The feathery touch of these graceful short tales conceals melancholic undertones of helplessness and American class and race...
A debut collection offers 15 short stories that mostly reflect small incidents and bittersweet enlightenments in black life.
These tales by author and screenwriter Williams span the 1920s to the present and generally offer insights into the African-American condition in the United States. They are often set in the South and distilled into elegantly observed little narratives that border on vignettes. For the most part, there are no epic marches on Washington, police dog riots, or Ku Klux Klan horrors but rather emotionally intricate, character-driven portraits that typically end with muted epiphanies, quiet even when life-changing. A minor exception is the opener, “Some Get Back,” in which two Depression-era workers’ ill-conceived revenge on their hated boss backfires (a commentary on Ferguson?). More in the author’s subtle manner is “Tea Time,” wherein a typically “disadvantaged” black kid being mentored by two white liberal newlyweds comes to think (with some justification) that he’s just a surrogate starter son, filling in for their upcoming baby. In “Glass House,” a surprise visitor enlightens a homeowner couple to the origins of their architecturally eccentric Georgia domicile and its connection to the black criminal underworld of bygone generations. Set in the 1920s, “The Benefactress” depicts the dispiriting ritual of a principal from a progressive black Southern school reporting to the wealthy Madam C.J. Walker–type dowager in New York who bankrolls the institution; his meek bowing to her whims reflects the Jim Crow atmosphere they are supposedly trying to rise above. Not all of the stories center on people of color. “Just Desserts” features a poor white Southern girl, a hitchhiker and casual prostitute, who decides to wreak a form of street justice on the creepy businessman who (along with his teen mistress) gives her a ride. Williams draws the curtain on that one just at the point where any number of more predictable and pulpy writers would have gone all Quentin Tarantino. The title story concerns a 1950s Pullman porter who has helped his daughter attain college and a future but in the process feels he is not worthy of her social circle. Stings and wounds of racial and economic inequality here are mainly inferred—rarely are they so out in the open.
The feathery touch of these graceful short tales conceals melancholic undertones of helplessness and American class and race divisions.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941551-11-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Washington Writers' Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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