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- The Darkest Child Delores Phillips
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Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money.
But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?
But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?
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The Darkest Child Delores Phillips
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THE DARKEST CHILD
By Delores Phillips.
The Darkest Child Free Download 2017
387 pp. New York:
Soho Press. $26.
IN the fall of 1996, Jerry Leath Mills published an essay in The Southern Literary Journal asserting that the sole characteristic linking all Southern literature -- the signifier, in academic parlance -- was a dead mule.
There is no dead mule in 'The Darkest Child,' the first novel from a Cleveland-based psychiatric nurse named Delores Phillips, but the black coming-of-age novel of the South has its own array of pernicious archetypes. In the story of one Tangy Mae Quinn -- a 13-year-old bookworm at the darker end of her mother's band of multihued offspring -- an entire ragged crew is assembled as if from Deep-Fried Central Casting. Apart from the precocious narrator herself, there's Rozelle, the light-skinned, brutal slattern of a mother; Zadie, the stooped, snuff-chewing midwife; Hambone, the soapbox-ready revolutionary upstart; Junior, the wandering, enigmatic mystic; and assorted white thugs (in mob form and otherwise). Because 'The Darkest Child' is the story of a young black girl's coming-of-age in adverse circumstances, even the title does not escape a rhythmic nod to its spiritual progenitors, 'The Bluest Eye,' by Toni Morrison, and 'The Color Purple,' by Alice Walker.
We first meet Tangy Mae in the late 1950's, on the cusp of the civil rights movement. The great question of the novel is how, as a penniless black girl in backwoods Pakersfield, Ga., strong-minded Tangy Mae can escape the life of prostitution that has swallowed her mother and her older sisters Tarabelle and Mushy, whom Rozelle introduced to the oldest profession. Lying on a pallet on the floor of her shack, rain dripping through the rotted roof into an assortment of tinware, Tangy Mae imagines she's found the solution: a merger with her light-skinned, deaf-mute sister Martha Jean: 'We would blend together, and my thick nose would become thin; my coarse, tangled hair would become silky and straight, and I would have deep dimples in my cheeks,' Tangy says. 'And, in turn, Martha Jean would be able to hear and speak. We would come rushing from the womb fused together, yelling at the top of our lungs, and no one would know that there were two of us. We would be smart, beautiful, and white, and Mama would love us with all of her heart.'
Such high-flown speech is the rule rather than the exception with Tangy Mae; Phillips is so eager to establish that her narrator, as Junior awkwardly avows, devours knowledge 'like a buzzard on a corpse,' that Tangy Mae, an otherwise likable character, is forced to wield purple diction to alternately tendentious and semi-humorous effect. Her family's house 'groaned under the weight of celebrations and sorrows and did not crumble,' Tangy Mae intones magisterially at the start of the novel. Describing Tarabelle as having the eyes of 'a dead poker player,' Tangy Mae elucidates, 'I had never seen the eyes of a dead person -- in fact, I had never seen a poker game -- but I had heard that poker faces were expressionless, and I knew that dead people showed no emotion.' Loud exterior knocking at their shack becomes 'an object striking rapidly against wood,' while her sister Laura's nighttime incontinence means she tends to 'routinely ammoniate' Tangy Mae. By the time our narrator, in the space of four pages, has put forth both 'loquacious' and 'chatoyant,' her internal monologue resembles nothing so much as the notes of a high school junior studying furiously for her SAT's.
This faux-Dickensian prose is at its worst when it should be sharpest: during the scenes of Tangy Mae's family crises. When Martha Jean's boyfriend looks helplessly at her after she has been beaten, Tangy Mae reveals that the 'wretched sob that escaped him echoed my own anguish.' And after Tarabelle reveals to Tangy Mae that their friendly neighbor, Miss Pearl, is in fact the friendly neighborhood abortionist, Tangy Mae, metaphorically unsavory in the extreme, is appalled that 'people passed, spoke and waved with no idea that innocence had sloughed from my body and lay in a heap at my feet.'
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During the scenes that establish the tyrannical hold that Rozelle maintains on her unhappy family, Phillips's prose takes a hard left at 'realism' and plunges straight toward unintentional satire. 'Something in her tone jarred me and awakened my hibernating foresight,' Tangy Mae says as Rozelle warms up to a typical act of ferocity. 'I saw . . . Mama dance across the floor at a side angle. . . . The belt snapped, then struck and seemed to wrap around my head like a tourniquet.' Lost in the image of an antic, asymmetrical Rozelle -- whose belt can somehow crack into a complicated bow -- the reader quite forgets about Tangy Mae and her predicament. A similar disconnect occurs when Rozelle hurls her newborn, Judy, over the porch: 'Mama, staring blankly into space, opened her hand and released Judy,' Tangy Mae tells us. 'I saw my baby sister sail through the air, flipping and jerking, as she began a descent that took her over the rocky incline and down into the gully.' One imagines it's difficult to capture eloquently the horrors of a baby being thrown out with the bath water, but that's probably why most first-time authors don't attempt it.
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If Tangy Mae's voice smacks of a Dickensian urchin, the voices of those surrounding her stray from a faithful rendering to a parody of Southern speech. In a typical example, Tangy Mae's father, Crow, is incredulous at how little his daughter knows about him. 'Rozelle never tol' you nothing 'bout me. Never tol' you how I used to sit for hours just holding you and looking down at yo' face,' Crow says. 'It's been some years, but y'all oughta remember me. Who yo' mama got you thinking yo' Daddy is?' In that long stretch of cutoffs and elisions, why do 'nothing' and 'looking' escape the knife -- and why is an 'oughta' next to the cleanly bared 'used to'? Phillips's awkward renderings of accent and erudition make it difficult to concentrate both on the characters and the story.
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What little of it we have not read before, that is. 'With a cup of water, Pakersfield soil can swallow itself and make a puddle,' Tangy Mae tells us towards the middle of the story. 'During an all-day rain, it swallowed my mother's car.' Like the hungry mud of Pakersfield, hokey dialogue, settings and characters have swallowed up the clean lines of Phillips's story. These are ruts, not roots. Let's hope that in her next work, Phillips clears her own path.