Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories

Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

2nd Edition edited by Lisa C. Moore
RedBone Press, 2009

The True Self Discovered and The World Confronted

In 1996 Lisa C. Moore, the founder of Red Bone Press, published a collection of stories called Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories. The stories that were told on those pages were remarkable not only for what was said, but because they gave shape and form to what many in the African-American community knew, however, wanted to keep hidden. No one wanted to admit to outsiders that black families were just as likely to produce gay children as white families.

As America expanded her awareness and acceptance of homosexuality it seemed that the African-American community grew more perplexed, more jaded. The years of denial had left many blacks with much more to learn about gay people than their white counterparts. Many African-American women didn’t know it was possible to be married to a man who was gay. Most thought that if a man was married, had children, and a successful career there was no possibility of him being homosexual. The same logic gave rise to the idea that a mother could not also be a lesbian. Therefore, Moore’s anthology was an important move forward for all people of African-American or black descent.

Unfortunately, thirteen years after the original publication of Does Your Mama Know? there are still young people, especially women, emerging from African-American homes without a sense of what it means to be a lesbian. As Moore points out in her introduction to the 2nd edition, “Black women have a rich oral history of lesbianism: Everybody knows of the bulldagger of the block that their mamas used to talk about.” However, most of these stories are intended to shame the lesbians rather than to empower them or the younger women of the community. The stories, poems and interviews that comprise Moore’s collection not only offer insight into the mindset of the African-American community, they make the issues faced by Lesbians of color feel much more personal than is possible in the rumors and folklore found on the streets.

For example, without going too far into the book we encounter perhaps the most important and primary source of rejection that black lesbians endure, the church. Regardless of ethnic background, most readers know enough about the Christian church to know that until very recently, homosexuality was counted amongst the greatest of sins. In many cases those who were thought or proven to be gay were forbidden from talking part, fully, in the life of the church, if not driven out of the church family completely. For many blacks this isolation means that there is little socially or spiritually that can be undertaken, because the church is so well integrated into the community. As Hope Massiah says in her story, “1985: Memories of My Coming Out Year”: “When I left the Church, I left my community behind me”. Thus Massiah, like the other woman represented in this collection, tells a story of falling in love, a story of seeking a new sense of community through attending women’s retreats, and becoming involved with the women’s movement.

This loss of community often means a strained or broken relationship with one’s mother. Terri Jewell’s mother says,

“As if wearing those thick glasses and cutting your hair down to the nub isn’t asking for

Tribulation, girl. Now you’re getting fatter and fatter. Don’t you care about how you

look? Don’t you have any pride in yourself?

Later she says to Terry, “I am so ashamed of you, I can’t mention your name to the women at work who are always talking about their daughters.”

Some gay women are raised by supportive families such as “Miss Ruth” who is ninety plus years old when she is interviewed by Terri Jewell. “Miss Ruth” was able to work, overcame racism and found enough freedom in Detroit to live openly with a woman she calls “Babe”. However, for most there are issues that seem almost insurmountable.

The stories in Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, are so well written that when we walk away from them it is impossible not to understand how remarkable it is to be born black, female, and lesbian. For being born black is still to be born into a world that is not fully ready to accept your arrival, and to arrive also being gay means you are truly an alien in your own land. This collection of coming out stories is important not only because it draws attention to the issues faced by lesbians of color, but because it highlights their struggle to be accepted as fully embodied human begins.

Breaking Out of Bedlam by Leslie Larson

Crown/Shaye Areheart Books, 2010
Review by Hannah Eason

Cora Sledge, the more-than-unlikely heroine of Leslie Larson’s Breaking Out of Bedlam, is overweight, decommissioned by a wide variety of pills she really shouldn’t have in the first place, and disoriented. This is the condition her grown children discover her in right before deciding to move her out of her home and into an assisted living facility, “The Palisades.”

Among Cora’s primary objections to the place: she is not allowed to smoke at will and her access to pills is now restricted. She has plenty of other complaints about being ousted from her own home and into this strange land of disease and incontinence. Despite herself, she begins writing in the journal her granddaughter, Emma, has given her, recording her frustrations with both her present and her past. She also records her unexpected liaisons – the gossipy women with whom she feels at odds from day one; the male attendee who helps with her breathing treatments (and smuggles in cigarettes for her) who is, appearance to the contrary, “that way”; and Vitus, the mysterious, well-mannered man she finds herself attracted to.

These entanglements, which Cora never anticipated making, inspire some of her forays into the past. She begins tilling down to the heart of her own story, recording things she hasn’t been able to say, hasn’t been able to face before.

As we learn of Cora’s past, we plainly see the dynamics which have contributed to her rather abrasive personality. By the same token, her story reveals the progression of a woman who was determined to never give in despite the pressure, at times overwhelming, which seemed to call for her resignation. We see a woman who faced what so many women silently did growing up when she did: a sense of being cut off from her own personal power, needing to rely on her connections with the men in her life to ensure a positive outcome for herself. She takes measures she isn’t proud of, she commits to a relationship which does not excite her (which makes her feel panicked, even, as she considers how it will determine the whole spread of her life to come), she silences the dreams she’s carried as a girl in the name of ascertaining a future for her children and herself.

The real story of Breaking Out of Bedlam is Cora’s bravery in facing and forgiving herself. She brings a spunky, irreverent spirit to the theme of late-in-life reflection on the past. To me, her voice seemed to make a journey as Cora herself did – in the beginning of this novel, I disliked her voice, finding it aggressive to the point of crude and lacking in warmth. As Cora journals, making the confessions she feels necessary to herself, those aggressive, crude qualities, while not vanishing, become endearing.

Connie May Fowler Confidential: Secrets, Storytelling, and the Oil Disaster

by Shana Thornton-Morris, Contributing Editor

Connie May Fowler understands the impact of secrets, both private and political. In her novels and memoirs, she acutely communicates the interconnectivity of life, including her own.

Fowler is a Southern author and she utilizes that culture and landscape in her novels. Her characters reflect the diversity of the South, while also portraying those subtle moments in all relationships that transcend culture. When asked if her characters relate to her Southern heritage, Fowler says that what other people might consider eccentricities are just a part of everyday life in the South.

“Secrets are a necessary part of being a human,” Fowler says. “If someone tells you something in confidence, you have to keep that held in confidence. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to unburden themselves.”

Fowler has made a career out of storytelling and trying to recapture a missing piece of her childhood. She says, “I had a fractured beginning. I only knew one grandparent who died when I was four. My father died when I was six. My mother died when I had just turned eighteen. Not knowing any of the grandparents, when my father died it blew what was left of the family completely asunder. I so longed to try to understand where I came from. Sometimes, I felt like I was hatched. It really did drive my thirst to be a storyteller just to try to figure out who these people were.”

Fowler’s father was a musician and the focus of her essay, “Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl,” which was published in the June 4, 2010 edition of The New York Times. She describes the revelation of a mystery, hearing her father’s voice for the first time in 45 years. As a six-year-old, Fowler had listened to the sound of her father dying after a heart attack, and those final moments had become her strongest memory of her father’s voice. After receiving a vinyl recording of her father singing with his band Henry May and His Rhythm Ramblers, Fowler could finally stop chasing the ghost of her father’s voice, a sound that she had lost while growing up.

“I had literally searched and searched,” Fowler says, “and it came out of the blue.”

She had suppressed her desire to know her father when in the presence of her mother, who communicated a disdain for him. In this way, Fowler’s secret as a child was to know her father, hear stories about him and listen to his music.

“For me having this disconnect from a familial trail,” Fowler says, “one of the most interesting things is to not only hear my father sing the song but to know that he wrote the song, and that I’m a writer. We are connected. There is a line that you can actually follow.”

While Fowler is comfortable, accessible, and communicates human interactions with fluidity and humor, she admits that she wasn’t always so certain of herself and her talents.

“I used to be extremely shy,” she says. “I had a stutter. I was terrified to go to the convenient store and I think it was because of the way that I was brought up and being beaten and that horrible stuff, so I didn’t know how to be a public person. My editor and agent just kept saying, ‘Be yourself. Be yourself.’ I didn’t know what that self was, and I literally made myself sick.

“I remember the first time I went to New York to meet them,” Fowler says with laughter, “and we were at a little pub and we were talking and I’m trying to pull it off. I just run to the bathroom, and I kept a bottle of Maalox in my purse. Eventually, I just wore myself out. It was almost out of physical necessity that I decided, Well, I am who I am and I can’t adopt airs. I think that writing books which have helped people in their own personal journeys has helped me to learn that it’s okay to be honest about who I am and what I have gone through.”

In Fowler’s seventh novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly (Grand Central Publishing, 2010), the main character struggles with an inability to admit that she is in a loveless and often abusive marriage. Indeed, Fowler says that most secrets drift into the unconscious, so much so that, like Clarissa, we are often unaware of the secrets we keep from ourselves. She points out that Clarissa is isolated and has no meaningful friendships. Though Clarissa is aware of current events in the outside world, she isn’t aware of herself. Fowler also emphasizes the aspect of shame that’s attached to secrets, specifically Clarissa’s embarrassment of her marriage and her writer’s block.

“She’s really abrogated her power to her husband (Iggy),” Fowler says, “and he’s stolen a lot of it and outright taken it.”

In connection with the novel’s release, Fowler created The Clarissa Burden I’ve Got a Secret Postcard Project to inspire others to anonymously unburden their minds. Through the project people are encouraged to anonymously disclose their secrets so as to unburden themselves, while also creating a dialogue about the pressing issues of our time and the subtleties of our relationships. Anyone can e-mail or send a postcard through standard mail. All of the original contributions are deleted and/or destroyed after being copied to Fowler’s website. Names are omitted. Fowler says that she was surprised by the responses and how freely people confessed their secrets.

“It’s been really humbling,” Fowler said. “I don’t think that I expected the level of candor. I wanted to do something in conjunction with the release of the book that made sense. I just thought that at the beginning of this book, Clarissa is paralyzed with secrets, including her many imagined, spousal death scenarios. I hoped the postcard project would create a dialogue. What I’ve realized is that for every person who makes a comment or sends me an e-mail privately, or even some who have posted on my Facebook page comments about the secrets, I know that a lot more people are thinking. It’s not always a public dialogue, but people are thinking and that’s something.”

On Fowler’s website, a person writes, “I worry that I don’t love my children the way other women love theirs. I mean, I do love them. Very much. But sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier if, you know, I’d not had them. Or waited until things were better.”

Another reveals, “I had an abortion in 1955 at the age of 18.”

Fowler admits that she is questing to collect stories, but to have fluid goals and change as she continues to write. In our interview, Fowler does not shy away from the politics of this time and place and immediately she begins expressing her concern for the abnormally large numbers of sea turtles coming to shore close to her Florida home. The BP oil spill has been foremost on her thoughts.

“I’m just completely bereft,” Fowler says, “The turtles are completely lost. They’re coming ashore in record numbers and going back out to shore. For us to have so many turtles so early, they’re obviously not accustomed to coming to this exact spot. We would feel better about it if they were still able to adapt and go ahead and lay their eggs, but evidently they’re going, no this is not my place.”

Fowler wants to tell people what it’s like for the residents of the Gulf Coast. She has been blogging about it and is already working on a new nonfiction book about the current oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I had started a new novel and it wasn’t going anywhere because Clarissa from How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly kept popping back up,” Fowler said. “I would be writing along—the new character’s name was Euphrates—and I would think, wait a minute, I just wrote Clarissa.

“I had an idea for a long time to write what would be a sort of environmental memoir,” Fowler says, “An artist living on the edge of the world, making things grow out of sand and what that life is like, so I decided that I probably needed to turn back to that and give Clarissa a rest. Then, the oil disaster happened. It became much more urgent. My new book will be about what it’s like to live here amid this disaster.” Fowler is a prolific American writer who will wrestle with heartbreak in her next book.

Her current project, The Clarissa Burden I’ve Got a Secret Postcard Project, contains anonymous, heartbreaking confessions and witty annoyances, all secrets nonetheless. Anyone may join the discussion and contribute a secret.

www.conniemayfowler.com

Beyond Marquee Names: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

Guest blogger, Mary Sharratt

Recorded history is wrong. It’s wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it.

These are the words of the late, great historical novelist, Mary Lee Settle, author of the classic Beulah Land Quintet, published in the 1950’s when both academic history and most historical fiction were narrowly focused on the elite. So many people have been written out of history: not only the vast majority of women, but also people of the peasant and labouring classes, and people of non-European ancestry. My goal as a writer, from my first novel onward, has been rewriting the voiceless back into history.

My new novel, Daughters of Witching Hill, concerns the true story of Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, the most notorious of the 1612 Pendle Witches of Lancashire, England. An impoverished widow, she served her community as a cunning woman, or healer, for decades before her arrest on witchcraft charges at the age of eighty. By retelling the Pendle Witch tragedy from her point of view, I longed to serve her memory and give her what her own world denied her—her own voice.

One of my inspirations is author Sarah Dunant, a champion of more inclusive, non-elitist historical fiction. Dunant has become an international bestseller by writing about people on the margins of history. Her most recent novel, Sacred Hearts, explores the secret world of Benedictine nuns in 1570 Ferrara, Italy.

Speaking at the Bluecoat School in Liverpool in May 2010, Dunant described how she first fell in love with historical fiction when she was a twelve-year-old in postwar Britain, which she remembers as “a grey, colourless, bleak place” where nobody wanted to talk about the war. On the brink of adolescence, she found a wonderful escape in Jean Plaidy’s novels of the crowned heads of Europe. These books not only opened up another world that was colourful and glamorous but they inspired Dunant’s lifelong love affair with history. She went on to study history at Cambridge. “The history I learned,” she recalls, “was the history of great battles, great empires, great men.”

But what inspired Dunant to become an historical novelist were the sweeping developments in academic history that occurred after she left Cambridge in 1972. This new history embraced people who did not belong to the elite. She cites Joan Kelly-Gadol’s 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” as one of the turning points in the development of how we look at history.

“Modern historians,” Dunant explains, “know that there is a multiplicity of history—there is more than one history, one fact. The history I’m using has been hard won over the past twenty to thirty years.” And this history allowed her to write novels about a past that simply wasn’t regarded as history even thirty years ago. For Sacred Hearts, she has drawn on two generations of young historians who examined court records of nuns who got into trouble.

Similarly, I could not have written Daughters of the Witching Hill without the drawing on groundbreaking social histories, such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic; landmark works on Reformation Studies, like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England; as well as recent studies on historical cunning folk.

So will this new history open the door to a Renaissance in historical fiction? Will more and more authors draw on this wider window into ordinary people’s lives instead of rehashing the same old tired tales of Tudor royalty? Dunant believes that historical novelists possess every potential to be on the cutting edge of bringing this new history in an accessible form to a modern audience.

Sadly, although the world of academic history has moved on light years since the 1950s, historical fiction often appears to be stuck in a rut. An increasingly conservative publishing world urges new and established authors alike to play it safe by writing about “marquee names,” such as Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette, instead of drawing on a social history of the less privileged. Must we all write like latter day Jean Plaidys in order to meet our publishers’ sales expectations?

“This is the backwash of celebrity culture,” Dunant says, “and our greed for sensation and scandal. People read about Anne Boleyn when they tire of reading about Paris Hilton. We’ve gone back to kings and queens, a celebrity history, because we’ve squeezed Paris Hilton dry.”

Yet a 2009 market research poll conducted by blogger Julianne Douglas on Writing the Renaissance indicates that only 11% of the people she surveyed buy historical fiction based on the appeal of “marquee names” alone. Readers want so much more out of their fiction: fascinating characters and storylines, arresting and richly realised settings. Above all, I believe that people are drawn to historical fiction to learn things about the past they don’t already know. Perhaps we are indeed ready for a Renaissance in historical fiction.

Mary Sharratt’s acclaimed new novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. To learn more about Mary and the true history of the Pendle Witches, visit her website: www.marysharratt.com .

Daughters of the Witching Hill:
Buy it on Amazon

Sarah Dunant:
www.sarahdunant.com/

“Time to Change the Marquee” by Julianne Douglas

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh

Shaye Areheart Books, 2009
Review by Mayra David

This is a story that spans time, cultures, continents, even worlds. But for all that, its essence lies in the story of the Leahy family tragedy: Meave Leahy has lost her twin. It’s this tragedy that has since simultaneously driven and held her back in all aspects of her small life in Betheny, New York.

It’s been many years since Meave Leahy has been to visit her parents’ home in Castine, Maine. In fact she hasn’t been back since escaping to college, soon after losing her sister. Though we get everything from Meave’s perspective, she offers no clues to what happened to her twin nine years ago. It’s as if she doesn’t even allow herself the merest complete thought on the topic of Moira. Here, Therese Walsh creates true tension in the reader. There’s a sense, in the beginning, that the story might be beyond the details of the loss of Moira, that this may be a story about how the twin who was left behind finds a way to move on. But then slowly, and clearly against the will of Meave herself, we realize that this story is about taking a long, painful look backwards.

In fact, it’s not just about looking backwards, but almost physically reliving the past. The book’s premise is based in part on the possibility of a magical antique keris (javanese dagger) acting as a bridge not only into the depths of Meave’s repressed memories, but into the spirit world. This sudden turn in the story is softened by the introduction of the Leahy twins as already having an almost magical connection with each other. It’s a common notion that twins share intense bonds, but here it is shown as a concrete skill the sisters have developed; sensing physical and emotional pain, “seeing” each other from afar, and when necessary, “blocking” their minds from each other to gain privacy.

Still, this is where it gets a little dicey for the book. After ensconcing the reader in one genre (family drama), the story takes a turn into legends about ancient javanese weapon-making. Of course this requires that the fantastical plot bend be backed up by both historic facts and javanese legends involving dream worlds, spiritual energy, and superstition. The kind of stuff fantasy films a la Tomb Raider are made of.

Thankfully, Walsh keeps the story from becoming tacky by keeping the heart of the story where it belongs: between Meave and Moira Leahy. Their relationship is honest, touching, and painful. In short: real. In fact their complex story is so compelling, one must often fight the urge to simply read the chapters where Walsh moves the story back in time, when the girls were still together. Fantasy, mystery, historic fiction, family drama, romance. If anything, there is almost too much story here. But the book is well written, fast paced, and has enough depth to carry it all.

Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard

The Permanent Press, July 2010
Review by Rhianon E. Huot

When I received Georgeann Packard’s “Fall Asleep Forgetting” in all it’s tree green colored gloriousness and noted on the inside jacket that not only does Packard write, but she’s a photographer and a graphic designer as well, I looked forward to the read. I should have remembered what mothers everywhere tote as sage advice, “Never judge a book by it’s cover.”

Never have I appreciated Hemingway’s thorough character portrayals as much as when I read this book. Like them or hate them, his characters give us a clear depiction of what life is like for a woman, a hero, an anti-hero, a misogynist or a broken down war veteran within the context of his written scene. Packard’s characters are card board cutouts of her thoughts, two dimensional and reeking with her own opinions. She might as well be whispering a subliminal message to us while we read: “This is how you’re supposed to feel. This is what you’re supposed to think.”

Just when I thought there was some deeper rhyme or reason to this book, Packard would pull the rug out from under me by evoking every obnoxious cliché you can think of. She uses blue to represent sadness, despondency. She gives us a transvestite named “Cherry,” who brushes off other’s maltreatment by realizing that some people are just “simple.” Even a wild-child who detests wearing shirts or shoes walks across the overly predictable pages.

There is no discernable reasoning to the layout of “Fall Asleep Forgetting.” The book is divided into sections marked by black and white photographs that lack enough contrast to discern up from down. Under the photographs Packard has phrases. These phrases are just as random as the division, some are from the bible, others appear to have come from nowhere at all and say things like, “I am alone only to the degree that I separate myself from the natural world.” Surely I’m just not getting it, I initially told myself. Are these abrupt endings and starts a way to mark the passing of time, a way to delineate characters stories and interactions from each other? Perhaps they are separated based on the bits of one characters journal, which is sprinkled throughout the book. Surely these phrases all add up to something that has an overall motif, a meaning. No, none of this logic seems to rule the book.

Increasingly as the work progresses, it turns into erotica, thinly veiled as something deeper. Packard finds a way to mention the breasts of each female character, as often as possible, in nearly every scene. Marked with cliché adjectives like “plush,” “soft,” and “warm,” Packard distracts from any real story telling with terribly unbelievable sex scenes between a married couple and another young woman. As you navigate the book, it becomes hard to help but wondering if her female characters don’t represent some form of wish fulfillment on her part.

Just when you think things can’t get any worse Packard has a character pass gas at a restaurant and then proclaim to the proprietor, “And that, dear Rose, is the best thing on your menu.” Later, during a scene with a married couple, a woman whispers into her husband’s ear, “You cook like you make love, my sweet, with a charming disrespect for recipe.” Really, this is too much. Let me save you the trouble of ever having to put this book down in annoyance. You will never have to put it down, if you don’t first, pick it up.

Light and Trials of Light by Cynthia Reeser

Finishing Line Press, 2010
Reviewed by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Cynthia Reeser is a poet, visual artist, musician, and the Founding Editor of Prick of the Spindle. Her new collection of poems, Light and Trials of Light is a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press earlier this year. The collection is comprised of twenty poems which capture the world in such a way as to remind the reader that nothing we experience should be treated as minor or unimportant. For example, “The Amputees” is a poem that at first seems to be a simple recall of a forgotten memory. A mother is speaking to her child who was just a toddler when:

the men in orange suits
came, for our tiny
stand of trees,
the one (you won’t remember)
bordering our house/

Here the mother sounds as if she is telling a story to a group of small children, but this is not a fairy tale. Instead it more closely related to a horror film. In the stanzas that follow, the men in orange suits are not coming to harvest the trees, but rather to mangle and disfigure them:

On the edge of the field.
They came hacking,
sawing, scraping: reaping
limbs, but only just

on the side threatening
the power lines.
When they left,
limbs lay dripping
useless sap all over
this new battlefield.

The victims of this war are rarely mentioned, their wounds never spoken of, because for most people it is more important that their lights, appliances, and games work when they come home.

On every page Life and Trials of Light challenges the reader to reconsider our behavior, to look around us for clues on how to react to such things as death and change. The poem “Petals” feels like a lament for a lost loved one, and our expectation may be that this poem will end sadly; however, Reeser instead reminds us that there is hope and beauty in death:

Recalling boughs, your fragile limbs
reaching for light and air,
for sails blooming hushed in the strain
of multifoliate descent, plummeting
past memories that now rebound
in silence and in the staid river,
dolmens rebounding off nothing
Except last season’s foliage, now ground
into shade and mulch and dust,
into minerals now sent up through roses.

“The Year” ends with:

The lilac brush does not hide the
heaviness of rain. Keens itself,

for want of bygone seedlings dropped,
for loss of dove-pecked buds.

The poems that await the reader in Light and Trials of Light are beautiful, sometimes witty, and always filled with truth. Cynthia Reeser does not try to hide the ugliness of life, she admits that our world and our lives change, while encouraging us to find a way to move forward. The trees that lose half their bodies go on living, because the life cycle includes death: a rose is provided the minerals it needs to live, and the lilac brush recognizes that sometimes we are robbed of the things we hold dear, yet it does not give-up.

Light and Trials of Light is a short collection of poems, but it should not be overlooked.

Memory and the Queen: An interview with author Minrose Gwin

by Hannah Eason

Summer can play havoc with the senses.  In North Carolina, early May, on the sunned campus of UNC-Chapel Hill, this matter is brought to the fore.  This is where I’ve come to meet Minrose Gwin, Kenan Eminent Professor of English, Co-Editor of The Southern Literary Journal and author of the new novel from Harper Perennial, The Queen of Palmyra.  By the time I reach her office, my breath has taken on an unaccustomed weight from the massive lawn’s uprising of pollen, and I find myself making starlet-in-panic hand motions, fanning myself rapidly.

Another explanation for the shortness of breath, the story possibly truer to heart here,  is that I am about to meet the author who has been astounding me at the level of chapter, paragraph and word since I read that first sentence:  “I need you to understand how ordinary it all was.”  That line is our introduction to the voice of Florence Forrest, the ten-year-old girl who will share with us a story of race in ‘60’s-era Mississippi and the effect of events therein on the memory of an entire generation, of a whole place.  Not only does Minrose Gwin manage to cover an angle on the race struggles which remains relevant even today, but she does so in a beautiful narrative built on phrases sharp as stings.  This is a book to remind us that language is still a viable denomination of worship.

I need you to understand that talking to her is rather extraordinary.

Gwin is a true Southern Lady:  she excuses the mess (of which there’s very little) and offers me cookies.  We speak for a moment about the affront to easy-breathing that has been this summer and our potential cures.  Her eyes have a bouncing gleam that defies so many allergens. 

In our interview, she talks about one summer with an even greater impact on the senses of those who witnessed it.  She talks about the summer prior to Florence Forrest’s fifth grade year, one that will press heavily upon the characters’ most powerful yet fragile sense:  that of memory. 

Hannah Eason:  The Queen of Palmyra is such an interesting title. What can you tell us about it? 

Minrose Gwin:  Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, lived in the third century and she was queen of a large kingdom in Syria, and she was just the smartest, bravest, most – in some ways – arrogant woman you would ever hear about in history.  She claimed to descend from both the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra.  She was a warrior queen, and she took on Rome.  And she would ride in the front of her forces as they fought and bare one breast to show her forces – her men – who she was. 

The story you get in the novel is a very different version of that Queen of Palmyra, which goes to show how our stories can mutate.  

There’s a character in the book, Zenie – Zenobia – who is the older black woman who lets Florence hang out with her, for pay, but doesn’t necessarily enjoy Florence (laughs).  She’s named after the queen.  But there are other characters – Eva Green, for example – who might also qualify as the queen. So, one big issue is:  who is the Queen of Palmyra in the book?

H.E.:  I think that as you read, you find yourself asking that.  Well, who will finally have that title?  I had the final impression that Eva was the queen.  They all had some aspects.  And, now that you’ve mentioned it, one other thing that was very interesting was Zenie’s reaction when Florence shares a dream she’s had in which she was Queen of Palmyra.

M.G.:  Zenie gets very upset with Florence at that point, and I think that’s the most tension-filled moment between the two of them.  And the reason that Zenie feels that way is that it’s something of hers, something her mother gave to her, her story.  And you can’t take someone’s story.  This is her heritage, part of her African American heritage.  And here is this white girl coming, trying to snatch her inherited story from her, including her name.  Her name is so important to her.  Very, very angry reaction.

H.E.: It seems that a recurring lesson to Florence is the importance of stories.  What would you say are the implications and the danger to people when they disconnect from their stories?

M.G.:  The book is a lot about stories and competing stories, and Florence has to choose which story she’ll invest in.  Zenie has her story about Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra, which comes from the book’s title and is where Zenie gets her name.  The father, Win, has stories about Bomba, the white boy who gets stuck in the quote-unquote savage jungle with quote-unquote savages.  Florence is just so taken with stories her grandfather tells her about Uncle Wiggily, about his adventure and how brave he was. 

You have all these stories circulating.  Florence’s survival depends on her trying to make her own story.  She gets so swept up in other people’s stories that you hope she becomes more and more connected to what her story is.  I don’t want to give anything away, but this doesn’t happen until very last moments of the book.

Stories can also be deceiving, they can lead you astray; and I think in many ways that, until that very ending, Florence is still in something a false story of her own making, a story she can live with after everything that’s happened to her, a story she can survive in.   But that story just gets exploded in the end.

H.E.:  Speaking of this way she chooses a story she can live with, one that’s affected by her memory, you’ve brought out an interesting aspect of southern literature, in your work, in your thoughts on memory.  And southern literature has seemed to become broader and maybe less defined than it was at one point.  What can you tell us about the cultural ramifications of memory, as it relates to people who grew up in troublesome times, and the lack of memory?

M.G.:  Especially the latter.  I think in terms of Florence herself, there’s a line in the book – and I probably can’t quote it directly – but something about “Stories happen and then you tell them, but what you see depends on what you know.”  With Florence, we’re not sure of what she sees; we’re still not sure by the end of the book what she has seen.   What she originally saw did not correspond in her head to what she knew could be the possible truth.  So her memory rejects that knowing, or that seeing. 

The original title of the book was “What I Didn’t See,” which certainly bit the dust a while ago.  The book is so much about seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing; and memory functions that way.  Psychologists tell us that.  If something happens and it’s so unbelievable we can’t imagine it could be true, we reject it.  Post-traumatic Stress Disorder can involve a form of this rejection.

H.E.:  And we see that play out frequently throughout the book.  At several points, as Florence learns more of her father’s activities, we realize how innocent her perspective is, and how he and his friends encourage that innocence.  It seems like we get to experience the development of her vision in this way.

M.G.:  Competing stories, again, that counter her father’s story, become stronger in her mind.  What I was really trying to convey is just like it says in the very first line of the book:  “… how ordinary it all was.”  It was ordinary.  Racism was ordinary.  Racial epithets were ordinary.  The cruel ordinary of all of it is so chiling when we look back from a historical perspective.

H.E.:  The characters in this novel are so strongly developed, never falling into cliché, never even falling into the expected.  It would be so easy  for Win, the father in the story, to fall completely into the category of villain with no human qualities.  But we have the benefit in being able to see him, especially in the beginning, from Florence’s perspective.   He’s just Dad.  He too is ordinary.  We don’t see him as completely inhuman.

M.G.:  And he has a physical handicap.  He has a history that has made the man he became, a very brutal history.  I think the character I really worked on the hardest in terms of depth was Ray, Zenie’s husband, although I guess he is the most minor character of all the major characters.  I felt that I really wanted to get to know him better and what made him tick.  I really tried to give him more depth than I would ordinarily give a minor character, because he interested me so much.

H.E.: One thing Win Forrest, the father in the story, is very concerned about is outside agitators. He names, graphically at one point, all those he considers to fall in that category. Having grown up female in the South during a time when so many aspects of society were changing, what was your experience in regard to your community and the reaction to those perceived as outside agitators?

M.G.: That’s a really good, interesting question. I grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, which is a small town in the northern part of the state not far from Memphis. Our town was much more what I call an Appalachian town than a Deep South town built on agricultural economy. Our town was more built on an industrial kind of economy. For that reason, I think there was a lot more interchange between African Americans and whites in our town. I don’t want to paint too rosy of a picture, because it’s not. It was certainly segregated and deeply divided according to race.

We had a very progressive newspaper editor in our town whose newspaper was in the moderate-to-progressive range, which was very unusual. There were only two or three newspapers that were like that in the state. So, I don’t think I got the full brunt of what theoutside agitator meant.

But, simultaneous to this project, I’ve been starting research on another project which is about NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in the summer 1963 and whose death figures into the novel. A lot of work for the novel came from my research – like the newspaper articles. I didn’t make those up, those are actual stories. What I found out in my research, to make a long story short, is that the term outside agitator was a real buzz word in that time, and anyone who came in from the outside was called an outside agitator. When Medgar Edgars was assassinated, they said outside agitators did it. They were to blame for everything.

H.E.:  You’ve mentioned that your interest in race and gender, among other things, has focused a good deal of your attention on literature from the U.S. South.  While the primary focus of The Queen of Palmyra was on race issues, I thought you also addressed gender in the sense of what it meant to be a wife or a daughter in that period of time.  What can you share with us about how gender impacted the story?

M.G.:  I think that there were issues around gender in the story.  One of the things with abusive people, I think, is that their abuse spreads very wide.  Here, you see kind of a network of the father’s abuse –  it’s racist and it goes into violence in terms of race, but it’s also is violent in terms of the females in his family, his wife and his daughter.  One thing I was interested in was how Martha, the mother in this story, deals with her situation.  Here she is, she has a husband, she has a daughter; she’s trapped.  Their economic situation is rather dire.  The problem with Martha is that the way she handles herself in terms of the situation is not ideal by any means.

I was very interested in the relationships between African American women and white women in the story, as well.  I really tried to bring that out in terms of the grandmother, Mimi, and her relationship with Zenie, her domestic servant, her quote-unquote maid, and how their relationship was so vexed and so full of tension.  Zenie had so much resentment, and rightly so, against the white grandmother.

There’s a scene in the book which I think is very telling between a white woman and an African American woman in which Martha, the mother, tries to go and give something – a fan – to an African American woman, and the woman rejects that gift.  Martha just can’t understand why this woman, whose house is burning up hot, who has just gotten out of the hospital, would reject that out of pride. 

H.E.:  And I thought it was interesting that in that scene, Florence was the one who had to explain to her mother how the woman feels about this and why she feels the needs to reject the fan. And that just shows you that Florence grew up fast and she grew up very intelligent.  Very observant of the racial issues going on around her.

M.G.:  Yes, this ten-year-old, going on eleven-year-old, girl knows more about race relations than her mother or her grandmother do.

H.E.: And I found that from the midpoint of the novel on, it was so hard to remember that this is a young girl, you feel like she must have grown up by years at this point, she must be sixteen or seventeen now. 

M.G.:  My agent, when reading the manuscript early on, asked, “How long can this summer be?”   There is a lot that happens in that period of three months, two-and-a-half months really.

H.E.:  Going back to some of the relationships between female characters in the novel, Florence has a diverse array of female role models.  It would seem, from the surface anyway, that her mother has the least to offer her.  In what we see manifest as Florence grows up, and in the very brief time we have with Florence as an adult, what would you say are some of the gifts that come specifically from her mother?

M.G.:  One of the things that can be said about the mother – and I tried to built characters with good and bad, complicated, nuanced – is that she does try to rebel. She’s so rebellious and in a subversive sort of way.  In the first chapter, she tries to shove the father’s box off the table.  She rips up the Citizen’s Coucil cartoon that he puts on the refrigerator.  She runs to the bootlegger to warn them of the [Klan] activities that will happen that night, which was a pretty brave thing to do.  She’s very rebellious, and I think when the rebelliousness finds its way in Florence, it comes very powerfully.  I think that rebelliousness comes from her mother.

And of course, it’s not that simple.  You have Eva [pronounced Ev-ah],the young African American woman at the center of the story, who has a lot of grittiness and rebelliousness and, unlike the mother, stands up for what she believes in.  She doesn’t cop out.  She’s had an impact on Florence also.  There’s Zenie, who is very subversive and rebellious in her own way, fearful at the same time and more cautious than Eva, her neice.  She also has a big impact.  Hard to say exactly how much comes from the mother.

H.E.:  And rebellion turns out to be very important for Florence, to get her out of her situation, onto something better. 

Through several of your characters, but especially through Florence, you show a very strong southern voice.  In your opinion, who are some of our prominent writers of the southern tone?

M.G.:  As far as some of the earlier writers who influenced me:  William Faulkner, Eudora Welty.  Welty had very strong female protagonists with a strong sense of voice.  If you’ve read the short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” you see that.  Sister is telling her story and she’s so angry at her relatives, going to go live at the post office, she’s so angry.  More contemporary writers have had an impact on me also.  Lee Smith, for instance.  Jill McCorkle is a very strong voice.  Alice Walker – her stories are so powerful.  Randall Kenan is also very important to me.  In terms of younger writers, Tayari Jones.  Her book, Leaving Atlanta, is very powerful in terms of historical events of the 1980s. In Atlanta at that time, about 20 children were murdered, and she writes stories from their perspective.  There are so many, really.

H.E.:  I’ve recently found out of I was misinformed on a statistic, I thought North Carolina was still second only to New York in terms of having the most living writers.  From recent research, I believe we have been bumped down, but we do have a high number of living, working writers from this state. Do you think there’s something in particular about the land, or our sense of place, in North Carolina – and in the South, more generally – that drives people to chronicle?

M.G.:  Eudora Welty said, “Place is the crossroads of circumstance” and also “the heart’s field.”  I think in a lot of southern writing, experience is marked by place.  And I think attachment to place historically comes from the fact that a lot of people grow up in small towns and communities where they’ve lived and their families and their families before them for a very long time, very grounded and rooted.  You mentioned that southern literature is changing, and it’s true – people are much less place-bound.   There’s a McDonalds in every small town.

H.E.:  It has changed.  What was very refreshing about reading The Queen of Palmyra is that it seems very self-enclosed in the sense that everything about it is southern.  Your metaphors, your connotation, your words – all your word choice – these things don’t lead your reader’s mind away, they all seem to reflect right back into Florence’s place, her home.   It makes for a very solid project, one that so definitely is what it is.  That made it very enjoyable.

M.G.:  Thank you.  Faulkner taught us is that for a book to be universal in the larger sense, it needs to be grounded in the local, there has to be a locality about it.  There’s a lot in southern studies about the global, the impact on the U.S. South and all these other southern places around the world.  I think that one of the things that is a connector is a strong sense of place.  If you read a book like Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night – very powerful – it’s set on an imaginary island in the Caribbean, but it has many of the same themes:   racism, violence, abuse, all these stories very firmly grounded in place. People are starting to think about southern in a very global sense. 

H.E.:  You have written about the global implications of southern literature and events here in the South, suggesting that it is further reaching than we might at first think.  What, would you say, are some of the main lessons the South has for our global, modern circumstances?

M.G.:  That is a big, big question.  For myself, I can say, in terms of writing, I’ve always been very interested in the idea of blindness, how people can look the other way when something terrible happens right under their very noses.  All along, I had in the back of my mind Nazi Germany and the kinds of events that occurred in the 1930s.  How ordinary Germans, who weren’t bad people, just turned away from circumstances that were in front of their very faces – and how is it possible for people to do that?  We always have villains in the world, but the real problem is people who turn away from villainy.  And so that was the implication for me.  I think southern literature is race history, and the painful history of the south is speaks volumes to many different situations in the world.  Ethnic wars in Africa, for example.  The Holocaust.   All these sorts of things, they’re connected.

H.E.:  Any particular books you feel awakened your love of literature, or encouraged it, at least?

M.G.:  (smiles) I must confess, To Kill a Mockingbird was a very important book to me (laughs).  Beautiful book. 

When I was a girl – you’re asking about when I was a girl – I loved the Uncle Wiggily stories.   I loved Nancy Drew mystery stories.   When I was young, I loved mystery.  And then I started reading books like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and all of that.  I’ve always been a sucker for secrets, young protagonists, mystery.

H.E.: Those are very exciting, and great to have in young literature.  It shows children that reading isn’t boring, it isn’t stodgy.   They get to see themselves like Florence did in the place of Nancy Drew, which allows her to see herself in this way she perceived her characters, larger than life.  And I think she addressed this directly at one point.  It goes back to what we’ve talked about with the importance of stories.  They allow you to see yourself in ways that go beyond your own boundaries.

M.G.:  And it’s interesting what happens to identity when that happens.   Because there’s some shifting around in identity when you read, even if you don’t have the experiences in the stories you read except  vicariously.  Something in your identity gets shaped by that story; it’s very mysterious and it’s very subtle, but it happens over and over again.  When I was girl, my grandmother would take me to the library every Saturday, the county library, the Lee County – named after Robert E. Lee – county library.  You could check out seven books a week, and I would check out seven books every week.  I was never happier than when I was coming out library with arms outstretched, stacked up with books because I just felt like I had a treasure.  I would usually read maybe four or five of the seven, and some I just couldn’t read.  But I read a lot.

Drawing our interview to a close, I thank Gwin for her time. When I mention that I received the e-book for review but that I will definitely purchase a copy as well, she gives me a copy from her bookshelf and jots in it the kind of personalized inscription that warrants – to book-nerds and memorabilia hounds everywhere – the placing of favorite items in airtight cases, yelling at anyone within the radius, “Don’t you touch that!” 

Like so many of her characters, Minrose Gwin is a combination of gentility and fierce intelligence.

Spanking New by Clifford Henderson

Bold Strokes Books, 2009

Review by Mayra David

A warning: the cover of the book posits: “Imagine if you could choose your parents…and your sex!” In fact, the author did not imagine any such thing. The narrator, Spanky, is a Floating Soul that has been “dripped” out of The Known into the Land of Forgetting in order to find parents and be born. Only, instead of choosing, Spanky is fated to particular parents, whom he finds easily enough because he has been dripped in their immediate vicinity. Then, at some point or other, he realizes he’s a boy.

Still, I was happy to suspend my disbelief and dive into a story about a boy soul that finds he will be born a girl. Truthfully, I was expecting something to unfold that ultimately did not. A look at the inner struggles of transgendered persons perhaps. Or an imagining of what brings about our sexual orientations. Instead, Henderson goes down a more familiar route: an after-school-special type story about unplanned pregnancy for Spanky’s parents, Rick and Nina.

It is with the unplanned preganancy that the story really starts, as it begs the question: Can we do this alone? Suddenly, this young couple finds itself in need of support, and where support is lacking among blood relations, Henderson does a good job of showing how human nature will then reach out to find it, even from an unlikely source. Slowly, we see Rick’s reserve toward Nina’s gay friends melt. He accepts their help and friendship, and returns it, for his own sake instead of Nina’s.

One big weakness of the book is the narrating voice. Not satisfied with either conventional first-person or omniscient narrators, Henderson tries, unsuccessfully, to merge the two – a first person narrative with an omniscient point of view. Though he is not omnipresent, he is conveniently omniscient anyway. “Whoa Doggies! What did I miss? I scan back in time. …”? And he provides no wisdom from The Known – unless “I need an XX and an XY to get the job done” counts as insight. Less Floating Soul, more Alien Kid among earthlings.

The issue of two XX’s or two XY’s being together is touched upon briefly, when Spanky tries to understand homosexuality and theorizes:

“The Land of Forgetting is about reproduction and getting born. I wonder if it’s possible for a soul to get the wrong body. [...] The Known can’t make mistakes. Can it?”

This should have been the crux of the whole book, but after seamlessly introducing it into the story, Henderson steers clear of it, opting for a conventional narrative about young people who find each other through their struggles. In doing that, she deflects from the philosophical reflection her own characters seems to demand.

These characters seem boringly familiar: The musician son at odds with his insurance salesman father. The daughter who is her father’s ‘pumpkin’ no-matter-what. But then again, there are lessons Henderson wishes to impart here – lessons best received from familiar people. Their thoughts and circumstances are all relatable. Except in one instance: Before Spanky’s parents meet, his mother, the 21 year old actress, is in love with the gay costume designer named Pablo, and refuses to realize he is gay even after he has her dress as a boy and takes her with him to a club called ‘Chaps’. Really, I can only suspend my disbelief so much.

Historical Imperatives in Arisa White’s Disposition for Shininess and Sara Veglahn’s Closed Histories

Closed Histories
Noemi Press, 2008

Disposition for Shininess (not pictured)
Factory Hollow Press, 2008

Review by Metta Sáma

Arisa White’s Disposition for Shininess and Sara Veglahn’s Closed Histories are two incredibly different chapbooks from two seemingly (on the page) different writers. While White’s poetics veer towards the lyric narrative, Veglahn’s work is determinedly lyric, with narratives always harkening in the shadows. Each of these books establishes a central focus: for White, the lyric “disposition” is the core of the poems, while Veglahn constructs a concept for, as her title suggests, closed histories. Despite these fundamental differences in the end product (the poem itself), White and Veglahn’s chapbooks are moody trajectories of the intersections between the personal, the public, the private, the memory and rememory, and the responsibilities of the individual to these not so discrete spaces.

White’s poems are sprawling or tight, playful and compassionate, stark and brutally honed to capture the core of the metaphor that she extends and warps and snaps and releases to a newness. This is innovation at its core: an ability to make new the old, to make unrecognizable the familiar, to comfort and destroy, to build the concept while also building the narrative (and lyric). This innovation is most noticeable in the titular poem, “Disposition for Shininess”, a six-part, eight-page poem (the second poem in the book) that expands the lyric presented in the first poem, “This is How it Went in Luke”. Where “This is How it Went in Luke” builds on an anaphora, “The daughter of,” and stages the book as religious/spiritual beginnings, “Disposition for Shininess” puts the narrative pieces in place. We learn about the births of various members of the family, and White, a master craftician, plays with physical birth, emotional birth, spiritual birth, the birth of geography, and the physical mappings between the siblings, the mother, and the mother’s lover. In White’s hands, every image is compressed and conflated to hold as much emotional resonance as possible: “Like over and over again we a post-it/to some stone she had to swallow,/some pain that can’t be exfoliated down” (1: 20-22); “She pulls her hair and there’s a widow./Slicked, she stands at the peak of her thoughts./Our mother polishes her requiem until it’s an opal./Watch it long it glistens like a leach” (2: 12-15); “We fold the smaller one into the bigger one/until we are one child our mother cannot hold.//. . .We know this exquisite corpse between us” (4: 2,3, 14). This poem, similar to others in the book, drops clues and picks them up, working deeply on nuance.

Sara Veglahn, too, is an exquisite innovator. Closed Histories, a series of untitled prose poems, build on a basic premise and re-create as it queries. Veglahn’s innovation happens within the lines, saturated as they are with quietness and mystery, with a surprise that startles the senses, but that, oddly, feel right, earned. She writes: “Where there’s a magic number for each/thought. I walk sideways down the road. I walk/careful and slow. The soldiers are in the fields./The soldiers are coming down from the hills” (2-5). I follow these poems because the voice is steady, confident, curious, and tenacious. Selah Saterstrom says that “Between the images an almost divinatory logic erupts,” and Veglahn captures that deep intuition in the middle poems, which begin in the simple and move quickly, stealthily, to the profound: “From the window, light. From the light, a/pattern. From patterns, the shape of the world./A thought in a shape. . . ./As if in a mirror, the way that you are not/yourself in your reflection” (1-5). Veglahn’s work feels like a mash-up of Muriel Rukeyser and Mei-Mei Bersennbrugge: deeply philosophical, utterly conceptual, fresh, political, and painfully compassionate.

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