The Bookkeeping of Memory: Judgment and Justice in True Grit
Charles Portis’s True Grit, first published as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968, is a story of the open road in the American West—“an epic” and “a legend” of a story, in fact, if one gives credence to the Washington Post review published upon its release. It is perhaps fitting that Catholic writer Donna Tartt, whose own fiction repeatedly explores questions of judgment, beauty, guilt, and redemption, should have written the affectionate afterword to the 2004 rerelease. There, she recalls reading Portis alongside “Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Honors English classes” in the 1970s when she was “fourteen years of age,” the same age as Mattie Ross, Portis’s clear-eyed protagonist. Tartt relays that sometime after the enormously successful adaptation starring John Wayne—who won an Oscar for playing the iconic Rooster Cogburn—the novel itself became increasingly intertwined with Wayne’s own legend in the American imagination.
While Tartt does not fully speculate on why this happened, I suspect it occurred in large part because the film became identified primarily as a Western: a genre tale starring a man who was already, in many Americans’ minds, a myth all his own. Significantly, Wayne’s Rooster is also considerably older than Portis’s Rooster in the novel itself, roughly 39-42 versus 61 or 62. Wayne’s age changes Rooster into an aging-legend figure rather than a still-dangerous, middle-aged frontier marshal, one who might awaken Mattie’s longings. The gap and the iconography of Wayne himself help explain why audiences link cowboy mythic masculinity more than Mattie’s adolescent journey with this novel.
Whereas the book transcends genre into something, dare I say, stranger and, yes, certainly more enduring, the movie in some ways relegated the classic to the world of pulp Westerns, musty bookstores, and battered trade paperbacks. Even the phrase “true grit,” the very question of who possesses that indomitable characteristic, seems as though it ought to belong to Rooster—to John Wayne as a person even, whose face loomed large on movie posters, including the one that hung in my parents’ basement, and even deeper within my father’s moral imagination and that of many within his generation. For years, I assumed Portis’s story belonged to Wayne’s audience, to a generation of men who loved the idea of true grit and all it entailed.
Then I finally read the novel as an adult and found myself surprised. Was this not a man’s story? A story no child should be part of? Yes, Mattie is called an “unnatural child” in Portis’s novel and asked about her presence in places she should not be, over and over. But in some ways that is precisely the central question not only of True Grit but of many a great coming-of-age narrative: how does one make one’s way through an adult world mired in violence, injustice, and moral uncertainty? How does one come to terms with being an adult? Think now of To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, The Outsiders, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The Hunger Games, and many others.
Indeed, anyone who has read True Grit as Tartt did—and recalled her mother and grandmother loving the book as much as she did—knows the essence of grit belongs not to Rooster but to Mattie. And if there is any doubt about this, we need only turn to the novel’s unforgettable opening lines, narrated in a voice as iconic and regionally self-assured as that of another famous thirteen- or fourteen-year-old coming-of-age traveler through the American frontier whom you might already have been thinking of and wondering why he was not mentioned previously: Huckleberry Finn.
For those needing a quick reminder, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is generally set in the 1840s along the Mississippi River corridor of Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi, while True Grit takes place only a generation later in the 1870s, beginning in western Arkansas before moving into Indian Territory. The novels are thus separated by only a few decades and a few hundred miles within the broader American frontier landscape.
Yet while we still tend to read Huck Finn as the wandering child of the American frontier, we often neglect Mattie Ross, who likely would not be especially surprised by this oversight. After all, she begins her tale already assuming she will be doubted and forgotten—and, yes, perhaps even by you too, who may not until this article have remembered to count her as one of the most famous child protagonists in American literature, dear readers, or, as Mattie might call anyone inclined to disagree with her, simply “people.” Portis’s novel begins as follows:
People do not give credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in 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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Cheney shot my father down Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life, and his hard his $ 150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
Right away, readers learn that Mattie is a child, like Huck Finn before her, who is about to go on a journey in the American wilderness. Huck Finn famously falters about who he is and questions and prays and thinks about his faith. You might recall this moment with Jim on the raft, when he said, “I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell.’” Mattie begins her adventures on a train with Yarnell, a Black stable worker and friend of the family who accompanies Mattie on a train ride where she decides to “ride on a colored coach.” When the conductor of the train yells at Yarnell for not moving a trunk, Mattie replies, “We will move the trunk but there is no reason for you to be so hateful about it,” and then the next line reads, “He saw that I had brought . . . attention to how little he was.” There is no moral back and forth with Mattie, or as she puts it after watching three people hang and then going to the undertaker where her father lay dead, “I have never been one to flinch or crawfish when placed with an unpleasant task.”
Indeed, Mattie’s moral inheritance on the open road is one of grit—and I will pause here, as English professors are often apt to do, to invoke the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word itself. One 1874 definition, appearing almost precisely during the period in which the novel is set, defines “grit” as “coarse material such as gravel, sand, etc., that is spread on roads to improve traction.” In other words, grit is not merely toughness. It is the very thing that allows one to continue forward movement across unstable ground. What Mattie seeks throughout the novel is precisely this kind of moral traction amid grief, violence, uncertainty, and the lawlessness of the frontier. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, who vacillates morally and spiritually throughout his journey, or even Dorothy Gale, whose central longing is simply to return home, Mattie is governed above all by a stern sense of justice. She values duty, competence, self-command, and moral clarity. Her journey across the frontier is therefore not one of self-discovery so much as a continual testing of character. Thus, True Grit reimagines the American road narrative through Mattie Ross’s Stoic discipline, turning the frontier journey not into a story of self-discovery but a testing ground for justice, endurance, and moral self-governance.
Moreover, there is a chosen buoyancy to Mattie’s narration that is important to acknowledge. For all the violence of the text, True Grit is persistently comic without ever becoming silly. As American humorist Roy Blount Jr. observes, “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” And indeed, McCarthy’s roads (think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men) usually end in apocalypse, nihilism, or at minimum a man staring silently into the void somewhere in Texas, wishing he were anywhere but in America or in existence at all. Portis’s roads, by contrast, still permit justice, laughter, and a fourteen-year-old Presbyterian girl who is somehow the most competent person in the territory, and in her own head, in the world. In classical comic terms, the world of True Grit bends not toward despair but toward restoration, of self and the reader.
To illustrate that sense of restoration, it helps to recall that shortly after arriving in Fort Smith to retrieve her murdered father’s body, Mattie Ross pauses to describe the famous federal judge Isaac Parker, whose courtroom she soon visits in search of the deputy marshal she hopes will help her track her father’s killer. Parker, remembered throughout the American West as the “Hanging Judge,” had sentenced more than 160 men to death during his years on the federal bench. Yet what captures Mattie’s attention is not his reputation for severity but an unexpected detail about his final days—and the judgment before which he himself was about to stand. Mattie muses:
On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and eighty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you might feel some of the stronger medicine than the Methodist could make. It is something to think about.
It is, indeed, something to think about. This episode frames the moral universe Mattie inhabits. Before she hires Rooster Cogburn, before she pursues Tom Cheney into Indian Territory, and before she begins keeping her own careful account of justice and memory, Portis reminds readers that even judges ultimately answer to another Judge. Mattie’s response to her father’s murder is to keep careful books—to pursue justice with astonishing discipline, convinced that every wrong ought to be answered and every debt repaid. Whether such bookkeeping is sufficient is one of the novel’s most pressing questions.
Mattie’s moral accounting bears a striking resemblance to Stoic discipline. Her confidence that the world can be made morally intelligible through duty, self-command, and careful judgment echoes the ancient Stoic conviction that virtue lies in governing oneself rather than external events. Stoicism provides a compelling vocabulary for understanding how Mattie pursues justice. Furthermore, Portis leaves another possibility open. Judge Parker’s search for “stronger medicine” suggests that even the most disciplined pursuit of justice may not exhaust the deepest longings of the human heart.
Like Dorothy Gale before her, Mattie epitomizes what the Stoics called the dichotomy of control: the distinction, as Epictetus writes in the Enchiridion, that “some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.” Or, as Marcus Aurelius later summarizes more bluntly in the Meditations, “You have power over your mind—not outside events.” Mattie cannot undo her father’s death, eliminate violence from the frontier, or fully govern the actions of the men around her. What she can control, however, is her own conduct. As aforementioned, her understanding of duty is deeply tied to filial obligation and inflected by her stern Presbyterian moral inheritance; she quotes Scripture almost as quickly as she name-drops lawyers, contracts, and accounting books. A legalistic understanding of the world—of what can still be ordered amid chaos—is part and parcel of who she is.
We can see this clearly in Mattie’s early interactions with Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who enters the novel pursuing Tom Cheney not for murdering Frank Ross but for killing a Texas state senator and his dog. LaBoeuf arrives in Fort Smith hoping to convince Mattie to allow Cheney to be tried in Texas, where a reward awaits him. Mattie, however, immediately resists his convoluted frontier pragmatism. If it is not orderly, contractual, and morally legible, she wants little to do with it. The scene quickly becomes not merely a disagreement over geography—whether her father’s murder should be adjudicated in Arkansas or Texas—but over the nature of justice itself. Whereas LaBoeuf approaches the pursuit financially and pragmatically, seeing Cheney as a criminal attached to overlapping rewards, Mattie sees the matter as a moral obligation tied to filial duty and the righting of wrongs done to her family.
Moreover, Mattie instinctively recognizes complication itself as danger. She does not want LaBoeuf interfering with her arrangement with Rooster Cogburn, who by this point has already agreed to help her and who, she suspects correctly, may be easily swayed by additional money. Mattie prefers contracts, singular loyalties, and systems she can still govern. She is, in many ways, trying to impose Presbyterian bookkeeping onto the chaos of the frontier. Their exchange unfolds as follows:
“Haw, haw,” said LaBoeuf, “it is not important to me where he hangs, is it?”
“It is to me, is it to you?”
“It means a good deal of money to me. Would not a hanging in Texas serve as well as a hanging in Arkansas?”
“No, you said it yourself they might turn him loose down there. This judge will do his duty.”
“If they don’t hang him down there we will shoot him. I can give you my word as a ranger on that.”
“I want Cheney to hang for killing my father, not some Texas bird dog.”
“It will not be for the dog. It will be for the senator, and your father, too. He will be just as dead that way, you see, and pay for all his crimes at once.”
“No, I do not see. That is not the way I look at it.”
What matters here is not merely revenge but Mattie’s insistence upon moral order itself. She refuses expediency. She refuses reward culture. She refuses even the more masculine frontier logic that justice is interchangeable so long as a criminal ends up dead somewhere. For Mattie, justice must be rightly ordered, properly enacted, and connected to duty. In Stoic terms, she refuses to subordinate virtue to externals such as money, reputation, convenience, or masculine bravado. Her concern is not with what she cannot control—the chaos of the frontier—but with maintaining her own moral constancy within it. Money matters to Mattie—but not as luxury or status. Money for her represents order, accountability, obligation, and ideal exchange. She is not materialistic in the modern sense so much as anti-chaos. Even Mattie’s obsession with contracts, debts, and financial precision reflects not greed but her desire for a morally legible world. Gilles Deleuze argues in The Logic of Sense that the figure of the Stoic girl “presupposes a great deal of wisdom and entails an entire ethic,” an ethic of someone who does not change or come of age by altering the self in the course of the novel but by having the landscape become the myth that is embodied by that person.
For the purposes of this brief article, I am going to skip ahead to the end of True Grit—past the shootouts, snakes, dead horses, and all the frontier violence—to the older Mattie Ross who narrates the novel retrospectively, because it is there readers most fully see the comic buoyancy and mythmaking that Charles Portis has been constructing all along. Readers discover that Mattie has surreptitiously followed the life of Rooster Cogburn for decades afterward (and I will allow you, dear readers, to notice the implications of his name yourselves, though I will also remind you that Rooster earlier saved her from a potential sexual assault at the hands of LaBoeuf) and that she got to know him best when she was an adolescent and that he was the only man whom she ever believed exemplified “true grit,” in the end. Mattie eventually learns through her younger brother, Little Frank Ross, that Rooster is scheduled to appear in a Wild West show near Memphis. Rooster—who had ignored Mattie’s invitations to meet for years—has by this point become part cowboy, part performance, and part frontier mascot for paying audiences who likely wanted considerably more shooting and considerably less Presbyterian bookkeeping than Mattie Ross was prepared to offer.
Mattie recounts that “Little Frank had teased me over the years about Rooster being my secret sweetheart. By sending this notice he was having a sport with me he thought. ‘Skill and dash! It’s not too late, Mattie!’” As much as Mattie begs indifference to her brother, the novel suggests otherwise. She does actually “skill and dash,” even after reflecting that “a quarter of a century is a long time.” Yet when she finally arrives to the show, Rooster has died only days earlier. Already buried in a Confederate cemetery, he is nevertheless exhumed by Mattie and reburied in her own family plot. Even in death, she insists upon proper order, proper placement, proper accounting for those she has judged as her own in moral probity (and relationship to her). Indeed, Mattie Ross, one suspects, would probably attempt to organize the afterlife itself if given sufficient ledgers, contracts, and legal authority.
And then Portis brings the novel full circle through Mattie’s final reflections on gossip, judgment, and public misunderstanding:
People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance. They say I love nothing but money and the Presbyterian Church and that is why I never married. It is true I love my church and my bank. What is wrong with that? I tell you what. Those same people talk pretty nice when they come in to get a crop loan or beg a mortgage extension!
Here we find Mattie once again justifying herself against “people,” exactly as she did at the beginning of the novel. The frontier has changed. Rooster has become legend, transformed into performance, spectacle, and Wild West mythology. Yet Mattie remains stubbornly committed not to legend but to truth, duty, and memory rightly ordered. On Rooster’s grave she writes not some grandiose frontier mythology but the restrained epitaph: “A Resolute Officer of Parker’s Court.” He is remembered not as a cowboy caricature or theatrical gunslinger but as a man who fulfilled his duty—which, in Mattie Ross’s universe, is about the highest compliment available short of balanced financial records and regular Presbyterian church attendance. True Grit ultimately invites readers to contemplate one of Christianity’s oldest questions: What can justice accomplish, and where does mercy begin?
In this sense, Mattie ultimately controls the narrative of the West itself. She outlives Rooster. She outlives the frontier. She even outlives the mythology surrounding both. It is her telling of the story—not Rooster’s—that survives. And significantly, Portis does not end in apocalypse, nihilism, or metaphysical collapse. Unlike the borderlands of Blood Meridian, True Grit closes with endurance, continuity, memory, and moral coherence still intact. As Margaret Graver argues in Stoicism and Emotion, the Stoics understood virtue not as emotional suppression but as the cultivation of rational and stable forms of judgment. Mattie’s narration embodies precisely that constancy. She has not controlled events themselves—her father still died, violence still occurred, Rooster himself is gone—but she has controlled the narration of those events. She controls the bookkeeping of memory itself. The emotional accounting. The moral ledger of the frontier itself. Significantly, by the novel’s conclusion, Mattie has become approximately the age Rooster was during their original journey together, having moved from child observer of the frontier to one of its final keepers of memory. Thus the novel closes not in despair but in Stoic endurance, with Mattie’s famously restrained final sentence:
This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.
With those words, Mattie renders her final account. It is a faithful account, a just account, and perhaps even a beautiful one. Yet whether justice alone is the final word is another matter entirely.
