Zora Neale Hurston: Magnolia Flower

Deal Me In 2021- Week 41

‘Of course not! But John, listen, did you ever hear a river make such a sound? Why it seems almost as if it were talking – that murmuring noise, you know.’

‘Maybe, it’s welcoming us back. I always felt that it loved you and me, somehow.’

Zora Neale Hurston’s “Magnolia Flower” has the feel of a fable. The title is the name of a Native American daughter of a slave man. She marries John against her father’s will.

The beauty in the story to me is twofold. First, the story is being told by the natural world in which Magnolia Flower and John live. The River speaks to the Stream as a parent would speak to a child. The “parenting” of the River is in stark contrast to the parenting of the humans in the story. Second, Magnolia Flower and John’s story remains enchanting and seems to be one of those “happily ever after” stories. Again, their relationship stands in stark contrast to that of Magnolia Flower’s parents.

Ultimately, this is a sweet story that makes for a pleasant read.

This story is included in Zora Neale Hurston’s collection Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick: Stories. I read it for Week 41 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Rudolph Fisher: A City of Refuge

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 40

Rudolph Fisher’s “A City of Refuge” also uses as its theme the moving of African Americans from the South to the North – specifically New York City.

King Solomon Gillis leaves his home in North Carolina quickly as he had killed a white man. We don’t get the complete story of this aspect of Gillis’ life and as a result we can’t help but root for Gillis as he arrives in his new world.

While we want to root for him, we also can’t help thinking that he’s just a little naive as he walks the New York streets and immediately gets involved unknowingly with less than respectable people dealing in a less than respectable business. The narration is all third person and mostly from Gillis’ point of view though occasionally there are small sections of narration from the point of view of those less than respectable.

Fisher’s writing and development of character – especially Gillis – is superb, pitting his optimism against New York’s reality. One of the initial paragraphs, as Gillis gets off the train, especially grabbed me even if it’s sentiment quickly faded:

Distant thunder, nearing. The screeching onslaught of the fiery hosts of hell, headlong, breathtaking. Car doors rattling, sliding, banging open…Heat oppression, suffocation – eternity…More turnstiles. Jonah emerging from the whale.

Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight.

This story is included in Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best edited by John Henrik Clarke. I read it for Week 40 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie: Book Two

Book Two of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children took me a little longer than anticipated but I found it worth the time.

I compared Rushdie to Kurt Vonnegut in my post about Book One. In Book Two, the Vonnegut twinkle is still there but something about all the details of the plot reminded me also of Charles Dickens – specifically David Copperfield.

As Saleem Sinai continues to tell his life story after he was born on India’s Independence Day from Great Britain, he now realizes he has extra sensory perception (mind-reading) with many of his fellow children born just after midnight on that day. Eventually this turns into an extra sensory ability to smell – not just regular smells but other smells – like the smell of emotions.

This sort of magical realism doesn’t always occur in Dickens’ novels but the plot driven narrative always makes me wonder if Dickens knew how his story was going to end or whether he made it up as he went along. I found myself asking the same question of Rushdie as he narrates Saleem’s childhood.

However, Rushdie gives his narrator a different spin in that he is less reliable than Dickens’ narrator (at least in David Copperfield). In fact, numerous times Saleem just flat out tells the reader that he’s unreliable – at which I have to at least chuckle. As far as knowing how its going to end, Saleem will also frequently hint at something and then say “that’s for later” – giving a sense that Rushdie did know how everything turns out as he was writing it – provided his narrator can be relied upon, of course.

The plot itself revolves around Saleem’s family as they become involved with Indian and Pakistani politics and culture during the 1950’s and 1960’s (at least so far – who knows where Book Three will take us). My post about Book Two can end with this quotation that seems ever so applicable to today:

…in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence – that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

Just for reference, Midnight’s Children was published in 1981.

James Baldwin : Going to Meet the Man

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 39

I stepped in the river at Jordan.

Out of the darkness of the room, out of nowhere, the line came flying up at him, with the melody and beat. He turned wordlessly toward his sleeping wife. I stepped in the river at Jordan. Where had he heard that song?

A second week in a row with a James Baldwin story. This one is the title story from his collection Going to Meet the Man: Stories.

Gruesome. Horrifying. Just two words that could describe this story. Jesse, a white deputy sheriff in the south comes home to his wife ready for a night of romance but unable to perform. A white man’s impotence gives an unusual power to this story. As Jesse recounts in his mind the beating he gave a black man in his jail, his mind goes back to his childhood recalling his parents taking him to a lynching.

This lynching is described in as terrifying a manner as anything I’ve read.

The relationship between Jesse and his father brings together the idea of what can be passed down from generation to generation. While the white man struggles with what he’s done as an adult, his memories as a child brings back his prowess.

Again – terrifying.

This story is not for the faint of heart.

I read it when I selected the Nine of Hearts for Week 39 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Tama Janowitz: Physics

Now, I am a word person and have never been good with mathematical problems – how many miles a train can travel in five hours if its speed is forty miles per hour, and so forth. I always think, What if a cow gets in the way?

In looking through some of my short story collections, I realized that I only have five stories left in Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker edited by David Remnick. Between now and the end of the the year, I figure I might as well knock these out then I can count it as a book I finished this year.

First up of the not-read stories is “Physics” by Tama Janowitz. It starts with Eleanor, the narrator, getting hit by a car. It’s not a major accident. In fact she leaves the scene to go have pizza. But I would say that getting hit by a car is still significant regardless to what degree.

Eleanor then narrates her story as she goes home to her artist boyfriend Stash, they have a fight over the refrigerator and then go out to a fancy dinner being thrown for a group of artists including Stash.

By this time, based on the narration, its not surprising that Eleanor feels out of place – no matter where she goes. A lot of inner dialogue takes place as Eleanor walks about her life. A lot of angst, insecurity – the things that exist in quite a few of these New York stories. The humor in the minute details of life pops up frequently. She decides she wants to have a baby – all of a sudden.

Ultimately, she compares life to a “Dodg’em car in an amusement park, where the sign says ‘Proceed at Own Risk’. On the one hand it’s very believable that Eleanor would come up with this lame metaphor. On the other hand, it’s a lame metaphor.

James Baldwin : Exodus

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 38

When she was a woman grown, well past thirty as she reckoned it, with one husband buried – but the master had given her another – armies, plundering and burning, had come from the North to set them free. This was in answer to the prayers of the faithful, who had never ceased, both day and night, to cry out for deliverance.

James Baldwin’s “Exodus” brings together two women of two generations. Two generations of “freedom”. Florence, the protagonist, remembers the stories her mother has told her about when, as a slave, she was suddenly free. However, Florence doesn’t remember the actual events, only the stories.

It’s difficult to tell, but it seems Florence’s mother thinks that freedom was enough and maybe her memories of slavery and the freedom that came from it are enough. They are real.

But Florence decides, against her mother’s wishes, in 1900, to move from the South to the North. This is her exodus, her freedom.

The contrast between the generations, between their ideas of freedom, gives the story a slight peculiarity. It’s not only the story of racial injustice and the fight for freedom. It’s the story of one generation needing to be free from the ideas of the last generation.

This story is included in Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best edited by John Henrik Clarke. I read it when I selected the Eight of Hearts for Week 38 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie: Book One

…I must interrupt myself. I wasn’t going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings…

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children makes great use of the metanarrative concept – at least so far in Book One. In fact, the quotation above practically defines metanarrative in a way that’s hidden and unless the reader is looking closely, it just seems a part of the story.

I’m not revealing anything that isn’t at the very start of the novel and that isn’t included in the goodreads description. The birth of the narrator takes place at midnight on August 15, 1947 – the exact moment that India breaks free from the British. While the reader understands this to be significant, by the end of Book One, they still don’t know the details of this significance. Actually, the narrator races toward this event as it occurs right at the end of Book One along with a slight twist.

At least in this first section, one might also consider the narrator unreliable as everything he’s telling is before he was born. The question about how he knows all this is there while the answer isn’t – but it doesn’t seem to matter. There seems to be a lot left for him to tell.

In completing Book One, I find many similarities between Rushdie and Kurt Vonnegut. Rushdie is the wordier of the two with this novel running about 530 pages but both look at life with that wonderful twinkle in their eyes. One can’t help but enjoy the way they acknowledge the absurdity and amusement they find as they observe and write about life.

Check out next week and I’ll (hopefully) post about Book Two. There are three Books in case anyone is wondering.

Albert Murray : Train Whistle Guitar

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 37

Lil’ Buddy’s color was that sky blue in which hens cackled; it was that smoke blue in which dogs barked and mosquito hawks lit on barbed-wire fences. It was the color above meadows. It was my color too because it was a boy’s color. It was whistling blue and hunting blue, and it went with baseball, and that was old Lil’ Buddy again, and that blue beyond outfields was exactly what we were singing about when we used to sing that old one about it ain’t gonna rain no more no more.

Steel blue was a man’s color.

I’ve been reading a lot of good stuff lately and none better than Albert Murray’s “Train Whistle Guitar”. Hopefully the paragraph I quoted above gives you an idea of the poetry this story contains. The narrator and his friend, Lil’ Buddy, live near a train track and have lots of ideas about the glory involved in riding the rails.

Most of these ideas and ideals come from their boyish admiration for Luzana Cholly who would show up from time to time in their town via train. For lack of a better term, Luzana Cholly might be considered a hobo. He could tell stories that would make two young boys long for the open tracks.

In the eyes of the boys, Luzana Cholly was his own person. The other adults in the town, including the boys’ parents, including the white folks and the black folks, didn’t know what to make of him and he was quite satisfied for it to stay that way.

Murray makes the boys’ conversations between themselves humorous in that they go on for a long time but it’s only the give and take of quick one-liners: one-liners about what they want to be and how they want to be it and what they want to do and who they want to do it to. And these ideas all gather influence from this man that nobody understands.

As with most boyish ideas, they get knocked about in their heads. Reality might set in. They get older. Someone comes along to tell them to get over them. This someone happens to be Luzana Cholly.

Very few, if any, stories capture the wonder of boyhood and how it gets snuffed out better than this one.

This story is included in Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best edited by John Henrik Clarke. I read it when I selected the Nine of Spades for Week 37 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Out of it he extracted a pinch of tobacco, factory-cut, placed it in Shukhov’s palm, measured it with his eye, and added a few more strands. Just enough for one cigarette, no more.

Shukhov had a piece of newspaper ready. He tore off a scrap, rolled the cigarette, picked up a glowing coal from where it lay at Tiurin’s feet – and drew and drew. A sweet dizziness went all through his body, to his head, to his feet, as if he had downed a glass of vodka.

I think I’ve mentioned at least in a few posts that I’m not a smoker, never have been; however, it’s not uncommon for me to find smoking a powerful image in stories. In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a seemingly minor moment in which Ivan Denisovich Shukhov buys a small piece of tobacco from a fellow Soviet prison inmate, becomes something more, something central to the story.

Something small, something insignificant such as a few seconds of smoking puts a meaning in Shukhov’s day and, as a result, his life. A meaning that could very easily slip away in the Russian prison environment he finds himself – an environment of cold, of gray, of work – in which laying bricks needs to be accomplished quickly in subzero weather so the mortar doesn’t freeze and the work has to be redone.

Smoking for a few seconds adds light, warmth, comfort and meaning to this world. It adds enough for Shukhov to continue with his day – and his life. I think it adds something else, too: dignity.

The copy of the book I read is not the one pictured. My copy is translated from the Russian by Ralph Parker. My copy also spelled the author’s first name with a “der” as opposed to “dr”. I’m not sure either way is wrong. One might be more anglicanized.

Paul Laurence Dunbar : The Lynching of Jube Benson

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 36

…best of all, Jube was a perfect Cerberus, and no one on earth could have been more effective in keeping away or deluding the other young fellows who visited the Dalys.

Paul Laurence Dunbar tells his story “The Lynching of Jube Benson” from the perspective of a white country doctor courting the daughter of his landlord. Dunbar has the doctor tell this story after the fact to a handful of acquaintances. The doctor tells it in a highly educated manner – the narration at times seems almost exaggerated. Perhaps this is meant to add contrast to the animal actions the doctor eventually conducts.

As the doctor concludes his story, he shows some remorse for his actions; however, he’s so detached from his own story that this remorse seems understated. This might be a result of Dunbar feeling that the doctor wouldn’t show enough remorse. Or maybe there isn’t enough remorse for anyone to show in this situation.

This story is included in Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best edited by John Henrik Clarke. I read it when I selected the Five of Diamonds for Week 36 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.