The Southern Woman, page 1
Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth Spencer
Introduction copyright © 2021 by Afia Atakora
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Modern Library and the Torchbearer colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2001.
Some of the stories in this work were originally published in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, McCall’s, New Canadian Stories, The New Yorker, North American Review, Ontario Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Texas Quarterly. In addition, some have appeared in The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), Jack of Diamonds (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988) and The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Spencer, Elizabeth
The southern woman: selected fiction/Elizabeth Spencer.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-593-24118-9
Ebook ISBN 978-0-593-24119-6
1. Southern States—Social Life and customs—Fiction. 2. Italy—Social life and customs—Fiction. 3. Women—Southern States—Fiction. 4. Women—Italy—Fiction. I. Title
PS3537.P4454 S68 2001
813'.54—dc21 00-054612
Ebook ISBN 9780593241196
modernlibrary.com
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Ella Laytham
Cover images: scisettialfio/Getty Images (flowers), H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images (face)
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Afia Atakora
The South
The Little Brown Girl
The Eclipse
First Dark
A Southern Landscape
Ship Island
The Fishing Lake
The Adult Holiday
Sharon
The Finder
The Bufords
A Christian Education
Indian Summer
The Girl Who Loved Horses
The Business Venture
Italy
The White Azalea
The Visit
The Cousins
The Light in the Piazza
Up North
I, Maureen
Jack of Diamonds
The Skater
New Stories
The Legacy
The Master of Shongalo
The Runaways
The Weekend Travelers
First Child
Owl
Dedication
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
AFIA ATAKORA
If you have not heard of Elizabeth Spencer, it’s alright. You were not meant to. Before being invited to write this introduction to her works, I had not heard of her, either.
Spencer is not often enough named where she belongs, among that pantheon of Southern writers, the Faulkners and Twains. Frankly, Spencer is rarely even listed among the demigods, made lesser, of course, because their stories, like hers, are by, for, and about women. Think Flannery O’Connor, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty. Though I daresay that Elizabeth Spencer is in a category of her own, to be set apart from certain Southern writers, from certain Southern traditions.
To say that she was silenced is to perhaps give too much credit to the literary establishment and not enough credit to the indelible draw of storytelling to a natural-born storyteller. Still, after Elizabeth Spencer earned the unanimous vote of the 1957 Pulitzer judges for her novel The Voice at the Back Door, the Pulitzer board refused to formally name her the winner. Asterisk, no prize for fiction was awarded that year.
For The Voice at the Back Door, Spencer drew inspiration from a real civil rights case. In the fictional telling, a Black man stands falsely accused of a crime. A white man is called upon to defend him in the heart of the segregated South. If this sounds familiar, do keep in mind that by 1957 Spencer’s novel had already won the Pulitzer and been robbed of it too. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was not yet published, and would not win its own Pulitzer until 1960. You’ve surely heard of Harper Lee, we’ve told and retold To Kill a Mockingbird, we teach it to children. And perhaps it is precisely this—that the lesson of Mockingbird is a child’s lesson with straightforward evils and simple solutions that made it more palatable a parable to the Pulitzer committee, the literary establishment, the American reader skimming the shelves. We’d rather the tidy morality play, the simple schoolyard lesson: Just don’t be racist. Spencer offered a question that begged a response, an open-ended indictment of a segregated society steeped in racism, a country self-destructively committed to the systems that perpetuate violence and hate. The Pulitzer committee deemed that we were not ready to hear what Spencer had to say about racism in America, no matter how well she had rendered it—or precisely because she had rendered it too well.
Silenced? No. Spencer continued to write, widely, prolifically from the central nervous system of America and beyond. She had tapped into a vein and, of the pure essence collected there, drew out all the stories of pride, of sin, of neglected promise and tainted legacy. Rather than silenced, one might say she was hushed.
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In truth, I came ready to read this collection with one eye shut the way one might cringe through an old Disney film, bracing for racism, ready with reflexive apologies, “It was a different time.”
But both of my eyes popped open when I got to the story “Sharon.” Reader, I said “Wow.” Out loud. Because Spencer weaves a spell, performs a sleight of hand which makes you convinced you are falling in love with Sharon—Sharon being the name of the plantation, like Gone With the Wind’s Tara—in a knowing wink to that strange old Southern preoccupation with the personification of land and objectification of people. But you are not falling in love with the land, or even the ghost of the mistress who owned it, Miss Eileen. You are falling in love with the woman behind it all, the new mistress, whether she wants to be or not. Like the narrator’s uncle, you have gone and fallen in love with the Black maid Melissa. Like him, you feel for her and you can’t ever truly know her. You discover this, as the narrator does, as an outside observer glimpsing what looks like love through a window. But do you believe equal love can exist between a white man and his Black maid in the fraught, segregated South that has been presented to you, seamless and spare, in these few exquisite pages? Spencer does not tell you what to think, instead, like an impressionist painter, she provides you with a hundred tiny dots of rich detail, a veritable Seurat of Southern life. The image you see is your own, of your own making and in your own likeness. And just like that, Spencer has you, because she’s told you something about the South and something about yourself, too, and all your complicated preconceived notions.
“Politically correct” is a loaded term, “woke,” another. By the powers vested in me, by the same literary establishment that hands out prizes and asterisks, I am pleased to declare Elizabeth Spencer as neither. What some of these stories might lack in respectful terminology they make up for in sumptuous language and innate empathy, which kind of makes you wonder why some of those other old Southern writers have such a hard time writing “Other” people as just that, people. The most enduring image in “Sharon” is its final one, suggesting that for all that segregation, that great legacy of “othering,” the white South and its Black history are indelibly intertwined, a complicated miscegenation of hate, and love, too.
Product of her time, Spencer might be, but she makes smart, gorgeous use of that time. Her writing embodies the tell-it-like-it-is vigor that we like to think is the spirit of America, though we’ve usually got it wrong, got it soiled. But “tell-it-like-it-is” as written by Spencer is pure, distilled, admirable. She evokes the romantic allure of the prideful South and makes those of us who can view it only from the outside envious.
“Rebel” is a loaded term, too, particularly as it relates to the South, to America, to civil war and civil liberties. To Black, to white. Elizabeth Spencer is a rebel.
Now, Americans, we love us a good rebel, with a caveat, a rebel with an asterisk attached, so long as that rebel is for us, not against us. Us, that limited pronoun, meaning us white males, us exceptional Americans, us the literary establishment.
Elizabeth Spencer’s stories are not for us. I suspect they are for herself, a working out of the world around her, like painting the same still life over and over from different angles, no agenda, no embellishment, just an attempt to render the image a little more accurately. A little closer to the truth each time.
The truth can be damning. The girls who own the point of view in many of Spencer’s Southern stories are finding that out. They are “Daughters of the Confederacy,” daughters of “a different time,” markedly c
We meet one such child, Maybeth, in “The Little Brown Girl.” Similar to the daughter in “Sharon,” Maybeth lives on an old plantation ruled by a Mama and Daddy who don’t have much patience for her curiosity. Maybe the Black workers have more sympathy or maybe they don’t have the social standing to shoo her away; whatever the case, Maybeth finds an affinity with the adult Black help, in particular Jim Williams, who appears in her world only part of the year, to tend her father’s cotton. Between them they invent the idea of a little girl, an imaginary friend for the lonesome Maybeth, a daughter for the markedly solitary Jim, a whole person whose existence they can almost convince themselves to believe in.
Jim Williams might be a mythic Negro, but he is not a “magical” one. And in a different writer’s telling, Jim’s deception would be the object lesson, and Maybeth would be the white savior in training. Not so in Spencer’s stories. That touch of Southern gothic magic stirs up the ghost of the Little Brown Girl, standing like a shared thought between Maybeth and Jim. We understand Maybeth’s longing for a playmate, and even the inherited idea that she might buy herself a brown one. But this literally haunting narrative makes only the barest hint at why Jim yearns for the spirit of a little brown daughter.
Spencer may summon up a ghost, but after she lets the ghost’s very existence speak for itself. There’s a dark sorrow there that our narrator and our writer both know they can’t get at, and they both wisely take a step back from the stories that aren’t theirs to tell. Spencer’s strength lies in knowing what is hers: the rich dialect, the lush landscapes, and the stories of her youth made as real as she can render them, a goal that goes entirely against the sensibilities of that same upbringing. Elizabeth Spencer won’t be hushed, either.
Still, if Spencer is the titular Southern Woman, then the departure of her settings from her native Mississippi—to Europe, to Canada, to the North—make up a clear trajectory. Her South had rejected her and she went on to write the way exiles do: from other places, a distance which makes the heartbeat of home pulse even louder.
This is perhaps why Spencer’s most celebrated story, the one you’ve probably heard of, “The Light in the Piazza,” is not set in the South at all but in Italy. Certainly, on the face of it, this novella is her most palatable work—no Negroes here—so palatable in fact that it became a 1962 film and a 2003 Broadway musical. The film, with Olivia de Havilland as Margaret Johnson, a debutante outside her prime, is well cast. De Havilland, after all, was made famous for her role as Scarlett O’Hara’s bestie and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress (asterisk, she lost to Hattie McDaniel as Mammy).
On the page, Margaret Johnson might as well be the middle-aged version of Scarlett’s pal, or her 1950s descendant, anyway, and her mannerly witticisms about her three-month sojourn to work on her tan in postwar Italy could easily serve as the Southern Woman’s travel guide. But the heart of the novella is Margaret’s relationship with her adult daughter, who has “the mental age of a child of ten.”
This story is bold for its time, bold for any time, exploring the interiority of an older woman, who desperately protects her child and yet has a guilty yearning to be free of her. That Clara is an adult with special needs is handled with care. Spencer never makes fun of Clara, never makes her magical or beatific; in fact, much of Clara’s perceived limitations are told secondhand through her mother’s need to explain her. Margaret does so with the full breadth of her Winston-Salem–bred dignity, a compulsion that quickly comes undone in the space of one Italian summer, so that “The Light” refers to the new way in which Margaret might see her daughter, removed from American definitions of capability, of pride, of success.
What the adaptation leaves behind on the page, and what has been hushed in Spencer’s work time and time again, is this key criticism of the homeland. Margaret has to be away from America to gain this new perspective, remove herself from her deep roots and from the capitalist sensibilities for which her absent husband, Noel, is the perfect stand in. He gave up on Clara long ago. In the midst of the “communist scare,” his “every experience found immediate reference in his business.” And “When,” Margaret wonders, “had money come to seem to him the very walls that keep out the storm?”
“I’m going to do it.” Margaret sees the light. “Without Noel.”
When Spencer returns to the Americas, she is older, wiser, and she inhabits older, wiser characters. Her later works continue to pick at the established seams of female identity, and even Up North, and elsewhere, that Southern magic is the scalpel. In a master class of spare storytelling, “Owl” tells of a wife disappointed that the appearance of an ominous bird is not a foretelling of her husband’s untimely death after all. In “I, Maureen” a similar spousal near-death experience leads to a breathtakingly honest rendering of mental illness and a pyrrhic victory with echoes of Medea.
As Maureen tells it, “I could have been a witch, an evil spirit.”
Her estranged husband rails, “I don’t know why you ever had to turn into a spirit at all! Just a woman, a wife, a mother, a human being—! That’s all I ever wanted.”
“Believe me,” says Maureen, “I don’t know either.”
The beauty and the brutality in Spencer’s stories is precisely this: You can’t know where she means to take you. It is almost as if she doesn’t know where she means to take herself, as though she pushes forth, and pushes forth and arrives at the truth quite as stunned about it as you are.
There is the sense of walking in on someone at their most vulnerable, naked. The shock is not in the nudity but in the fact that they don’t immediately grab a towel, it is in the way they refuse to be ashamed. So here we are, Spencer seems to shrug and say in her stories, you might as well go ahead and get an eyeful.
* * *
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Afia Atakora is the author of Conjure Women, a Southern gothic novel exploring the lives of emancipated slaves in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she was the recipient of the De Alba Fellowship. Atakora was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Jersey, where she now lives.
THE SOUTH
THE LITTLE BROWN GIRL
Maybeth’s father had a business in the town, which was about a mile from where they lived, but he had about forty acres of land below the house that he planted in cotton and corn. The land was down the hill from the house and it was on two levels of ground: twenty acres, then a bluff covered with oak sprouts and vines, then a lower level, which stretched to the property line at the small creek. You could see it all from the house—the two fields and the creek, and other fields beyond the creek—but from the upper field you could just see as far as the willows along the creek bank.
For nine months of the year, Maybeth’s father hired a Negro named Jim Williams to make the crop. Jim would work uptown in the mornings and come in the afternoons around two o’clock—a black, strapping Negro in blue overalls, stepping light and free and powerful on the road from town. He would go around the house to the back to hitch up the black mule in spring, or file on the hoe blade in summer, or drag a great dirty-white cotton sack to the field in the fall. Spring, summer, and fall they saw him come, until he became as much a part of the household as Maybeth or Brother or Lester Junior or Snookums, the cook; then, after the last pound of cotton was weighed in the cold fall twilight, the Jim they knew would vanish. In winter, they sometimes spoke to a town Negro as Jim, and he would answer back, pleasant as you please, but it was no use pretending he was the same. The cotton stalks stood black and sodden in the field, and the cornstalks broke from the top, and there was nothing for a little girl to do in the afternoons but grow all hot and stuffy by the fire or pester Mother for things to eat or study schoolbooks sometimes. There wasn’t anybody much to play with out where they lived.
