Reading The Member of the Wedding on Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (8/13/23)

Yes, You Should Absolutely Read The Member of the Wedding

Unlike all the other Sundays, today I'm reading prose because I find myself away from home and poetry. Please enjoy the beginning of Carson McCullers' novella, The Member of the Wedding. It's an absolutely fantastic book that I began a few weeks ago and quickly devoured. If you haven't read it, I hope that this serves as a gateway into the full book. It is definitely one of the best books I've ever read and one that I'll return to. The writing is thick and smart, wry and hilarious, deeply observant and packed with pitch-perfect sentences. 

The story takes place in the mid-century South and follows Frankie, a twelve-year old girl walking the tightrope into adulthood and the grim reality of such a balancing act. She lives with her widower father and spends her time with her younger cousin John Henry and her nanny/house-help Berenice. Frankie is finding herself less drawn to pastimes that used to take her whole summer, such as digging a swimming hole with neighborhood children or putting on shows in the back yard. 

Like Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankie is more interested in throwing knives than playing dolls, but as an older version of Scout, she's becoming more curious about the larger world, her place in it, and the town she's grown up in. When she learns that her eldest brother is to be married, she starts fantasizing about becoming a family with he and his bride after the wedding--despite receiving no invitation or even a gesture toward it. She decides that this will be her way out of town forever and into the world and goes about dreaming the dream until she has convinced herself of its truth in her attempts to convince others. 

She begins to experience the town and her home as though she will never return, and like the childhood she is leaving behind, she starts to feel both the loss and the excitement of living a different version of her life than she has until now.

Evidently, the novella became a movie only a few years after its 1946 publication (and again 50 years later), and was one of McCullers' best known or most heralded works--aside from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I so very much wish that I'd read McCullers before now, but I'm so happy and grateful to read her work now that I've cracked it open. Much like my experience first reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, I reveled in the discovery of every sentence and scene. McCullers is amazing. From the way she designs the telling of the story to her observations about the characters to the vivid, perfect details (from John Henry's quiet perfectionism to Berenice's blue glass eye and stories of her deceased husband to Frankie's meticulous pantomime pretending to be a jeweler in her father's store window). 

It's on-point, as the kids say. (Do they still say that?) 

Do yourself or your book-loving friend a favor and find a copy of The Member of the Wedding. 

 

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Rapid Review: Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright

Last week, I discovered a copy of Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children at a used bookstore. This is the third work I've read by Wright, in line with Native Son (fiction) and Black Boy (non-fiction). Like his other work, Uncle Tom's Children does not flinch from the violent and impossible labyrinth that is living in the United States as a black person.

Published in 1936, the book begins with a non-fiction piece, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in which Wright recounts his experiences learning the unwritten rules white people required black people to follow, from his first job in which his life is threatened because he referred to a white person in conversation without using "Mr.", to witnessing his white bosses beat a black woman in the back of the store--an event treated by his boss as a delicious matter of fact. After she wanders into the street, bloody, weak, confused, a white police officer arrests her for intoxication.

Starting the book with the non-fiction piece serves to authenticate the reality that all the following novellas take place in, and to establish Wright as the clear storyteller of the book. The reader cannot sink too far into a story without remembering its author and the first non-fiction piece, which is important since these fictions contain such vivid, awful violence many readers will shirk from it by trying to shrug it off as fiction. Nope. The organization of the book refuses this wish. Fiction is bound to reality, and any attempt to deny this reality is to be aware that Wright is watching and knows this impulse and will not have it.

Except the first piece, the rest of the book is comprised of short stories/novellas, each told in a series of small sections that typically culminate in a person trying to save his life, or her own, after breaking the white man's code which Wright illuminates as ridiculous, arbitrary, and impossible with a guaranteed violence built into it--not just violence committed to the body, which Wright shows, but also the violence committed to the soul, identity, relationships, and one's ability to grasp what reality is since so much of reality is maneuvering through illusion.

In the story "Big Boy Leaves Home," which might, from the title, seem like a coming-of-age story about a boy maturing into a man about to start a new life . . . is not. "Big Boy Leaves Home" is the story of a group of teenagers who skip school on a hot day and want to go swimming, but a white man owns the pond and will likely kill on sight. The teenagers go swimming anyway, which ends with a white woman screaming, a white man shooting two of them, and one of the teenagers (Big Boy) killing the white man in defense. Of course, as soon as the white man is shot, everyone, including the reader, knows that this is the certain death for the teenager. The rest of the story is the two surviving teenagers attempt to save their own lives, while white people follow in a mob that burns down houses and worse.

In the last novella, "Bright and Morning Star," a mother has raised her two sons to young adulthood. Now, she is made to witness the destruction of her sons, which coincides with the blossoming of their ideas and beliefs in a workers' revolution and unification of poor white and black people in order to gain any traction to better lives. Her eldest son has been put in prison for his ideas, and her next son is about to die for the same reason. And she knows it. And she tries to protect him and the group of people in the community who believe the same. This night, she summons courage to "talk back" to white men who come hunting for her son. "Bright and Morning Star" is an incredible story that, in little time, explains how religion had been used to quiet the woman to the tragedy of her life--and after her awakening to communist ideas, she begins to feel alive.

In sum, Uncle Tom's Children is a harrowing book full of beautiful lives caught in a wretched reality made by, and perpetuated by, people who control it and then claim ignorance about its existence. How I wish someone had taught this book, or any book by Richard Wright, when I was a literature student. But they didn't.

I don't wonder why.

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Places to find Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright (click for links)

• Indiebound
• Your library
• HarperCollins

Reminder: If your library does not hold a copy of this book, you can request the book through Interlibrary loan, or request its purchase. Librarians are always looking to add books that community members believe will benefit the collection. 

The End of Short Story Month: Read Eudora Welty's Collected Stories

Photograph from this article in the Library Journal

I live down the hill from a Free Little Library, and before I went to Texas for two weeks to save my flooded house, I stopped by the library to find a book. Usually, the books we choose from the library are children's books for our son, but on that particular day, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty sat there behind the small door.

That is not a pocket-book, my partner said, nodding at the book when she picked me up from the airport.

She was right. I guess people take light reading on the airplane. My light reading weighed a couple pounds, and might have counted as carry-on luggage had airport security felt like making an argument.

The copy of the book is large. Not just thick, but with large pages about two-hands tall. It was published a year near my birth year. Were I my mother, I would find this significant in a telling way. Because I'm a writer. Eudora Welty was a writer. We are women. We write stories. Continue the similarities necessary for symbolism, as you see fit.

But I'm not my mother, though I do share her tendency toward symbolism, so as I looked at the copyright page, I just imagined what my mother would say. Were Eudora born in 1913 like my grandmother, rather than in 1909, it would be easier to believe, rather than simply imagine, implications between numbers and lives.

Cover of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

The copy is also water-damaged. Not so bad to interfere with the words, but clearly the book is

rippled. Perhaps left in a basement box. Perhaps a bottom shelf over so many years by a window that tended to be left open.

Inside the copy is the New York Times obituary of Eudora Welty, cut carefully out. It ran from one page to another, and both pages are here. In the margins of only a few stories is blue-ink cursive in a woman's hand, or at least the cursive is small and careful and reminds me of the cursive from the weekly letters my grandmother wrote to my mother.

It's a copy, then, that was not only bought, but also saved. A copy read through. A copy owned by a person who took time while she read. A teacher? Maybe. A student, surely at one time, to have a habit of writing in the margins.

All of this is important to me. I'm one of the history of people that believes the book is a sacred object, one in a line of people who has inherited the memory of when books were incredibly expensive, always rare, for only the wealthy, kept from the hands of the class of people that encircle the trunk of my family tree and reach out.

I can't help but feel romantic about the physicality of a book, this place where someone's thoughts wait to enter the thoughts of another, all without speaking. So intimate, this.

Well, not every book does this to me. Not every binding. I started examining the book after I started reading the stories and realizing how wonderful they are.

What took me so long to find her? I think I read an excerpt of her talking about writing, on growing up as a reader. I might have even taught it to a class of 101 students, years ago. I've read a few of her commonly anthologized stories, "A Worn Path," for example, but the anthology stories didn't strike me like these have. 

Regardless. This is an excellent book of stories. I'm five stories in, 50 pages out of over 600 pages. If I wait to suggest this book to you, several years will have passed. That's how I read now. When I find a collection that is awesome, I force it to last. For example, when I read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, I waited a year before reading the very last story.

But I want to tell you about this book now. It is a strange book. Her writing reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, whose work I very much enjoy. And Harper Lee. Not just because she's Southern, or maybe also because of that. She also reminds me of Patricia Highsmith. And all the writers I like, do have a tendency to have lived in the South, and to gravitate toward depictions of the grotesque, the not-quite, the school of you-won't-believe-it-but-yes-life-is-like-this, with a twist of dark humor in the voice, always there, too. Writers who write about characters who live in poverty but whose lives are not the butt of jokes because of that. Characters whose lives didn't turn out as happy stories might. Characters who find themselves controlled by others who don't realize how they're controlling the lives of others. Female characters, in particular, caught in lives orchestrated by a history of gendered expectations--whether they realize this, fight this, or not. Usually, not, though the writer does.

Maybe I gravitate toward fiction written in the 1950s because my mother was born in 1939. Once, when I asked my mother about feminism, she said, Well, it was a surprise. I hadn't even considered it.

Anyway. You might enjoy Eudora Welty's stories, too. Today is the last day of National Short Story Month in the United States. A perfect way to celebrate is to find a copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty and enjoy the pages between now and next year's short-story month. I won't be done with them yet, but we can check in, then.

• Find The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in a public library near you by using WorldCat.org.
• Purchase The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in your local bookstore by using IndieBound.
• Locate the nearest Free Little Library near you, and hope that you have a neighbor who left it there; or, leave your copy there when you're done with it.
• And, Amazon, has a copy, too.

Or begin by reading my favorite story so far, "A Piece of News." Here is one of my favorite passages from it, in which the main character Ruby imagines her death after reading an article in the newspaper about her own death, or the death of a woman with the same name, or (so many overlapping possibilities):

[…] At once she was imagining herself dying. She would have a nightgown to lie in, and a bullet in her heart. Anyone could tell, to see her lying there with that deep expression about her mouth, how strange and terrible that would be. Underneath a brand-new nightgown her heart would be hurting with every beat, many times more than her toughened skin where Clyde slapped at her. Ruby began to cry softly, the way she would be crying from the extremity of pain; tears would run down in a little stream over the quilt. Clyde would be standing there above her, as he once looked, with his wild black hair hanging to his shoulders. He used to be very handsome and strong!
He would say, “Ruby, I done this to you.”
She would say—only a whisper—“That is the truth, Clyde—you done this to me.”
Then she would die; her life would stop right there.
She lay silently for a moment, composing her face into a look that would be beautiful, desirable, and dead.

(Excerpt from the story "A Piece of News" by Eudora Welty)

Short-Story Month: Day 30, The River by Flannery O'Connor

"It occurred to him that he was lucky this time that they had found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the park. You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ. Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewell, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke."

"North Georgia River" by Melissa,

Used under CC license

We're drawing toward the end of National Short Story Month, and have yet to feature a story by one of the best American writers, Flannery O'Connor.  

And, so, today's selection is her story "The River". "The River" follows a boy whose parents have hired a Southern fundamentalist--perhaps by mistake, as it seems--to watch him for the day.  She ends up taking the boy to a river baptism, a new experience for the boy who later returns to the river alone.  

Like nearly all of O'Connor's stories, although her own religiosity and tendency toward trying to save her readers through careful allegorical imagery and grotesque images, "The River" defies O'Connor's religious wish in the story and shows us complex characters in the strange situations that religion itself stages time and again.  Regardless of O'Connor's intentions, "The River" is an excellent story of the way humans try to control their own lives by controlling each other's and the terrible fiasco that comes from such behavior.  And the main character, "Bevel", is hilarious, too.  And he knows it.

"The River" by

Flannery O'Connor

(link goes to a nearly full "preview" 

of the story on GoogleBooks)

Short-Story Month 2012: Day 25, Show-and-Tell by George Singleton

by Taro Taylor,
Used under CC license

He held his arms wide open, as if I were a returning POW. "Did your teacher send back a note to me?"

I reached in my pocket and pulled out the letter from Héloise to Abelard. I handed it to him and said, "She made me quit reading."

"She made you quit reading? How far along did you get?"

I told him that I had only gotten to the part about "sugar-booger-baby." 

Six days remain of National Short Story Month, and so far, of the selected stories, none have been humorous.  And so, it's about time for some relief--a story about a boy whose father courts his teacher through a series of covert show-and-tells--by one of the United States' humorists, George Singleton. Of course, for humor to work there must be the bittersweet, too, and there is, there is.  

"Show-and-Tell" is from Singleton's collection The Half-Mammals of Dixie, which she remembers reading in the backyard on a blanket in San Marcos, Texas, having found the book at a library sale. 

"Show-and-Tell" 

by George Singleton

(2001)