The Store: Summary
As I liked this one better than my erstwhile partner, I feel guilty for neglecting poor Stribling. But on the other hand, my feeling that I ought to write something substantive has tempted me into delaying doing anything at all (….there’s a disturbing allegory there….) and meanwhile, I’ve left the summary to rot. So here it is in brief:
The Store, by T.S. Stribling, is the second book in a trilogy concerning the fate of the Vaiden family. It’s set in Florence, Alabama — a city Stribling knew well — in the 1880s, or in other words, the rise of Jim Crow and the aftermath of the Civil War.
This is a novel with a sizable cast and a few prominent players, but the main attraction is indisputably Miltiades Vaiden. Milt is Col. Milt, a former Confederate army officer, plantation overseer, and leader of the Klu Klux Klan. When we meet him, though, he’s hit a very tough patch: Headed into his late 40s, he’s married to a wife, Ponny, he isn’t attracted to and whom he thinks beneath him in class and understanding; they have no children, though Ponny desperately wants one. His family farm is barely making any profit, and has fallen into disrepair, and he himself is living in town in rented rooms, with nothing much but a pension to get by on.
It wasn’t always meant to be this way; before the war, he had ambitions of moving from plantation overseer to plantation owner, and was engaged to Drusilla, the beautiful daughter of one of the most prominent families in town. Drusilla ditched him at the alter (runs off with a dashing young officer named Crowninshield who’s killed in the war, leaving her with one daughter, Sydna). His marriage to Ponny was supposed to bring him enough scratch to get him back on his feet, but that all fell through when the store owner to whom he had sold his whole cotton crop, one J. Handback, declared bankruptcy without paying ol’ Milt. In the years that have passed since the Reconstruction, Handback has opened a new store and done well with it, and now owns many of poor farms surrounding the town, but Milt’s never recovered from the loss.
Milt’s desperate for one last chance to reverse his fortunes, and he seizes it when he runs into the aforementioned J. Handback, walking through town late one night, drunk as a lord and bragging about his mulatto mistress. Armed with blackmail ammo, Col. Milt demands a job from Handback. After a few months go by, Handback sends Milt to supervise the transport of 500 bales of cotton from his farms to storage so it can be shipped to New Orleans for sale — and that’s when Milt comes up with a scheme that will really let him get his own back, conceiving a clever plan that will allow him to nick Handback’s whole shipment, netting him about $25,000 — if word doesn’t leak before he gets the profit in his bank account.
While Milt schemes his way back to the good life, his young nephew, Jerry Vaiden, dreams his way though his last years of high school, mooning over Sydna and groping toward Nirvana with the help of a dusty library book on Bhuddist mysticism. To say that Stribling nails Jerry’s characterization is too blunt; he pins him, more like, as an entymolologist spikes and spreads a beetle on a corkboard, penetrating right to the heart of a certain type of too-sensitive adolescent, and displaying all his flaws to best advantage: Jerry’s self-obessesed (though unconscious of their self-obsession), inspired by high ideals — of valour, asceticism, self-sacrifice, romance — and utterly oblivious to the ways in which he fails to live up to them. His depiction of Jerry may be remorseless, but it is not unkind; you get the feeling there’s a fair bit of self-portrait in him. Jerry’s a bit of an outcast—attempting to adhere to the practices of Zen Bhuddism doesn’t win your too many friends in small-town Alabama in the 1880s, even if you do keep it on the down-low. But he preservers, strengthened by his belief in and yearning for a life beyond his current circumstances, and always hoping to be given an opportunity to prove his own goodness.
Stribling also follows the fortunes of one of the town’s black families, the mother-son pair of Gracie and Toussaint. Gracie is the beautiful mulatto mistress Handback couldn’t help bragging on; what’s more, she used to be a Vaiden family slave. Her son, Toussaint, is so pale he could pass for white — if he ever moved far enough away to be among people who didn’t know his family and his history, and that is Gracie’s dream for him.
I’ve realized in writing this much, I’ve barely sketched out the background to the actual plot, the central characters and the major event that sets all the others in motion. Seeing as it took my 750 words just to get that far, I’m going to Cliff notes the rest, with spoilers galore: Milt gets his money, gets caught, and then gets off, cash intact, but only because of a tragic technicality — sherrif’s men, sent at the behest of Handback to roust him from his house, frighten his wife so much she dies of a heart attack, and Handback’s afraid his suit for the profits on the cotton will be met by a counter-claim for wrongful death. With lots of other bills coming due, and creditors putting the squeeze on him again, Handback faces bankruptcy a second time — and kills himself.
Newly free and only half-mournful, Milt is blamed for both deaths and widely shunned by the townsfolk, all except for one, however — Sydna, the young daughter of his ex-flame, who remembers the tales of his battlefield valor and kindness to her family, and still idealizes him as a noble and fallen warrior. She is at first unconscious of the true depth of her affection — but her mother’s not. And when the Col. shows up at the Crowninshield door, his old dream of owning a big house and having a beautiful wife to grace it newly revived with the stolen money, Drusilla turns him down and then turns him lose on Sydna, who accepts him.
That tears up Jerry’s heart, of course, and he becomes a little meaner and more orney in his heart-brokeness. Meanwhile, Milt’s actions have also harmed Gracie and Toussaint — Gracie had helped Milt hide his cash asked her to, betraying her lover and revealing her true loyalties, to her own self-disappointment. Now that Handback’s out of the picture, she’s been forced to take up Milt’s offer of a place as a tenant on a newly-bought property of his. Locked away in the remote countryside, she loses all hope of herself or her son ever escaping Florence to a better life when Toussaint marries a young local school teacher.
Toussaint has never managed to attain the level of necessary self-abnegation to survive in the Jim Crown South, as will be proved when a conflict arises between him, a poor white sharecropper and Col. Milt over the use of some farm equipment. Toussaint decides to stand up for his rights, leading to the final tragedy of the book….to bring across the true flavor of the dramatix climax Stribling constructs, a mixture of fated doom and chance ill luck, of the accidental lack of information and deliberate, Peterine denials and failures to act, would take nearly as long as it does to read it; suffice it to say that it ends with three men hung from a tree in the village square, Jerry having unknowingly failed a great moral test, and Milt having lost one precious thing he never knew he had.
So that’s basically what happens in the book. Why should you care what happens in it? Stribling’s not the greatest stylist we’ve run into in this quest; a little dipping into his bio reveals that he spent years as a hack writer for the pulps before attempting more serious work, and it shows in spots. (Such as the end of chapters, which are nearly always cliff-hangers.) Some of the characters are thin, some coinciendences a bit contrived. I can’t say I’d tell you to read it for style.
Nah, I’m going to say that you should read this book for the thing I thought least promising about it when I picked it up: Its setting, post-reconstruction, pre-Jim Crow, small-town Alabama.
See, I think the reason I feared this place and people was that, have read a decade plus of other Pulitzer winners and noted their batting avergae, I was afraid it we’d get a ham-handed portrayal of race relations and small town tensions, or some Gone With the Wind-like paen to the gracious, glorious Old South. (Which is awaiting us quite soon.) A cuddly nostalgia-fest, or a red-faced moral jerimiad.
What you get instead is cold. Cold in the sense that Stribling knows this place, these people: The things they say, the things they think, the minor and the major hypocricies that get them through the day. In respect to this particular time and place, I’d say he’s got as keen an eye for the delusions people allow themselves as Flaubert. (Though he doesn’t, perhaps, take as much visceral joy from totting them down.)
But also cold in the sense that’s that’s how he serves up the characters to the reader: He presents their actions, their reasoning, and he gives them to you flat, with no real indication of where his own sympathies lie in respect to those actions. (I can think of a few spare, swift moments which are an exception to this, where he lets slip a sentence or two that suggests his judgement — Handback’s death scene is one.) This too, is different from most of the Pulitzers; Penny and I have complained copiously of the snideness, contemptuousness, even arrogance that many of the other authors display toward thier characters (Lewis and Tarkington spring to mind). Even with the better writers, it’s been clear who their favorites are: Cather is quite fond of Claude, and Ferber approves of Selina. Peterkin ain’t a great writer, but she is clearly delighted with Mary. Being able to step back and let the reader form their own judgement entirely is difficult, and I think many writers wouldn’t even attempt it. It’s also the cause in part, I think, of why Penny and I disagreed so strongly in the beginning about this book. I was inclined to favor Stribling more clearly from the first, while she was more doubtful of his intentions (especially in regard to whether he was commenting on racism or actually being racist). And that I think is an interesting affect to be able to achieve, and vitally necessary one for him to be able to do the thing he does so well in this book, which is tease out the web of moral conflicts and obligations that entangle every character in this town. The things that stick with me about The Store aren’t the big, dramatic climactic scenes. It’s the little ones, which skip across the surface of the plot: Milt returning to his old family home and learning that the child of a free slave is being taught to read by his sister, and has been named after him. Handback’s brief visceral repulsion at the thought of Toussaint leaving town and passing for white — at the same time as Toussaint’s mother, Gracie, is the love of his life, whose betrayal he cannot survive. Jerry, watching over the body of his aunt the night before her funeral, and harshly turning away a black man who begs for some part of the funeral feast, his honor insulted by having his knighltly vigil disrupted and his family’s grief intruded on—though he knows the same man had saved his uncle’s life the day before, and lost his job because of it. These things gave me a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to live in that time and place than I had heretofore ever know, the compromises people had to make with themselves and with the world, and for that I’ll always be grateful for having read The Store.
