When short stories work, it’s not in the way of miniaturized novels. They follow a different logic, setting in motion more open-ended explorations of the mind. Often, what results is not a concrete conclusion so much as a broader reconsideration of a specific feeling or idea.
At least that is the case in this collection of short stories by James Alan McPherson. A man is embarrassed by the rough life of his cousin. A barber struggles to adjust to a changing marketplace. A naïve woman displays unexpected cunning to beat a drunken-driving charge.
McPherson’s stories center around problems of social isolation. Sometimes they are told in ways that suggest an unreliable narrator at work. Often, there is an aspect in dealings with others that smacks of outright rudeness. A woman in a doctor’s office is accosted by a stranger: “As a concerned person, and as your brother, I ask you, without meaning to offend, how did you get that scar on the side of your face?”
Elbow Room isn’t much remembered today, which is strange. It’s never been out of print. When this book won McPherson the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979, it was kind of a big deal, marking the first time a Black author ever won such a thing. Not knowing about McPherson, you might have reasonably guessed James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, or Maya Angelou. But no. It was him.
Even more remarkable than what happened to McPherson’s career after this: Nothing. He wrote some non-fiction, including his memoirs. But he only ever published this and an earlier collection of short fiction, Hue And Cry. If he ever wrote a novel, it never saw the light of day.
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| Author James Alan McPherson. In later life he was an essayist and instructor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "You can't teach so much as give people access to each other," he was quoted about his career. Image from https://lithub.com/in-honor-of-a-great-mentor-james-alan-mcpherson/ |
That’s a shame; I expect I would have enjoyed it. Elbow Room is a fine collection of offbeat, elliptical tales, told with much warmth and humor and occasional creative obscurity. They suggest McPherson with a little more output might have earned a place in American fiction alongside names like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, recording the experiences of those living on the margins of life.
Like them, his characters are often somehow warped. Unlike them, he could really bring the funny when he wanted to.
You must know that in those days older folks would point to someone and say, “He’s from the North,” and the statement would be sufficient in itself. Mothers made their children behave by advising that, if they led exemplary lives and attended church regularly, when they died they would go to New York.
That’s from the first story in the collection, “Why I Like Country Music.” It’s a gentle first-person recollection about a first crush as experienced in the Jim Crow South, though that is like saying James Joyce’s “Araby” is about growing up in British-occupied Dublin.
As with “Araby,” the focus is on a memory of a girl the narrator obsessed over while growing up. “Even when I can’t remember her face, I remember the rainbow of deep, rich colors in which she lived,” he explains. “This is so because I watched them, every weekday, from my desk directly behind hers in our fourth-grade class.”
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| In "Why I Like Country Music," the classroom is dominated by its teacher, Mrs. Boswell. "Now I know your mamas already made you think life is a bed of roses, but in my classroom you got to know the footpaths through the sticky parts of the rosebed." Image from https://cptv.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/iml04.soc.ush.civil.scschools/segregated-schooling-in-south-carolina/ |
The social constructs of the Deep South do play a role. Because this segregated school adheres to the same rituals as the white schools do, the narrator winds up finding himself roped into a square dance with magical Gweneth Lawson. This inculcates a lifelong affection for a genre of music most people don’t expect him to like, including his wife, a woman of the North who isn’t Gweneth.
That sense of dislocation is present if muted in “Why I Like Country Music.” It shows up more actively in the other stories here.
In “The Story Of A Dead Man,” a one-eyed cousin re-enters the narrator’s life to shock him with stories of a misspent life. The gentler humor of “Country Music” is replaced by something more ribald and vaguely threatening. Billy Renfro, we are told, “listened only to the beating of his own heart,” but in telling his story the narrator seems at pains to point out he didn’t push the guy away, even if Billy did cause him some embarrassment with the in-laws.
The insistence of the narrator becomes a subtheme, as amusing as anything Renfro himself does. In fact, there is evidence the father-in-law actually enjoys Billy in a way the uptight narrator doesn’t quite appreciate. Maybe I’m just reading into that:
But it is certainly true that I tried hard to save the situation, although Billy has maintained that I turned on him. The man is a notorious liar, and likes to keep the family jumpy.
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| In "The Silver Bullet," the narrator looks on while a community activist attempts to shake down a city bar. "As of this minute, I declare this joint nationalized. Every dollar come in here, the community get back twenty-five cents, less three cents for tax... You can play ball or close down now." Image from https://www.wineenthusiast.com/culture/black-america-cocktail-culture/ |
The marginalized nature of McPherson’s characters is expressed often, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically, often both at once. The best story in that regard, and maybe the most accessible, too, is “The Faithful.” Here, a neighborhood barber and minister finds both his concerns have fallen victim to changing times. He is unbending.
The story concerns the decline of faith and tradition in a sympathetic yet withering portrait of an outcast whose disassociation came not from self-separation, but from holding on too long to what no longer works.
He’s adamant the fault is not his own: “Now, me I’m as proud as the next man. But our boys didn’t stop gettin’ haircuts until these white boys started that mess. That’s a fact. Wasn’t no more than a couple years ago, they’d be lined up against that wall on a Saturday night, laughin’ at the white boys. But as soon as they see these white kids runnin’ round wild, all at once they hair ain’t long enough no more.”
The more things change, the more adamant he becomes. Finally, his principles get the better of him when a wide-afroed boy comes in with a fatal request for just a little off the top.
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| In "The Faithful," a traditional mindset clashes with a culture of ever-changing ways. John Butler, the reverend who runs the shop, is teased: "A heavy hand makes for a rusty register, don't it?" But Reverend Butler refuses to take the hint. Image from https://www.therichbarber.com/blogs/news/down-to-the-roots-the-history-and-tradition-of-the-black-barbershop |
Even when more overt comedy is on the agenda, alienation is never far behind. “I Am An American” features an Atlanta man whose attempts at being helpful while visiting London continually hit barriers of culture, language, and understanding. Every interaction is rife with hazard:
About a score of people, mostly Americans, were seated at the cloth-covered tables. We could tell they were Americans by the way they avoided eye contact.
When he spots someone stealing luggage from Japanese tourists, you know along with his wife that he’s better off just leaving well enough alone. But the man can’t help himself.
The lighter stories are a true pleasure. More arresting are others that probe the human condition from prisms of race and social standing.
“A Loaf Of Bread” spotlights a Jewish merchant exposed on a TV show for charging higher prices in a black community than at his other stores in whiter areas. His point of view is clearly expressed: it costs more to operate some stores than others; why shouldn’t he make a profit?
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| Is race the reason for higher prices? Community leader Nelson Reeds asks the question in "A Loaf Of Bread." "All I know is over at your place a can of soup costs me fifty-five cents, and two miles away at your other store for white folks you chargin' thirty-nine cents." Image from https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/g35319597/vintage-photos-of-grocery-stores-through-the-years/ |
Both the store owner and the lead agitator are presented as decent, fallible, self-questioning, but stubborn. Their wives hold less rigid views. This intermeshing of personal and economic concerns is limned by McPherson’s satiric lens, like when he depicts a rally where the neighborhood activists sit in the front row:
The
middle rows were occupied by a few people from the suburbs… whose outrage at
the grocer proved much more powerful than their fear of black people. In the
rear… crowded aging, old-style leftists, somber students, cynical young black
men with angry grudges to explain with inarticulate gestures. Leaning against
the walls, huddled near the doors at the rear, tape-recorder-bearing social
scientists looked as detached and serene as bookies at the track.
Race is also a central concern in the title story, “Elbow Room.” A mixed-race couple are observed and commented on by a narrator who seems to disapprove of the man’s whiteness. Or maybe he wants the woman for himself. As before, the issue of an unreliable narrator is in the mix. This is actually spelled out in the first sentence, “Narrator is unmanageable,” which appears to be a note from a creative-writing instructor. Other comments from this unseen third party pop up throughout the shifting, rambling narrative.
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| A couple walk together in San Francisco in "Elbow Room." While she is hopeful, he sees only despair and loss around him. "Along the avenues, on the sidewalk, paralleling the beach, we strolled aimlessly and in silence. The people we saw seemed resigned, anomic, vaguely haunted by lackluster ghosts." Image from https://www.opensfhistory.org/osfhcrucible/2022/07/31/streetwise-fading-downtown-memories/ |
“Elbow Room” suffers from overt obfuscation; a sense McPherson’s more comfortable asking questions than drawing conclusions. It was not a condition unique to him among major 20th-century authors. A technique of playful experimentation keeps his stories engaging if not always grounded. He puts racial attitudes on the spot, less to pick sides than observe parallels.
In another story, “Widows And Orphans,” a North Carolina man looks back ruefully on the regional differences that defined a failed romance with a Los Angeles woman:
He told Clair that Watts reminded him of a Southern town dressed up in cement and neon and street lights. Instead of red-necks on the inside keeping watch, the residents had television and police helicopters to remind them of who maintained the status quo.
The dozen stories in this collection take the reader to a lot of places in relatively short order. They are inventive, arresting, utterly individual from one another. Few novels work as well setting moods and creating authentic environments as the best of the stories here. So maybe McPherson found in short fiction a genre that suited him better.
McPherson’s
lack of further fictional output probably did more to limit appreciation of him
than his unwillingness to be pigeonholed by racial concerns. Whatever the
reason, you feel a sense of loss reading Elbow Room that he didn’t
emerge the way he seemed destined to. But the craft of the writing, and the
pleasure of the reading, help dismiss any lingering disappointment. What we got
is more than satisfactory.
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