referencing a possible spy career, if Banks and others are correct that she had one:

Nothing fascinates me more than living among people whose habits and ways of life go back into antiquity, and so I managed to get permission from the Japanese government to ride a bicycle through the scores of Ainu villages, staying where I wished. . . . I was provided with a succession of interpreters . . . and they were guides and policemen as well. As the spy scare is on in Japan, they practically aimed my camera for me, and I had considerable difficulty in getting permission to look around. My name turned out to be rather a drawback, as a Captain Neill James, a retired British officer, was in the Tokio [sic] jail for espionage, and members of two prominent families in Kobe, also named James, were likewise under arrest. I took many perfectly harmless pictures, but the authorities wouldn’t allow me to bring them out of the country. However, I managed to smuggle some through in a bundle of dirty clothes (23).

The article is striking not only for the allusion to the espionage but also for the challenges James overcame as a single woman abroad. In other sections of the article, she displays a keen eye, describing the garments the Ainu make and wear in great detail. One constant of her books is her love of fine clothing; she adores fashion and several times finds employment working in upscale women’s clothing stores. She even writes at one point, “Nothing lifts a woman’s morale like a new hat” (Petticoat Vagabond [1937], 242). However, what seems quite antithetical to that idea is that she travels to some of the most isolated places on the planet where a change of clothes is not even an option. It is noteworthy, though, that the manufacturing of garments will play a significant role in developing industry in Ajijic when she later settles there.

4Adventures in Mexico and Settling in Ajijic

Neill James’s final travel book, Dust on My Heart, is an account of her travels throughout Mexico and includes the most frightening moments of any of her narratives, along with her best writing. The title refers to an old Mexican saying: “When once the dust of Mexico has settled upon your heart, you cannot then find peace in any other land” (Dust, 11).¹² This sentiment appears true for James, who spends the next fifty years as a resident of the country. Interestingly, it was never James’s intent to stay in Mexico longer than six months—or even to go to Ajijic at all. Dust on My Heart covers James’s extensive exploration of the country. In a 2015 review of Dust on My Heart for El Ojo del Lago, writer Alice Hathaway details the isolated locales James visited and the extremely rustic nature of her travel:

James’s six-month exploration of remote regions in Mexico [took her] off the beaten track where she might need to travel by horseback, burro or on foot if they could not be reached by road or rail. She packed her sleeping bag, knapsack and notebooks and set out for Indian country to let the adventures happen.  [. . .] I wished for a map as I read the chapters about the Otomie Indians who live in land without water. I had never heard of Orizabita or Espiritu in the state of Hidalgo, where “seven-odd thousand Otomies derive their livelihood from the cactus.” [. . .] Neill James’s travel through the rural countryside showed that the Conquistadores who ravished the land in search of gold overlooked more mineral wealth than they took. She went to the mountains of Oaxaca where silver and mica were mined, to the Guatemala border in Chiapas, down to the coast at Veracruz, to Mitla and Monte Alban and back to Mexico City in November to join the Explorer Club’s winter climb of Popocatépetl.

It is at this point, when James joins the group climb of Popocatépetl, the second-highest peak in Mexico, that she experiences two injuries that bring all of her worldwide traveling to a halt. The story of her tragedy is movingly related in the Mexican narrative. James begins the account of her double disasters by giving the reader a history of her impressive list of previous climbs (in a tone that suggests just a bit of bravado), but she then quickly realizes that she is not as prepared to climb Popocatépetl as she thought:

Any one [sic] with sufficient energy and will power [sic] can climb a mountain. The feat merely entails the placing of one foot above the other, lifting the body to a higher level, up, up, up, endlessly. Popocatépetl (17,894 feet elevation) was the highest objective on my ambitious list of peaks. But I was not exactly a babe in the woods. In the Rocky Mountains I had climbed Hood, Baker, St. Helens, all 10,000 feet or more;¹³ I had walked on the floor of cloud-filled crater of Haleakala; the world’s largest extinct volcano (10,000 feet elevation) on the Island of Maui; I frolicked on the summit of Mauna Kai, a 13,000-foot volcano on the Island of Hawaii. And I had climbed foreign peaks, too. With the Buddhist pilgrims clad in white kimono, I bowed to the rising sun from the summit of Asamayama, Japan’s 8,000-foot active volcano. (Later, lava liquidated a party of climbers). I saw the dawn from the summit of Fujiyama, which comes up out of the sea to a height of 12,365 feet (Dust, 219–20).

James then describes climbing Popocatépetl, which she calls “Popo,” in harrowing detail. No other mountain challenged her as this one did:

At 15,000 feet it was impossible to take more than ten steps without resting. Ordinarily, I rest standing, feet facing down the incline, but here the sight of the precipitous slope was too terrifying. At 17,000 feet my heart pounded. I rested each second step, leaning forward, head upon my ice ax, and instantly fell asleep. Thus I innocently risked death a thousand times! [. . .] The average climber, upon reaching the top of Popo, rests, takes a quick glance over the rim of the smoke-filled crater, and begins a hasty descent lest darkness overtake him on the mountain. Our goal was different; we were going down into the crater (237).

James and her party of twenty-seven climbers successfully descend into the crater and walk around it. She compares it to a scene from hell, with “sulphur fumes that smelled like rotten eggs” and like “walking about in the throat of a giant” (227, 226). After several hours within the crater, everyone in the group makes a favorable ascent out of it, but it is at the end of this daring mountain assault, on the final downward climb, that James experiences a life-changing disaster. Her account of it, composed in short, staccato sentences, is agonizing to read:

I tripped. In a twinkling it happened. I was lost. I rolled over and over and over. I was not frightened. No one had told me that mountaineers killed on Popo had rolled to death. My only sensation was one of complete surprise that I could not stop. I headed pellmell down the mountain. I could not right myself. In an emergency my brain is clear. I remembered Munde’s [the expedition leader] advice to use my ice ax. This was impossible. I plunged, whirling down the icy slope with the speed of a runaway espress [sic]. I concentrated all my strength. With a mighty thrust I dug the ice ax into the ice. It held. But the speed of my falling body jerked my arm from its socket. I fainted. That was the end (232).

But, in fact, it is not the end. James writes, “A human is hard to kill. Though body battered and broken, the unconscious Petticoat Vagabond continued to breathe” (233). The quick thinking of her mountaineering group saves her life, and they get her to the American hospital in Mexico City.¹⁴ And for the next six months James remains at the hospital recuperating from a severely broken leg, a wound on her forehead requiring twenty-six stitches, and a broken collarbone and shoulder. Upon release from the hospital, James determines that the best place to continue her recuperation would be the famed hot springs of Mexico and chooses Ixtapan de la Sal, “reputed to have ‘the best waters in the Americas’” (243). James writes, “Six weeks of radioactive baths, daily massages, plus self-inflicted exercises, worked wonders. My fractured leg was so strong I walked with a single cane; my left arm was movable” (252). With her tourist card due to expire, she decides to return to Mexico City to renew it. During the return trip, she briefly stays with friends and, while there, is invited to join a group to witness the birth of the Parícutin volcano. Despite her fragile condition, she is determined to go, declaring, “The volcano was the most awe-inspiring sight I have witnessed in all my travels” (259). That is quite a statement considering the plethora of adventures James had experienced up to this point. Here is James’s description of what she witnessed:

Roaring from the crater of a perfect cone, now 2,800 feet high, a column of smoke shot upward. Boulders the size of a house were hurled effortlessly upward by a titanic force, accompanied by a rumble which shook the earth, interspersed with exploding boom as of cannonading. Heat lightning zigzagged, flashing up and down the column of uprising gases and smoke at an elevation of a mile above the earth. Below, red-hot lava spilled over the brim of the crater and flowed slowly down the steep slopes, little red flames dancing in the moving liquid fire. . . . The earth beneath our feet trembled uncertainly (259–60).

One of James’s companions wants to leave the vicinity of the volcano and “find respite from the glasslike dust and ashes” (261). However, James chooses to stay and watch longer, remaining with two others. It is a decision she later will come to regret.

After several hours, the volcano appears to die down and James, her two friends, and the Mexicans who were assisting the travelers make camp for the night in a rustic shelter in close proximity to the volcano. But, a few hours later, at three o’clock in the morning, James writes, “The roof above us collapsed under the weight of the rain of sand and ash” (263). She continues:

A mighty blow struck across my hip as I lay curled up on one side. It reverberated. I was shocked awake, confused by the pain. I heard a scream in the dark, the sound of running sand and ash tumbling upon me from above. I could not move. It was like a nightmare when the dreamer tries to run and should but is unable to move or make a sound. I was quickly buried alive beneath falling debris. . . . Mary Charles was the first to emerge, suffering with a badly sprained ankle, but able to walk; Rose’s back was twisted and she had to be helped. My injuries were more serious. Pinned down by the ironwood beam which fell freighted with tons of sand and ash, striking the right hip above my fractured limb, I feared the worst. . . . Six and a half months of almost hourly devotion to mending it lost in a minute! (263–64).

For a second time James is saved by the heroics of others. Help comes from the Americans and Mexicans, who fashion a stretcher out of available wood and lassos and carry her to a nearby village. James writes, “I cried aloud with pain from the weight of my body pressing open fractures. For me the trip was an eternity” (266). It would take thirty-nine hours from the time the shelter collapsed until James arrived at the hospital in Mexico City. James again began the long process of rehabilitation of her leg, and five months later she was released from the hospital. She found herself in the same predicament as before—her tourist visa about to expire, but this time no opportunity to renew it. It was at this moment that the second half of James’s life would begin: as recommended by a friend, she would travel to Ajijic, a village located at a much lower altitude. She says in the final sentence of the antepenultimate chapter of Dust on My Heart that “Ajijic was all people said and much, much more” (271).

5Neill James’s Legacy in Ajijic

James ends her quartet of travel books settled in an adobe house in Ajijic that lacked all modern-day conveniences, but it did have a garden that brought her much joy. Following another long recovery, though, she turned her attention to Ajijic itself and became recognized as a “trailblazer” in the community, according to Tony Burton (Foreign Footprints, 39). James is remembered among the residents and expats who lived there for creating industry and employment for the local population, especially the women. One of her projects was establishing a silk farm; she describes the venture in a letter to a college friend:

Dear Ima,
I established and run a silk farm. That is I planted mulberry trees and grow silk, spin and weave it. I set up a weaving establishment to weave it. Costs me double what I sell it for. I was just trying to establish a new industry in our village and found myself neck deep in silk myself. Villagers have land but grow corn and beans which sustains life. Seems to them more important than silk (James, Letter to Mrs. S. W. Reaves).

After setting up the silk farm, James then purchased material, thread, and needles for women and girls to use for embroidery projects. She even recruited an American artist, Sylvia Fein, living in Ajijic at the time, to create original designs.¹⁵ The project was a huge success, and the women were excited by the money they earned. Burton reported that these embroidered designs were turned into blouses and were so popular that James opened Ajijic’s first gift shop, with handcrafted “items made in Ajijic” (Foreign Footprints, 78).

Other projects followed. In the same letter to her friend Ima Reaves, James lists additional achievements in Ajijic, including fostering malnourished twins:

I established and maintain two public libraries for Ajijic. I have built and maintain 12 casas which I have furnished and rent, apart from my own. I look after toilets and non working pumps in the wells. In ajijic [sic] everything starts from scratch. I am feeding and giving cod oil and calcium to a pair of identical twins who are almost 4 years old and cannot walk and talk. Just a lack of nutrition. I have been feeding them for nearly a month and both are beginning to walk . . . but not talk. But they are healthy so suppose in time they will talk.

Several articles I found on James online confirmed these efforts, cited more achievements, and effusively praised James herself and her contributions. Kristina Morgan, author of “The Legacy of a Heroine—Neill James,” calls James a “Fairy Godmother,” “benefactress of the LCS [Lake Chapala Society],” and a woman that the author “would have dearly loved to know.” The article then enumerates James’s enormous accomplishments in Ajijic, which include opening “the first libraries in the area,” developing a “water purifying system,” installing “electricity and telephone,” and setting up “schools for local children’s education” (Morgan). All this she accomplished because, as the author states, “she believed in helping the Mexican people help themselves, a philosophy that is carried on today at the LCS through their scholarship program for students, ESL classes, computer classes and the Children’s Art Education program” (Morgan).

Another article praising James focuses on the thriving arts community in Ajijic. Mildred Boyd, in “The Neill James Legacy,” writes that James’s commitment to art education and the artistic hub that Ajijic has become is James’s most enduring gift:

It is doubtful that she visualized her adopted home as the thriving art center it is today. Education seems to have been her primary aim. Her early students recall that they were required to read or do homework for 15 minutes before being allowed to paint. . . . [James] encouraged the more talented to pursue art as a career, not only supplying all materials and paying the salary of a teacher, but providing a venue for the sale of their work and generously providing funds to send a number of them to prestigious art schools.

Her patronage has paid off handsomely. For six decades now a steady stream of gifted children has passed through those classes and an astonishing number have on gone on to successful careers as professional artists.

In October 2004, when Boyd’s article was published, the Centro Cultural de Ajijic hosted The Neill James Legacy Art Exhibit, which included “half a century of art featuring the past and present work of former students as well as the paintings of those who will carry her legacy on into the future” (Boyd). Finally, Tod Jonson writes in “Neill James—Ajijic’s Woman of the Century!” that “[s]ix of her original students still live and paint at Lakeside today: Antonio Cardenas, Dionicio Morales, Victor Romero, Jesús López Vega and his brother, Antonio Lopez Vega, as well as Javier Zaragoza. Today each of these men has his own gallery in Ajijic and is actively engaged in using the talents Neill taught them as little children.”

6Why Neill James Matters

In the thirty years since James’s death in 1994 much more has been accomplished on the banks of Lake Chapala. The headquarters of the Lake Chapala Society is located in James’s former home, and the Neill James Archive (NJA) has been established and is maintained there. Papers, photographs, journals, jewelry, clothing, furniture, and other ephemera have been or are in the process of being labeled and sorted.¹⁶ The other depository of materials for information about James brings us full circle, back to the beginning of James’s life story, in the state where she was born and educated. Mississippi University for Women has materials related to the life of James, including magazine and newspaper articles, photographs, and yearbooks. But, most importantly, since 2007 the university has offered a generous scholarship to creative-writing majors. A trust established by James’s younger and closest sister, Jane, funded the Neill James Memorial Scholarship.¹⁷ Jane never attended Mississippi University for Women herself, but she wanted to honor her sister with this award. It seems most fitting to have a recognition for James at the institution where her lifetime journey began. And, perhaps, as James’s life reads much like a novel and it is difficult to discern fact from fiction, a scholarship for creative writing students is the best way to remember this remarkable woman.

However, many questions remain about Neill James with answers that lack consensus among scholars: Was she a spy? Was she ever married? Did she leave Mississippi after college for personal reasons rather than simply a job opportunity in Washington? Did she lie or embellish her travel narratives? Why did she stop writing so suddenly? The debate surrounding these questions will persist for now with insufficient conclusive evidence, but what we do know for certain about her life, I believe, is sufficient to place her among the most fearless and accomplished women of the twentieth century. Her four entertaining travel narratives and children’s book put the remotest regions of the world into the laps of readers of all ages.¹⁸ Her travel life is one that most of us can only envy: James has had access to cultures and communities few have had the privilege of visiting, and she has documented those experiences in colorful and creative commentary. For her travel writing alone, she should be remembered alongside other great nineteenth and twentieth century women explorers and travel writers, such as Isabella Bird, Alexandra David-Néel, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark.¹⁹

And for her contributions in Ajijic she is remembered positively, as the plethora of literature suggests. Her legacy there, however, is not without taint; according to Tony Burton, in the early 1970s she encountered labor troubles within the businesses she helped develop when she first arrived in Ajijic. Employees unionized and court cases ensued, and James found herself living for a time in fear for her safety. In 1974 she officially retired from all her pursuits—the gift shop, embroidery business, and rental properties. Burton writes that despite these difficulties, “James is quite rightly revered today for her many positive contributions to the health and education of her adopted village” (Foreign Footprints, 227). He calls her “a legend in her own lifetime” (229) and has these final words of tribute for her:

Neill James loved Mexico and was always intent on improving the opportunities for women, children and young people. Whatever her flaws as an entrepreneurial capitalist, she was a committed philanthropist: her persistence was instrumental in bringing electricity, libraries and a health clinic to Ajijic, and she jump-started Ajijic’s transformation into a nationally important center for the visual arts (227).

Neill James was, indeed, a trailblazer and a legend. Her Petticoat Vagabond series chronicle an exciting and courageous life for a woman in the 1930s and ’40s. A first career as a globetrotting travel writer, followed by a second one in Mexico as a businesswoman and philanthropist, she is remembered for her contributions in both domains. Neill James was an extraordinary, enigmatic woman, whose lifetime journey from a tiny community in Mississippi to the mountains of Mexico is a life story for the ages.