It is always an embarrassment when a writer as fine as Bill Harris has been working for years and one has not noticed. Harris was born in Anniston, Alabama and moved to Detroit as a child with his mother. Educated at Wayne State, he served on the faculty for many years until his retirement. He’s best known for volumes of poetry and for a number of plays, and was honored with the prestigious Kresge Foundation Eminent Artist award.
Published in 2018, when Harris was 77 years old, this collection was a revelation to me. These twenty-five mostly linked stories are the most powerful, honest, wide-ranging, revelatory stories concerning the Black experience I think I have ever read, harder hitting than Jesmyn Ward or Alice Walker, on a par with Percival Everett or Colson Whitehead.
The early stories are set on antebellum Caledonia Plantation, just outside Acorn, Alabama, Harris’s fictional Anniston. My favorite is “Cretia’s Gal.” Cretia is enslaved. Her daughter is called Cretia’s Gal. One evening a visiting French musician, Monsieur Gottschalk, plays on the household’s most prized possession, a pianoforte.
Esme, the lady of the house, hated that music, and loses her mind when, the next day, Cretia’s Gal, a silent and “slow” girl, forbidden even to touch the instrument, absentmindedly plays the piece exactly, note for note. Instead of pausing in wonder, Esme, spoiled beyond reason, rages.
How dare she touch the instrument! Had someone secretly taught her? The insolence is beyond tolerance and Esme faints. Her power is arbitrary and absolute: Cretia’s Gal is cruelly whipped and sold down the river, away from family.
Other stories are set through the 1960s, moving from Alabama to the Midwest, all examining, illustrating, explaining in different ways, Black consciousness, and the tools and methods of survival—masks up, keep your own counsel and observe. It is clear, for example, that the African Americans know a lot more about the lives and secrets of white people than the reverse.
Another thread that runs through these stories, and one I have not seen before, is the deep understanding of Black women of the relentless emotional, visceral pain and frustration of the Black men, having to pretend humility, subject to whimsical arrest and convict labor, unable to speak freely, use their talents, to protect their families and support them financially. (One extraordinary exception to this is Black Deputy Marshall Cochrane Utterbach, the coolest, most lethal lawman I have seen in a long while.)
Strongest and cleverest of all the Black women is Pearl, a remarkable creation, with brains and extraordinary organizational skill, becoming a kind of personnel manager of a brothel, then a sex instructor for a white bride-to-be, and later a seamstress and property manager for a Black minstrel show, all the while raising and preparing her blind boy, called Son, a savant, a Tiresias in training, to survive in their dangerous, hostile world.
