Almost Family. Roy Hoffman. The Dial Press, 1983.

By Trudier Harris

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 21-23

White mistresses and their black maids have intrigued many generations of American writers. From the stereotypical portraits of the nineteenth century, to Faulkner’s more individualized but basically stereotypical Dilsey, to Alice Childress’ sassy Mildred, both black and white American writers have depicted the relations of the cultural and racial phenomena which inform white women treating black women “like one of the family.” Roy Hoffman’s Almost Family is yet another novel exploring that relationship.

Set in Madoc, Alabama between 1946 and 1975, Almost Family is the story of the parallel lives of Vivian Gold and her maid, Nebraska Waters. It explores the relationship between the two women as their children age and leave them, as well as the crises involved in one being employed by the other. Although Vivian initially scoffs at having a maid, and is frequently uncomfortable with the situation, her Jewish liberalism will not allow her to deny completely the trends of the community in which she lives. Whatever she may think to the contrary, she does have a maid, and she is politely but firmly diligent in maintaining the ultimate distance between the maid and herself. The two women might be pregnant at the same time; they may share the pain both have suffered earlier through miscarriages (Nebraska has in addition had an abortion); and they may both be devoted wives and concerned mothers. Finally, though, Vivian is mistress and Nebraska is maid; Vivian is white and Nebraska is black. The differences can never be completely overlooked.

Vivian’s position as a minority member in the larger white community which will not allow Jews to join certain clubs may be designed to show her potential to understand Nebraska’s more extreme minority position in relation to the white community; however, Vivian and her husband Edward finally become members of that club and can ignore their Jewishness (as Edward does in his support of the racist candidacy of George Wallace) in favor of acceptance. Nebraska, on the other hand, cannot change her color; nor can she realistically work to change her educational and economic status. The parallel lives are only parallel to a point. Vivian has much more room for escape from oppressing circumstances than does Nebraska.

Hoffman’s novel is not only a chronicle of the lives of these two women and their families, it also records, through them, the changes in the political and social atmosphere of Alabama and the country between 1946 and 1975. There is a scene recounting the stand of George Wallace at the entrance to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa while Vivian’s second daughter, Rachel, is a student there. There is the account of Nebraska’s son Junior losing a leg in Vietnam. There is a gripping description of the tension and violence which erupted in Nebraska’s neighborhood on the evening of Martin Luther King’s death, and there is irony in the fact that Edward and his son Benjamin have just drive to Nebraska’s house and it is she who is put in the position of protecting them from angry blacks. There is also the tension surrounding integration as Benjamin and Nebraska’s daughter Viv (named for Vivian), the result of the parallel pregnancies, grow up in a world which has not allowed them to truly mix in public settings.

The novel is interesting and engaging, and some scenes, such as the night of King’s death and the cones-

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quent death of Nebraska’s dauther, Wenda June, are particularly poignant. However, Almost Family depends primarily upon episodic, sketchy development rather than upon detailed portraiture of the two women. We see a lot of the women, over many years, but what we see remains close to the surface. There is little reflection. Ultimately, for Vivian, life goes on and, as it does, one needs a maid. Nebraska reveals deep resentments in blaming the Golds and other whites for the death of Wenda June, but these too are passed over. Hoffman trades depth for breadth in his novel, and he draws back from potentially explosive situations. There is a big crisis in one year which is not completely resolved, but the next chapter picks up two or three years in the future and may make only passing reference to that great crisis which has occupied us in the preceding chapter.

Hoffman understands the issues surrounding his subject, and he presents a substantial number of them, but he is ever polite in his presentation, and he ever strives, sometimes incredibly so, for peaceful, cooperative solutions. For example, Vivian’s liberalism leads her to invite Nebraska’s family to her summer home at the lake for an outing. When they all show up, tremendously uncomfortable with each other, Vivian complains about her invitation having been taken so literally (seven of the Waters family show up), and she does not have the slightest idea as to what to do with them. Both families are greatly relieved when the outing-turned-ordeal is over. “It’s all too confusing,” Vivian says, “all too confusing…. You try to be a mother, it’s hard. You try to be an employer, it’s hard. You try to be a friend, it’s hard. You try to be all three and it’s impossible.” Or consider what happens when Wenda June is arrested for trying to integrate the Woolsworth lunch counter in 1961. Instead of taking her to jail, two understanding policemen bring her to the Gold home to Nebraska and Vivian. As they discuss the matter with the policemen, who have blamed Wenda June’s action on her recent nervous breakdown, one of Vivian’s cousins emphasizes that the matter can be settled because “this ain’t the law . . . this is just family.”

But maids, as the title suggests, can never quite be family. Though claims to the contrary are consistently made by both Vivian and Nebraska, actions consistently undercut their claims. That is especially vivid when Benjie, freshly in college, writes an essay comparing Vivian and Nebraska as his two Jewish mothers. When he enthusiastically sends copies of his essay to Vivian, and to his sisters Sarah and Rachel, asking their advice about submitting it to the school journal, Sarah sends him a special delivery letter requesting that he not do so. Vivian in turn sends her a cryptic note: “Dear Sarah, Thank you. Love, Mother.” Vivian and Nebraska live primarily on the surface of polite relations. They dare not face overly long the distinctions that are theirs.

These two basically good women are caught in lifestyles and patterns of behavior which are larger than either of them. When they try to deny those patterns, it means discomfort and tension for both of them. Early in her employment at the Golds’ home, Nebraska had been tolerant if Vivian came home with her; then, following the disturbances of the civil rights days, there is a period of ten years during which Vivian does not visit. Unexpectedly, one evening when Vivian drives Nebraska home, she decides to go into the apartment. Insisting that she is “just family,” she rinses a glass and gets herself a drink, then she “ooos” and “ahhhs” and gushes over the apartment until Nebraska wants “to burst into tears.” Vivian comments on how well the numerous cast-aways she has given Nebraska look in her apartment, including one of the “filling-station glasses” that she “threw . . . out twenty-five years ago.” In one brief ten-minute swoop, Vivian has reduced Nebraska’s home to a perverse replica of her own: “Dear, being in your living room is like. being in a room right out of my own house! Isn’t that something?” It is truly something that Vivian cannot see beyond the surface of things, cannot see that it is partly because Nebraska must work in the financially limiting job of maid that she is forced to save all the Gold castaways. She cannot see that, in a matter of minutes, she strips from Nebraska all pride in her home, and she obviously influences the major decision Nebraska will make shortly.

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Hoffman does see, and he understands considerably more than his characters do. One of the virtues of Almost Family is that Hoffman brings a sensitivity to the representation of relations across cultural and racial lines in the South. He stands back from all of his characters and recognizes the limitations in them. I get the feeling that he is also standing back from what he has written, knowing that there is much more to tell.

Trudier Harris, who teaches English and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grew up in Tuscaloosa. Her book, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, was published by Temple University Press in December, 1982.

Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Viking Press, 1982. Penguin, 1983.

By Trudier Harris

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 12-13

Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place is a volume destined for long life. A collection of nine sections which together form a unified whole, the volume is powerful and strikingly well written. It captures the pain, suffering and futile attempts at happiness of a group of black women transplanted to a northern city’s deadend street known as Brewster Place.

Most of the women in Brewster Place have their origins in the South. Mattie Michael, who is the center of the first section, was born and raised in Tennessee. Sheltered by a father who witnessed the birth of his only child late in his life, Mattie is suddenly tumbled by Butch Fuller, the local dandy, into the mire of humanity. The pregnancy that results from Mattie’s one sexual encounter with Butch causes her to be thrown out of her father’s house. In order to save her father from the murder she knows he will commit she refuses to name Butch. Instead, she moves to Asheville, North Carolina to live with her friend Etta Johnson until the baby is born. Although Etta moves on rather quickly after the birth, Mattie’s “temporary” stay ends more than thirty years later when her own sheltered son skips bail instead of facing an assault charge, causing Mattie to lose the house she has put up to ensure his court appearance.

Mattie’s tale forms the backdrop against which the lives of several of the women of Brewster Place are to be viewed. She moves into Brewster Place upon her son’s abrupt and permanent departure. Mattie’s loss enables her to listen sympathetically to the tales of despair she hears and to understand the pain she witnesses. She manages to rein in her own pain consistently enough to offer guidance and comfort to others.

Mattie has an expansiveness of human feeling which allows her to watch patiently as Etta, also in her fifties, chases the ever illusionary dream of marriage to a respectable man. Etta has spent her life in “business opportunities” with men but Mattie knows that she is fast using up her assets. A minister picked for the husband role consents only to be her gigolo, forcing Etta to see that the only love and caring she is likely to experience will come from Mattie.

Other women on Brewster Place, are not so directly tied to Mattie. One, Cora Lee, fell in love so desperately with dolls as a child that she began to produce “real babies” as soon as she discovered where they came from. Another resident, Kiswana Browne, is a middle-class militant who has moved across town from “Linden Hills” to help unfortunate black brothers and sisters on Brewster Place. Saved from anachronism only by her commitment, Kiswana tries to form the residents of Brewster Place into a tenants union; they plan to fight in court for the many improvements the complex needs. In her commitment, Kiswana is just the opposite of the two young women who are the focus of “The Two.” Lesbian in a place which is hostile to their relationship, their different coping strategies illustrate how truly isolated they are; Theresa compensates by pretending not to care about the opinions of the neighbors, while Lorraine is driven to seek approval.

In one of the book’s most painful and disturbing scenes, Lorraine is raped repeatedly by the young black toughs of the neighborhood who have no place for a “dyke.” Pushed into insanity and retaliation by the rape, Lorraine commits murder.

Naylor’s heart-wrenching account of Lorraine has a counterpart in the tale of Lucielia Louise Turner, the granddaughter of Etta Johnson, the woman who had befriended Mattie after birth of her child. Ciel finds herself on Brewster Place in a common-law marriage with Eugene, for whom she has an abortion when he asserts that all she is good for is “babies and bills.” Several months later, when Eugene declares that he is leaving, Ciel’s claim that she loves him evokes, “that ain’t good enough.” While the two are fighting, their five-year old firstborn child, playing in

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another room, electrocutes herself by sticking a fork into an outlet. In the face of the rejection she believes God has shown her, Ciel determines to starve herself.

The pain, numbness, and death-in-life that define Ciel after her child’s funeral are relieved only when Mattie takes her into her arms and rocks the damned-up suffering into expression. That scene is a combination of conversion, renewal, and rebirth in which Mattie serves as preacher, guide, and sustainer. Indeed, Naylor’s description of Mattie’s role evokes that of Jesus in James Weldon Johnson’s “Go Down, Death: A Funeral Sermon,” and it can be compared to the change Avey Johnson experiences on the Caribbean island in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow. Yet, in the writing and in the power of the passage, Naylor’s voice is distinctively unique.

Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother’s arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children ‘s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegales infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.

She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it–a slight silver splinter, enbedded just below the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled–and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

Naylor’s presentations of human emotions ring so true that we sing our “Amens” from the knots in our stomachs or the tears in our eyes. There is verisimiltude in characters who are in their twenties as well as those who are in their fifties and older. In one scene between Kiswana Browne and her mother, who insists upon calling her newly remained daughter Melanie, Naylor astutely presents the clash of generations and the games parents and children knowingly play. In this instance, neither mother nor daughter win out; instead, both realize that they can learn from, and must allow respect for, each other.

Throughout, Naylor maintains a narrative style suffused with images that cause us to pause. She writes of the boys who attack Lorraine: “When they stood with their black skin, ninth-grade diplomas, and fifty-word vocabularies in front of the mirror that the world had erected and saw nothing, those other pairs of tight jeans, suede sneakers, and tinted sunglasses imaged nearby proved that they were alive”, and of the possible death of Brewster Place: “No one cries when a street dies. There’s no line of mourners to walk behind the coffin wheeled on the axis of the earth and ridded by the sky.”

But Brewster Place is not dying. Women like Mattie resist its demise as spiritedly as the images used to describe it. It is a testament to Naylor’s large talent that, in this her first novel, she handles the task so well.

Trudier Harris teaches literature and folklore in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Whistling At History

Reviewed by Trudier Harris

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 28, 24-25

Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan (Algonquin Books: Chapel Hill, 1993, 308 pages).

“Irreverent,” was my first reaction. And: “These characters aren’t rising above stereotype fast enough to suit me.” Next:”Too self-consciously aware of the novel being based on an historical incident.” Then: “Hmm this guy knows the black and white folk speech of the South, like an ear for things such as ‘I own know’ for ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Co-Cola’ for ‘Coca-Cola.'”

With this mixture of reactions, and several others that alternated with them, I raced my way through Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle. In a matter of hours I had completed a book that was alternately sad, funny, outrageous, informed, violent, tragic, and lingering. It lingers because I expected the novelist to do what the historians, newspaper people, and lawyers did not do—let the dead child raise his voice and reveal to me something that I didn’t know before. I expected Nordan to pull back the veil of history and take me to a place of understanding, not one that would make 1955 any less painful, but that would make it more tolerable. And after all those reactions, I reminded myself. “This is a novel. It was written by a man who was profoundly influenced by an historical event, but it is a novel. Let it take you places. Don’t impose your expectations upon it.” It is from that rather ambivalent—and hard to maintain—perspective that I offer the following comments.

Evoking the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen year-old boy from Chicago, in a small town in Mississippi, Wolf Whistle moves quickly from the scene of offense, to character studies of the white personalities central to the case, to the murder, the trail, and the aftermath of this “disturbance” (merely that, because the majority of the townspeople go so easily back to their routine existences). Set in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi (arrow catching is a senior varsity sport in this town), the novel follows Alice Conroy, a local school teacher; Uncle Runt and his family; Solon Gregg, the “white-trash” villain; and the Poindexter Montberclair couple, with wife Sally Anne as the unwitting recipient of the wolf whistle. And it is about Bobo, the character based upon Till; listing him last here is commensurate with the perspective of the novel, for it is the whites who hold

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center stage in this fictional creation.

My mixture of reactions to the novel is perhaps tied to a seeming ambivalence on the part of the writer. At times, I felt Nordan was intent upon probing the emotional and spiritual ugliness that led to Till’s death in 1955; there are some striking moments of introspection and analysis in the novel. At other times, I felt Nordan was parodying his own subject and characters with the use of names (Lord Montberclair,” “Jeter Skeeter”; the elderly relatives with whom Bobo is staying, viewed from the white perspective, are simply referred to as “Uncle” and “Auntee”; “Balance Due” and “Belgian Congo” are respectively the names for the white and black dilapidated, poorest of the poor sections of town), the blatant anthropomorphism (sentient birds and rice fields), and jokes about personal hygiene (Runt always smells like “birdshit,” and his son’s feet are so perennially unwashed that one of his classmates claims that she can smell them the minute he walks onto the school grounds).

Yet just when I am about to criticize these seeming irreverencies, Nordan surprises me with an understanding of the rather intricate relationships between blacks and whites in the South. Blues musicians sing on the porch of a white-owned grocery store (references to Robert Johnson and hellhounds are prominent) while black children play their games there; Runt tries to warn Bobo’s relatives that he is in danger; and the hardest-headed member of the arrow catching team sympathizes with Bobo when all his white classmates are making bad jokes about the murder. Even Solon Gregg listens to Muddy Waters on his truck radio.

As a scholar of African American literature, I was particularly struck by the evocations of African American literary texts that Nordan’s novel brought to mind, those of Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Toomer, and Toni Cade Bambara. The Till character, for example, carries the heavily destined name of Bobo, and a local lawman is Big Boy Chisholm. Bobo and Big Boy are the names of two rather famous characters in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Even Nordan’s pattern of narration suggests Wright at times. He begins outside a character’s mind, then goes inside; visual representation parallels that movement by language shift from standard English to dialect. Initially, the transition and the dialect seemed stilted, but I was lulled into its effect as the novel went along.

Bobo’s sentience beyond death evokes Morrison’s Sula, Wright’s Mann in “Down by the Riverside,” and J. California Cooper’s Always in Family. When pigeons have a conversation about Bobo’s offense, the sixth chapter of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God comes to mind (though the buzzards here, tagged by scientists, are named after ex-governors of Mississippi). References to “Lord” and “Lady” Montberclair and “Runnymede” evoke Brooks’ treatment of the murder as a failed Arthurian romance/ballad in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi: Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Bums Bacon.” And the typographical rendering of conversation reminds me of Toomer’s Cane. Consider this small sampling after Bobo has been taken from the home of his relatives:

Uncle pulled on his brogans. He said, “I’ll walk to the telephone at Sims and Hill, call the High Sheriff.”

Auntee said, “Wont do no good.”

Uncle said, “I know.”

Auntee said, “What’s the High Sheriff gone do?”

Uncle said, “I know.”

Auntee said, “Get you lynched, is all.”

Uncle said, “I know, Auntee.” (146)

And when several flash-forwards occur, along with Alice Conroy turning into a fortune teller, I think of Toni Cade Bambara’s treatment of extranatural characters and futuristic events in The Salt Eaters.

I tried to sort through the effect this inadvertent intertextuality had upon me as an African American reader. I concluded that the shock of recognition finally had a mediating effect. In a world where black readers might be particularly skeptical of any writer, and particularly a white one, daring to attempt to fictionalize the atrocity of the Till murder, the familiarity with other texts blunted my potential negative reaction to the implied trespass on novelly subject matter. These accidents of literary creation also kept me in the world of creativity and out of the realm of factuality for which I had initially gone looking.

Treading on problematic historical events is a daring venture under any circumstances. Underlying any such undertaking, where documents stack up for miles, is the question: How can you humanize villainy? How could Nordan make the murderer of the Till character someone who would consistently engage readers? I think he answered the question by wallowing in the villainy. Just facing it head on—saying, essentially, here is an unChristian (though he believes otherwise), unredeemable human being whose very effrontery is his attraction.

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Of course it can be argued that Nordan attempts to “humanize” Solon Gregg in the scene where he returns from New Orleans to the bedside of his fatally burned nine-year-old son. Wordless, he simply takes his guitar and begins strumming his son’s favorite song; his wife and daughter join in with their homemade instruments (washboard, tub). This nearly touching scene is gainsaid, however, by the reason for the son’s burning.

The question of bringing characters to life affects Lord Montberclair in a strange way. When initially confronted by the prowling Solon, he wields his German Luger in disgust at the “white trash” invading his territory. Class immediately gives way to race when Solon reveals his story. The problem is that the change in Lord Montberclair is too sudden; he dissolves too readily into a wimp. The characterization of Alice seems more a bow to feminism than to 1955 Mississippi. With the imaginative field trips for her fourth grade class, Alice Conroy brings an understanding of power relationships that seems a bit too advanced for the times. Strikingly, Bobo and Sally Anne, the two characters who are presumably central to the historical event, are almost absent from the text. Sally Anne appears to receive the wolf whistle, is seen from a distance in the courtroom, and shows up again to bond with Alice at the end of the novel. Bobo is mostly silent, which is a strange situation for a young man whose voice got him into so much trouble.

When he is taken from his aunt and uncle’s home, Bobo says nary a word during the entire ride with Solon to his place of death. This in spite of the fact that Solon carries on a stream of so-called casual conversation. Nordan succeeds in creating a surprisingly strange effect. We know what’s going to happen; Bobo knows what’s going to happen; and Solon knows what’s going to happen, yet he keeps up this polite “conversation” that gets poured into the seeming vacuum of the truck’s interior and the brooding, anticipatory state of the reader’s mind. Bobo is silent, seemingly not there spiritually or physically. When he becomes present again is the problem. After death, he becomes sentient. While he still does not gain voice, he registers and observes things about him in a lyrically haunting, unsettling presentation.

Bobo’s presence—or absence—is one of the reasons this book will get a lot of attention. The subject matter is precisely why I was hooked—and the fact that a former student of mine who worked for Algonquin books forwarded a copy of the advance corrected proofs to me. My expectation of some sign of transformation did not come in Nordan re-writing a specific historical event, but I think he attempted it in trying to suggest a different future for Alice, Runt, and Mississippi. The experience has such a profound effect upon alcoholic Runt that he almost sobers up (a friend of his shocks everyone by going to Alcoholics Anonymous,) and he insists that friends and relatives begin to call him Cyrus, his given name. His insistence upon that change is at best a limited sign of any different future, but it’s there, and its prominence calls attention to itself. Alice gives up teaching and perhaps her unrequited love for her college professor, yet she has been so on the periphery of the major action that it’s hard to see what her change means. And it’s somewhat disturbing that she is finally so ingratiating to Sally Anne.

I come away from the novel wondering what place it will eventually find in the literary mythmaking of Southern letters. It will be read, which I heartily encourage, for I certainly found it engaging. It will be discussed, with the academic types probably focusing on issues of literary representation and the appropriateness of particular kinds of literary endeavors. It might even find its way into history classes where professors want a literary representation of an historical event; with distance, tragedy inevitably gains a fascination that the immediacy of its horror initially precluded. Nordan’s novel will surely be considered an indispensable addition to a growing number of historical and fictional treatments of the Emmett Till murder.

Trudier Harris is A.B. Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University.