Books I Read This Month: March 2024
Percival Everett • Anna Shechtman • Lucy Sante • Diane Oliver
James (Percival Everett)
Daniel Decatur Emmett may not be as familiar a name these days as D.W. Griffith, but he was similarly a game changer in the field of entertainment. Despite the contentions of the Birth of Nation auteur’s latter-day apologists, the pioneering, racist filmmaker was responsible for making the formerly ragtag Ku Klux Klan a modern institution, and Emmett’s brand of show business likewise had an outsize role in oppression in America. Minstrelsy may have preceded him, but it was Emmett, the P.T. Barnum of burnt cork, who founded, in 1859, the Virginia Minstrels, the first troupe wholly dedicated to the grotesque form. He was the impresario who took the deeply insulting caricatures, which had been a small part of variety stage shows, and made it the whole show. In that same year, he also composed the song “I Wish I Was in Dixie,” which would become a battle hymn of the South during the Civil War. That he was born and raised in Ohio was of little importance—there was a market to exploit and one that wasn’t confined to the ass-end side of the Mason-Dixon line. More than 80 years later, there were still minstrel shows being performed in public school assemblies in New York City, that supposedly liberal bastion, except for those semesters when “American Indians” did a “rain dance” for the children. These cheap entertainments ingrained in the national consciousness pernicious beliefs about the intelligence and deportment of Black Americans. Emmett ultimately died in 1904 in impecunious circumstances despite his brilliant career, and it was another 14 years before money was raised to place a tombstone on his unmarked grave. The inscription declared that his former Confederate fight song “now thrills the hearts of the reunited nation.” You don’t say.
Some of Emmett’s lyrics serve as the epigram for James, Percival Everett’s masterful reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic 1884 satire, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the entertainer also appears as one of the picaros who play a key role in the retelling. Everett uses his satire to not only implicate slavers and racist profiteers, but also, tacitly, Twain himself, who was a staunch abolitionist, a friend of Frederick Douglass, and someone who had more in common with Emmett than you might imagine. That’s not primarily because of the 200-plus uses of the N-word that appear in his vernacular novel about a white boy and a runaway slave trying to escape from so-called civilization aboard a raft in the Mississippi. Mainly it’s because Twain, who knew the former slave Douglass could orate or write as well as anyone in the country, created in the character of Jim the ugliest stereotype possible of slaves. Jim didn’t need to be Douglass, but he was stripped of all native wit, all basic intelligence, benighted enough that even children could easily make sport of him. Twain meant to help, to urge white Americans to see the error of their ways, but he still did some harm—it was still a minstrel show. Everett wrote this novel as a riposte, to give Jim a new voice, to turn him into James.
“White folks expect us to speak a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.”
In Everett’s telling, James is himself a proprietor of sorts of a minstrel show. The slave has learned to read and write by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s library by night. Apart from freedom, books are his passion—they’re another kind of liberty, and Voltaire is a particular favorite. But no one can know, as it would enrage white folks, so he speaks in fractured English as is expected of him, being sure to say “‘cessity” instead of “necessity,” for instance. This deception will help keep him safe–or safer, at least. He secretly teaches the slave children on the plantation how to read but also schools them in how to torture their sentences when speaking in public. “White folks expect us to speak a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he tells his young daughter, Lizzie, when she puzzles over the need for the duplicity.
As in Twain’s tale, James decides to run off when he learns that Miss Watson is to sell him to another plantation, permanently separating him from his wife and daughter, which coincides with Huck Finn also making a break for it to dodge his cruel, alcoholic father “Pap,” who is forever lurking on the periphery of the boy’s life, always ready to unleash his violent fury on him. Huck is basically a good if imperfect child on all matters, including the matter of race, knowing instinctually he’s been born into a bizarre and unjust world. At any rate, he’s certainly better than his friend, that relentless little shit Tom Sawyer, who cares more about entertaining himself than the welfare of others. When James and Huck happen across each other on nearby Jackson’s Island after their coincidental escapes, the man knows he’s doubly screwed. Not only is he wanted for being a runaway slave, but he’s likely also wanted for kidnapping the boy, maybe even for murdering him. If he’s captured, it’s death by fire or noose.
“Never has a situation seemed more absurd, surreal and ridiculous.”
The pair embark on numerous adventures on the Big Muddy, trying to stay ahead of pursuers as they make their way by canoe and raft, dodging steamboats. Familiar Twain characters, like the dangerous grifters the King and the Duke, appear, complicating matters even further. James refuses to allow Huck to deposit him in Illinois, a free state, because he wants to rescue his wife and daughter. He’s also often concerned about leaving Huck to fend for himself, though the two are sometimes separated by circumstance only to fortuitously find one another yet again. Everett plays much of their hardships for the bleakest of laughs.
During a raucous scene of a religious revival in which the King and the Duke are trying to con a large crowd out of their money, the King decides to favor those assembled with a recitation of a Shakespearean passage he’s committed to memory. Unfortunately for him, it’s a Shylock soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice, and the crowd, believing him to be Jewish, is ready to riot. In another, Daniel Decatur Emmett purchases James from a man who’s temporarily taken possession of him, noticing that the escaped slave has a perfect tenor voice, something his minstrel troupe lacks after their resident tenor departed unannounced. Black performers aren’t allowed to perform in auditoriums, so James has to smear bootblack on his face before each performance. He gets help in doing so from the group’s attendant, Norman, who’s a very light-skinned Black man who’s successfully passed. As they walk down the street together, ten white men in blackface, a Black man in blackface and a Black man who’s passing for white, the runaway slave is overwhelmed by the scene. “Never has a situation seemed more absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” James says of the motley group, though he may as well be talking about the history of race in America.
All the while, James clings to a stub of pencil he’s acquired, hoping to write the story of his life.
Everett departs from Twain’s plotting in numerous ways. He moves forward the timeline of the narrative decades so that the action occurs on the eve of the Civil War, which eventually impacts the course of events. There’s a bold and completely believable revisionist reveal about the James-Huck relationship—the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. The so-called noble white characters receive a rewrite, with Judge Thatcher, for instance, the “decent slave owner,” being put in his proper perspective. When you’re owned, whipped or raped by another, degrees of etiquette matter little.
All the while, James clings to a stub of pencil he’s acquired, hoping to write the story of his life, desperately trying to not slip up around white people, even Huck, when he speaks, continuing his life-preserving ruse that he’s illiterate and no threat. When he’s dreaming or if he’s delusional from a snakebite, he debates aloud John Locke about ethics and such in his own voice, but he does all he can to sustain the lie. In the aftermath of the King and the Duke pretending to be pirates to separate some listeners from their money, Huck says to James, “They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?” James, in his false, practiced diction, answers: “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares 'em.”•
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle
(Anna Shechtman)
The cruciverbalist and academic Anna Shechtman began constructing crossword puzzles when she was just 15, the same year she became anorexic. Both behaviors have tangled roots, but each often takes impetus from a desire for control. The essential allure of the crossword isn’t the challenge of the game nor the sense of satisfaction at its completion. Its main psychological draw is the illusion of order it creates in an otherwise chaotic world, the respite it provides from life’s usual free-for-all. Constructors, like urban planners confronted by the tumult of the teeming masses, build their utopias upon grids, providing a sound structure to all who enter. Sure, initially you’re walking down a blind alley, with squares unfilled and theme unknown, but there’s a guarantee that order can be restored, chaos conquered. The few open-ended, non-grid games offered online currently at major publications aren’t nearly as popular because they lack the comfort of a closed world. Atop this emotional underpinning of the puzzle is the intellectual sheen enjoyed by solvers who are viewed as polymaths applying their broad learning to score a small, heady triumph. It’s considered an upright hobby.
It wasn’t always so. Roughly a decade after the first crossword (then called a “word-cross”) was devised in 1913 for the Pulitzer family’s New York World by British journalist Arthur Wynne, the puzzle exploded into the culture and became a wildly popular Jazz Age rage, from Strivers’ Row to death row. The form had its defenders, but it was frequently viewed as low entertainment that would divert people from non-trivial intellectual development. It was suspect behavior. “Let them read Shakespeare,” the columnist Arthur Brisbane wrote haughtily of crossword enthusiasts in 1925, though you know Shakespeare would have just adored the word puzzles. But the frantic counterreaction to the crossword craze wasn’t just about the skepticism of a diversion becoming suddenly ubiquitous—there was an anti-feminist subtext. Unlike the broad moral panic in the U.S. that attended, say, the emergence of video games in the 1970s, crosswords were more akin to the animus directed at the profound popularity of bicycling in the 1890s, which liberated women from dependence on men to provide transportation. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said this of the bicycle: “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.”
Like bikes, crosswords were, for a couple of reasons, linked to women’s rights. For one, the word game grew popular in the immediate aftermath of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote—though obstacles were obviously still placed before Black women—and there was already concern that females would be distracted from their “duties” in the home, so the “crossword-obsessed New Woman” became an invented crisis. The second reason is because women were the ones who often conceived and solved the puzzles, longing as many were for an intellectual challenge in a patriarchal society that denied them careers. In fact, Wynne’s invention may have never gone viral had it not been for the women who perfected the format, including Ruth Hale and Margaret Farrar, who contributed mightily to the codification of the rules of the game, enabling its charms to become standard and repeatable, the same way the National Association of Base Ball Players had done for its pastime in 1857.
It’s a deeply personal and widely political work which fits into the catchall category of Weird American Books, those titles that defy easy classification.
Hale and Farrar are two of the women profiled in Shechtman’s cerebral 2024 pastiche of memoir, cultural history and feminist theory, The Riddles of the Sphinx, which is an odd mix—but odd good. It’s a deeply personal and widely political work which fits into the catchall category of Weird American Books, those titles that defy easy classification, the sort of space occupied by the James Agee-Walker Evans 1941 collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. One of the wittiest of contemporary constructors and one who loves the grid but routinely subverts it, the author uses her longtime involvement with Big Crossword, as a constructor formerly for the New York Times and now the New Yorker, to explore the last century of American feminism through these semi-famous women, not exactly praising them but instead treating them like the mixed blessings that they were—that we all are. (“Feminism does not preclude being a messy human,” the author asserts. ) These figures were instrumental in developing the industry, but were elbowed aside by men beginning in the 1970s, as the crossworld became an overwhelmingly white, male domain.
Beyond Hale and Farrar and other historically significant women of the across-and-down domain, another female the author sketches is herself, centering on her struggles with anorexia during her high school and college years. As she meditates on starvation and crosswords, twin obsessions that have shaped her life, Shechtman draws a disquieting profile of her younger self. In general, adolescents can be a whole lot to deal with—Solomon may have allowed the sawing to commence had he been confronted with a teen rather than an infant—but even by those humble standards, Shechtman was so extra.
A brilliant child who hadn’t yet grown into her brain, one who felt overwhelmed by sadness and self-loathing, she was plagued in her teenage years by numerous character flaws that led her to embrace anorexia, a “distorted fantasy of success,” she puts it, which made her feel superior to her female peers. (“I wanted women’s equality and wanted to be better than other women,” she acknowledges.) She tours her youthful faults—grandiose thinking, narcissism, hypercompetitiveness—knowing that she gave her parents fits as they watched their daughter shrink away and even caused one therapist to “dump her” for being “manipulative.” (Of course she was manipulative—all addicts are in order to protect the continuance of the destructive behavior they’ve grown emotionally dependent upon.)
For most people, a crossword puzzle is accepted at face value as a fun, trivial thing, but the writer rightly views it as a literary and political space.
Psychotherapy is a big part of Shechtman’s personal narrative, from the series of professionals who’ve treated her to her reading of classic analytic literature by Hilde Bruch, Sigmund Freud (of course), etc. While her immersion in therapy may have in the end helped guide her to a healthier path, the effects weren't anywhere near immediate, leaving her in a state of self-immolation. “Perhaps I’m just not a good person,” she thought to herself during that period, eventually having to leave college and head to a Utah treatment facility named “Paradise.” Like all talented wordsmiths, the author knows a gift when she’s handed one, and whether it’s Paradise or Pleasantville (the town where she worked, not always pleasantly, for New York Times puzzle master Will Shortz), she doesn’t whiff on opportunities for comic relief.
Truth be told, based on this book, Shechtman still possesses many of her younger self’s dubious qualities, if in much smaller doses. She’s still way too tough on herself and others, which may be a feature and not a bug for a critic, but it isn’t always the most salubrious characteristic for living life well. This book will be really divisive in the crossworld, a subculture that can be as petty and unpleasant as any other insular society, due to the author intertwining her personal narrative with the game, but the psychological auto-vivisection Shechtman conducts in Sphinx is admirable and fascinating. She’s a puzzle half-done, still working on herself, a super-intelligent person trying to improve her social intelligence. She performs this self-examination while using her top-notch writing and researching skills to explain how women, such a foundational part of the crossword, have mostly fallen off the grid. She asks: “How did crossword constructing evolve from a feminized pastime—once conflated with first-wave feminists and bored housewives—to a male-dominated industry, its pervasive gender imbalance tracked, analyzed, and visualized by men prominent in the field?” The answers are numerous, but the reality is depressing.
For most people, a crossword puzzle is accepted at face value as a trifling time-killer, but the writer rightly views the form as a literary and political space, a laboratory where language is used in either exclusive or inclusive ways, where it further entrenches us in the status quo or makes us reconsider received wisdom. “Words, per se, don’t have identity politics,” she writes. “But when launched into circulation—By whom? In what context? With what intent?—they become load-bearing devices. They carry political implications, erecting borders that are inevitably fraught with the psychic and material baggage of identity.”
The final section, an amalgam of stats and dish, will be of most interest to the contemporary crossword community.
Some of the bios of women who left a mark on the crossworld include the aforementioned Hale, an Algonquin Round Table regular who advocated for women to maintain their surnames after marriage, and, in 1924, founded the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, a good use of her grammar and usage fixation, leading the way for the formalization of the puzzle’s standard operating procedure. She also advocated for the ease of divorce laws and attained a 1933 Mexican divorce from her writer husband (whose work she often did for him sans compensation). Hale died young at 47, likely killed by drinking contaminated water taken from her plumbing-less, ramshackle Connecticut estate. Farrar was the founding crossword editor of the New York Times and also created the best-selling initial book of the puzzles published in 1924 by Simon & Schuster. She was the one who, in addition to improvements like forbidding two-letter answers, made sure each puzzle passed the “Sunday morning breakfast test,” keeping the unpleasantness of life out of the puzzle, acting as both tastemaker and censor. She also crossed the picket line during the long 1962-63 New York City newspaper strike, refusing to see herself as the journalism professional she was, believing herself as a “gal keeping busy and out of trouble.” (Internalization is real!) Julia Penelope was an impossibly complicated person, a lesbian separatist and early TERF, who alienated friends and enemies alike as she continually reinvented herself politically, and not always in sensible ways. She was also an alt-crossword constructor who used the form as activism, publishing Crossword Puzzles for Women in 1995. This portrait in particular would make for an outstanding standalone opuscule in the tradition of Stefan Zweig.
The final section, an amalgam of stats and dish, will be of most interest to the contemporary crossword community. It’s a survey of the modern industry, which begins with Shechtman’s pre-PhD stint working as an assistant to New York Times éminence grise puzzle editor Will Shortz in his Pleasantville home office a decade ago. The author was a young person who recognized, along with others of her generation, the bias not only rampant in the choice of constructors but also in the judgment of which clues and answers were deemed “acceptable.” Shortz, about 60 at the time, was the old guard who, yes, hired a young woman to assist him, but rebuffed most attempts to make significant changes. You can have empathy for him as he was caught between trying to satisfy readers who wanted more of the same and those angling to reimagine the grid, but there never was a single NYT crossword constructed by a Black female until 2021, and that’s unpardonable.
It wasn’t until 2020 that the New York Times made significant structural fixes to address the inequities of its puzzles section. Tired of waiting for needed change to arrive, Shechtman had stopped submitting crosswords to the Times years earlier, eventually being brought back into the fold by the New Yorker, which reserves half its puzzles for female constructors and is much more welcoming to multicultural clues and answers that don’t only test solvers’ knowledge but also helps them expand their learning. Of course, the New Yorker, which, in 2021, ran a piece of what eventually became this book, has had its own serious bias issues, if drawn along class lines, having become a privilege factory during the quarter of a century of David Remnick’s stint as Editor-in-Chief. During that time, the overwhelming—and I mean OVERWHELMING—number of staff-writer positions at the publication have gone to writers who grew up in comfortable middle-class homes and attended Ivy League universities. A brilliant female writer from a working-class background who attended SUNY or CUNY had zero chance of snaring such a position. It’s a passé and risible brand of elitism, an anti-meritocratic stance that’s been unique, among magazines, to the New Yorker for 25 years. A publication can print a crossword that employs the term “intersectional” as a clue, but it’s quite another thing to actually practice intersectionality.
I can’t tell you for sure if Shechtman, who comes from the sort of privileged background and education favored by the New Yorker, has stopped to think about this particular instance of unfairness, but it wouldn’t be surprising if she has. Of course, she isn’t responsible for a system created by someone else that’s been a reality since she was in the third grade, but it’s easy to be particularly hopeful about her because of an excellent essay she wrote last year about the Real Housewives series for the New York Review of Books, using the Reality TV franchise to cleverly investigate the underpayment of labor in the home for women of all classes. It may seem like an odd choice of inspiration for exploring the topic, but talented writers and thinkers realize that the clues are everywhere.•
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Lucy Sante)
About six decades ago Lucy Sante was a working-class kid bouncing back and forth between towns in Belgium and New Jersey, her family never really able to make it financially in either locale. Sante was surprised when she won a scholarship to Regis High in Manhattan despite not being the most dedicated of students. It was there, on the cusp of the 1970s, that the awkward child found her true home in a city that was on the edge of precipitous collapse. NYC’s post-war prosperity had run headlong into extreme financial mismanagement and the ship was capsizing—but what treasures there were to be found in the depths. It was a sinkhole full of sacred waters, a gleaner’s paradise, a flea market of ideas, an eclectic clubland, as punk and hip hop were being birthed, with records, books and and like-minded oddballs everywhere. Some of those fellow travelers she befriended were, as she modestly calls them, Jim, Jean-Michel, Nan and Darryl—as in Jarmusch, Basquiat, Goldin and Pinckney. The city was an eyesore and dangerous as fuck, more rattrap than tourist trap, but it was dirt cheap and, in its own way, a paradise. It was the “apex of Western culture and the armpit of the Western world,” as Sante once described New York of that era when discussing her classic 2003 essay on the topic, “My Lost City.”
As besotted as she was by NYC, gladly ditching school on the regular to become a flâneur in a city filled with cheap drugs and dotted by boxes of rare LPs regularly dumped at the curb by landlords whose solitary tenants had died, Sante unsurprisingly ended up flunking out of Regis, needing to finish high school back in New Jersey. But she was, to her disbelief, soon awarded a full scholarship by Columbia University and became determined to never again leave her scummy Shangri-La, even if she was, once more, too distracted by the borough to complete her formal studies. The sweep of history intervened, however, as bankers, lawyers and developers led the city into an unrivaled period of gentrification beginning in the 1980s. It was a stunning reversal. “I thought it was prelude,” Sante would say disconsolately years later about her vanished New York, still in a state of disbelief. Exacerbating matters was that it was a microcosm of what was being wrought by Reaganomics and Thatcherism, both of which bludgeoned low-income and middle-income people, most of whom gleefully welcomed these revolutions in reverse, which were cynically draped in Old Glory and the Union Jack.
Sante traces her late-life gender transition, how she belatedly took the leap in her dotage and at 66 became a woman of a certain age.
You might assume Sante, who eventually graduated from stints working at the Strand Bookstore and the New York Review of Books to write the instant-classic history Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, an account of another lost version of the city, ultimately relocated to Hudson Valley because of her heartbreak over Wall Street’s triumph. But the surprising move for the urban explorer was actually at the behest of her first wife, who wanted a rustic lifestyle. The marriage was a spectacular mismatch from the start, but not only for geographic reasons. From early childhood, the writer knew that she was a female trapped in a male body, one who would borrow her mom’s clothes on the sly to see what she would look like in a dress or skirt. It was an especially fraught secret for young Sante to harbor because mom was a repressed Catholic and tried to project her repression and Catholicism on her kid. As an adult, through breakups and breakdowns, as she doused her frayed nerves with all manner of narcotics, Sante longed to be the woman on the outside that she was inside. She was always attracted to females sexually, but she also was herself a female. In her 2024 memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, Sante traces her late-life gender transition, how she belatedly took the leap in her dotage and at 66 became a woman of a certain age.
At the outset of the book, Sante republishes an email she sent to 30 friends in early 2021, explaining to them that she’d changed her name from “Luc” to “Lucy” and that she was at the start of a gender transition that might or might not occur. It was a tentative and sincere missive, a halting first step. Her second wife, Mimi, prevented Sante from pressing send on a follow-up missive that tried to undo much of the first communiqué, rightly knowing that her spouse’s cold feet would soon warm again. What enabled Sante to be able to finally transition at retirement age? Perhaps she was encouraged by the introspection imposed by the solitude of the Covid epidemic. Maybe the gender-swapping app that allowed her to see photos of herself as a female at every stage of her life was the impetus. (Many of these images appear throughout the book.) Or maybe the moment was just right, as young activists had made Trans rights omnipresent, helping Sante “crack her egg” and be herself. There seems to particularly be credence to the latter scenario. “Now that the world had shifted slightly,” she writes, “I was on the moving sidewalk as last.”
“I was like a character in a science-fiction novel, trapped between dimensions.”
When Sante eventually decided to move forward with the physical transformation, she enjoyed a few months of exhilaration—a “pink cloud”—about the changes. That didn’t mean the initial phase lacked its awkward moments. “I was like a character in a science-fiction novel, trapped between dimensions,” Sante writes of the vertiginous aspect of her gradually emerging new self. The book flips back and forth between the treatments and processes she endures in her late 60s to achieve her goal and the earlier decades of the author’s life (childhood, young adulthood, two marriages, parenthood). The story’s told economically and is marked by the writer’s customary gift of observation.
For all the Sturm und Drang of Sante’s pre-transition, tortured personal life, her work has always been distinguished more by thoughts than feelings, cold-blooded rather than warmhearted, not exactly offering a surfeit of emotion. That characteristic seems to have been altered by her major life event. In the final 30-page crescendo of the book, passages not only about the end of her journey—“I feel exceptionally fortunate,” she tells us—but also about a former flame and running mate named Eva who died from multiple sclerosis, her parents’ descent into dementia, and her extraordinary second wife, Sante has penned the most moving prose of her career. The old punk hasn’t exactly become a pop princess, but there’s a new richness to the music.•
Neighbors and Other Stories (Diane Oliver)
The running theme throughout Diane Oliver’s sparkling short stories, released at last in 2024 as a collection but written during the Civil Rights Era, is the attempt at uneasy unions and reunions—a society-wide effort at school integration, a father returning to the wife and children he abandoned, an extended family trying to come together or at least peacefully coexist. There’s a baker’s dozen of tales which mainly focus on Black Americans endeavoring to connect with others, sometimes risking their lives to do so, and a single striking exception, the 1967 story “Mint Juleps Not Served Here.” Published posthumously a year after the North Carolina native had her life tragically abbreviated in a motorcycle accident when just 22, this entry is a shocking detour from Oliver’s dominant thread.
In this narrative, a Black family relocates far from their Southern home when their small son loses his ability to speak after being terrorized by a group of older white boys, settling deep in a forest preserve where they can cut off the rest of America, especially the racists who’ve harassed them relentlessly. The father builds a sturdy cabin where they reside and earns money by whittling wood into figurines. He makes an annual holiday-season pilgrimage to the general store in the nearest town where these tchotchkes sell briskly. It’s enough to sustain, and apart from his periodic trips to make bulk food purchases, the family lives alone in their idyll, happily seeing almost no one else.
In a discipline like fiction, one that’s incredibly resistant to precociousness, Oliver was the ultimate wunderkind.
A lovely white woman named Rosemarie from the County Service intervenes, though, making her way through endless trees and brush to locate their home. It’s a miracle she finds them at all. The woman arrives when the father isn’t home, kindly but forcefully explaining to the nervous mother that she’s intent on enrolling the nine-year-old child in school and turning him into a useful member of society, regardless of the skittish parent’s wishes. The conflicting desires of the family and the young woman lead to a stunning climax, the story becoming a bold heir to the Southern Gothic greatness of something like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” While this tale has caused Oliver to understandably be compared to Shirley Jackson, it’s Flannery O’Connor—minus the racism—who’s really the analog. Oliver could have had an O’Connor-esque career if she wanted, an audacious thing to say about an author who died so young, but that degree of talent was already present. Oliver’s palette was remarkably varied, however, and a couple of particularly ambitious stories later in the collection demonstrate that she may have gone in far different directions. In a discipline like fiction, one that’s incredibly resistant to precociousness, Oliver was the ultimate wunderkind.
Unification being Oliver’s chief concern is unsurprising considering the quartet of stories she published during her lifetime appeared in print in a six-month period in 1965 and 1966, in the aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. She looks at America through the lens of Black citizens of diverse economic situations, from the extremely precarious to the service class to the middle class, as they pursue happiness while dealing with some problems that are personal and others political. They struggle as most of us do with family issues, romances, finances, etc., while racism weighs on their efforts.
A generation gap is on display in this story as parents and clergy try to dissuade the young people from challenging the segregated system.
“Neighbors” is straightforward realism, a story about an apprehensive family on the eve of their young son being the first child to be bused to a white grade school, as they deal with all the negative attention that attends this seismic shift, ultimately realizing that the magnitude of the moment may be too heavy a cross for their household to bear. In “The Closet on the Top Floor,” a middle-class Black teen matriculates at a heretofore white-only women’s college, experiencing the type of mental breakdown common to teens as they leave the familiarity of home for a new social order, the alienation she feels from her peers exacerbated by being the institution’s only non-white student. “Before Twilight” follows several Black teens who are taken into custody by the police after demanding service at an eatery that only serves white customers. A generation gap is on display in the story as parents and clergy try to dissuade the young people from challenging the segregated system.
This generational dynamic is repeated in other entries, including “When the Apples Are Ripe,” in which the flummoxed father of Jonnie-Boy, who has decided drop out of college and head to Mississippi to organize against segregation, asserts that “sensible people with a future don’t get involved.” The family’s elderly white widowed neighbor Mrs. Gilley, who’s gladly spent her long life steeped in a Jim Crow mindset—she quotes an ancestor saying that “every young man ought to have a confederate flag, a horse, and above all a watch”—gives her family’s valuable, antique timepiece to Jonnie-Boy before he departs, after something is awakened in her by the literature he’s consistently left for her about the mistreatment of Black Americans. It’s an incredibly generous if not entirely convincing piece.
It’s not a great situation, but there’s a tentative reconciliation, and for the weary woman, it’s better than nothing.
In “The Visitor,” Dr. Wilson’s second wife, Alice, plays host to the aggressively standoffish Katie, the daughter from his first marriage, who visits on a school break. It’s an instantly tense relationship between the traditionally sociable Alice and the nonconformist Katie, who can’t even pretend to appreciate the fancy birthday party her stepmom throws for her. The two women end up in physical conflict, but for all the bad feelings, Alice takes surprising meaning from the experience during the denouement. In a number of the stories, Black women not only bare the worst of the burden of a still-segregated society but also find themselves disappointed time and again by husbands and boyfriends who unexpectedly leave them and their children behind, who fail to meet them as promised in a bus station, as the wait on the wooden bench grows longer and the desertion becomes increasingly obvious.
The women sometimes realize they’ll be let down by their significant others but need to willfully fool themselves in order to just keep moving through life. Just such a story is “Traffic Jam,” one of the collection’s perfect entries, which sees Libby, a recurring character in the book, do drudge work as a domestic for a well-to-do white housewife, Mrs. Nelson, rattling pots and pans while dodging, as much as she can, her hectoring boss, who rattles her nerves. A year earlier her husband left Libby and their five children, ostensibly to work a job for a couple of months, but he never called and never returned. Each morning she leaves her youngest baby in a basket on the porch of a neighbor, while the rest of the children, mostly fed on food she pilfers from Mrs. Nelson’s leftovers, fend for themselves. Her husband shows up one day unexpectedly at Mrs. Nelson’s house while the employer is away, and the estranged spouses immediately fight, she punching his shoulders in fury and he slapping her across the face. When they calm down, he takes her outside to excitedly show her the car he’s purchased, when all she can think of are the diapers and children’s clothes she could buy with the gas money. It’s not a great situation, but there’s a tentative reconciliation, and for the weary woman, it’s better than nothing.
But the lack of fulfillment that dogs her, though, goes beyond race or gender—it’s just because she’s a thinking person, because she’s human.
The pair of stories mentioned at the outset that reveal a mature and developing style appear late in the book. The first is “Frozen Voices,” a tale about a love quadrangle among college-age kids that ends up years later in a double-murder suicide among the group, with just one survivor left to reckon with what happened. A feature of the highly stylized piece is the repetition of certain sentences, which is aimed at giving the story an unconventional structure, though it causes the piece to ultimately become tiresome. If it’s not a wholly successful experiment, it’s a gambit that provides a hint at how Oliver may have pushed to morph her fiction had she lived longer.
Along with “Mint Juleps Not Served Here” and “Traffic Jam,” the best of the collection is the final story, “Spiders Cry Without Tears,” which reveals an understanding of older people and the awakenings they experience as the years pile up that is positively preternatural coming from someone who was barely out of her teens. The story revolves around white Nashville woman Meg, who works as a florist after her husband leaves her and her son goes off to military school. Her father wants her to move back home to their small town and her friends are forever trying to find her a new spouse, but Meg has an independent streak that resists these overtures. One day, Walt, a Black doctor with a very sick wife, talks Meg into having lunch with him and a surreptitious six-year relationship begins. When Walt’s wife dies, they decide to marry despite how unwelcome that will make them in 1960s America. Meg’s family and friends grow distant, which is sad, but what really gnaws at her over time is something far deeper. Her second husband is a good man, but she’s still a woman considered subordinate in marriage, still unfulfilled. And that lack of fulfillment goes beyond gender as it does race—the dissatisfaction persists because she’s a thinking person in a world that defies our best efforts to make sense of it all. It’s because she’s human. And despite the ever-shifting construct of race, that’s all any of us are beneath our skin.•