Archive for the Scarlet Sister Mary Category

Scarlet Sister Mary: A chat

Posted in Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary with tags , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2009 by Diablevert

Diablevert: So, Scarlet sister Mary. I’m flipping through the old reviews I downloaded a while back to see if there’s one in there for this book – i can’t remember

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I sent my copy back to the library all ready, so this is off-the-cuff and unscripted for me. (No holds barred!)

Diablevert: Me too.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Can I say that I liked the book better when I read somewhere that it was an inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston? Like, before I knew that, it just seemed like a racist time capsule (which it still kinda is) but seeing it as part of an evolutionary step in a literary movement made it easier for me to look at it as a piece of writing.

Diablevert: Sure, you can say that. Where did you read that?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Ashamedly, wikipedia…. Julia Peterkin’s page.

Diablevert: I found it quite odd to read this book because of the racism, like …..as if you thought something was real life, and then as you lean in closer, you bonk your nose on a pane of glass and realize it’s just a diorama, like at the natural history museum…. Like, you’d want to enjoy it, but then some line would come up about how much they shure do loves pickin’ that cotton, and you’re like, oh, wait. Maybe this purported bucolic idly is all wrong…

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: The shock of hitting a wall is a good metaphor here. I just couldn’t deal with the whole “see! they love hard labor! they were made for it!” angle. It feels tedious and disingenuous to continually be surprised by the racism in these early winners… and yet. It’s so pervasive. It reminds me of the way I felt when I started weeding my library at school… ….there were tons of books about “negros in america” bought in the 50s and 60s that were probably pretty progressive for the time, but the fact that they were still sitting on the shelves in 2005 was really offensive to me.

Diablevert: Did you not want to keep them in a box in the back, just for the history?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Oh, totally… I have a great shelf of shame. Some of the books were fine books, really (Famous American Negroes by Langston Hughes, for example), but just completely beyond my cultural comfort level to present to middle school kids.

Diablevert: I can see where that would be difficult. But maybe interesting. It’s hard for kids – anyone, really – to even conceive of how life was different before they were alive; it all seems like a story, a fable. Once upon a time there was such a thing as seperate water fountains…but it’s hard to feel how that must have been, in a way, to feel not the emotional impact but the reality of it. Contemporary books can kind of do that… But bringing it back to Peterkin, it’s weird because I felt like in and of its time, it’s attitude was almost anthropological….she includes all these scenes of ritual, all these lists of flora and fauna, habits, customs, all minutely described. There were some scene that felt more like an excuse to show you this stuff, that didn’t advance the plot much….lots of scenes like that, actually – but it didn’t feel judgy. It’s kind of funny, with a lot of the other authors we’ve both complained about them being snobbish toward the characters, looking down on them – but it feels like Peterkin quite likes these people, enjoys their company

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I agree about the anthropological angle… I wonder if that had a certain appeal to the prize committee, also. And I don’t think Peterkin is snobbish, either. Racist, sure, but not snobbish about it. (Can there be such a thing or is that ridiculous cognitive dissonance?) She’s got a great deal of affection for Mary (in a “oh that crazy kid” roll-the-eyes way.)

Diablevert: I think so, definitely. You can have it so ingrained in you that someone is inferior you don’t even question it, realize that you think that, at the same time as you like them. Like fag hags in the ’60s. Or a lot of the 20s writers mention gay people in passing, in that way, not with hatred, sometimes with enjoyment, but always with the presumption of aberration, inferiority. Did your book about the prizes say anything about it? Why they gave this one to her?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Oooh, I’m not caught up in that book, actually. I should revisit it. From the Wikipedia article, there was some scandal here… … that a committee member resigned over its selection. “Dr. Richard S. Burton, the chairperson of Pulitzer’s fiction-literature jury, recommended that the first prize go to the novel Victim and Victor by Dr.John B. Oliver. His nomination was superseded by the School of Journalism’s choice of Peterkin’s book. Evidently in protest, Burton resigned from the jury.” And it was banned as obscene in South Carolina.

Diablevert: Really? Oooh, juicy.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Yep. This is a hot one.

Diablevert: It did feel like that ending was tacked on tail-on-the-donkey style.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: You mean when the long lost cad returned? Yeah.

Diablevert: Not only that, but more her son dying and then her repenting.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Oh yeah.

Diablevert: Even after she repents, she keeps her earrings and voodoo charm…..it feels almost like the author’s a little disappointed too, to think of her resigned to celibacy. Like Peterkin felt she had to end the book with some kind of moral condemnation for Mary’s sleeping around, but it’s kind of half-hearted. Might as well not have bothered if she got banned anyway.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I think you can extend that idea of cute-ing up prejudice to include women who have sex with lots of people, or in anyway freely. It’s hard to override the cultural taboos against promiscuity in women. Or, as a 7th-grade girl once asked me, “Why are some girls hoes?”

Diablevert: I dunno, that’s real tricky. I’m not sure whether I think that Peterkin was secretly sympathetic with Mary in that sense, like the voodoo man – “Oh, go on, who’s she hurting, really?” – or whether it’s only because Mary’s black that she feels this way, like, shake-head-roll-eyes-amused-moue, “Oh, those hot-blooded oversexed Negroes! Can’t expect better!” What do you think?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Hmmm. I guess this is a place where knowing something about Peterkin’s biography would be helpful. I think she writes about Mary with genuine (if wry and condescending) affection. She certainly infers that promiscuity was something Mary was driven into by her caddish man (whose name completely escapes me now… wait! July?) and not at all a cultural norm of the community.

Diablevert: Generally so, yes. Although I think it’s more a baseline racism that a particular condescenion toward the character.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It’s the classic double stereotyping whammy: is it racist or sexist? Or a heady brew of both?

Diablevert: But she likes her, you know? Mary is driven into sleeping around, but Peterkin portarys her as heartbroken over July’s betrayal, and shows her deciding to knock boots with his brother as something that’s life-affirming, brings her back to her old self. Like, she seems to pity her more when she was being a good wife, getting beat up and slept around on, then when she decides fuck it, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Mary breaks the norms of her community but on some level Peterkin seems to be cheerleading for her to do so.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It’s an interesting book from a religious angle too. The church customs are described in a pretty anthropological way, and the church is didactic and autocratic throughout. (While also being extremely hypocritical… tossing out Buddha Ben on multiple occasions, that kind of thing.)

Diablevert: Word. But they take her back in the end…. and yet, for all the strictness of who’s in and who’s out, it also serves as a social occasion, even for the sinners…

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It was pretty much the only entertainment they had (except for work and that wedding).

Diablevert: Well, and drinking and gambling and sex and music.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Well, the drinking, etc., was all for the people who got the cheap seats on Sundays.

Diablevert: It’s never quite clear whether the larger crowd was outside or inside the church.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: That’s true…. they kept kicking so many people out that it had to be a small congregation some weeks. Oh, and there was the total fun of whitewashing everything and cutting out newspaper fringe to decorate shelves with (that totally blew my mind).

Diablevert: That was really interesting! I felt like that level of anthropological interest was the book’s biggest strength – those details were fascinating. You got this impression of such a peaceful, calm place, all these little niceties….and then something reminds you how biased it is, and the copious detail begins to seem less realistic. But yet I felt that shit was probably accurate….you got such an intense ground level feeling for what it was like to live in this place…digging sweet potatoes out of banked ashes for breakfast….

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It’s more interesting as a historical document than as a piece of literature, I think. I mean, the characterization is pretty shallow, the themes are heavy-handed… it’s all about the setting, the backdrop, the ways of life.

Diablevert: Yet, I dunno, I don’t feel like it was badly written….the detail was good and judicious.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: But I think there were more character types than characters.

Diablevert: I guess I’m just a sucker for good detail. Is there anything else about the book that stuck out to you?

Ms.Dreadfulpenny: Thinking… … not really. The dialect overwhelmed the rest of the experience for me in a lot of ways.

Diablevert: True. So, an anthropologically interesting, shallow, somewhat idealized book with maybe/possibly progressive views on women’s sexuality: Scarlet Sister Mary. Oh: Plus, it’s really racist.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I’m nervous that we’re entering the “softer, gentler, but still fucked up” years of early Pulitzers with the next selection.

Diablevert: What is the next one again?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Laughing Boy (or, the Navajo book) That sums it up for me.

Diablevert: Ah. Oddly, that book came up in something I was reading recently – maybe Louis Menard about writing workshops? – as having been criticized by a white Indian studies professor at the time as being too modernist to be properly Indian.

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Scarlet Sister Mary: Summary

Posted in Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary with tags , , , , , , on July 8, 2009 by Diablevert

Scarlet Sister Mary is a bit of an odd duck of a book, Margaret Mead in Margaret Mitchell’s clothing. Set on one of the coastal islands off the Carolinas, round about the 1920s or 30s, it depicts the life of a black village though the story of one of its inhabitants, the title character.

She starts out as just plain Mary, a skinny, lively, pretty 15-year-old, orphaned at a young age and taken in by Maum Hannah, a respectable widow whose only son is crippled. Mary’s in love with July, the handsome n’er do well that’s the despair of the island’s mothers and the idol of their daughters. Mary acquires the Sister when she’s accepted into the island rather strict evangelical sect, but she soon falls off the wagon when July reveals he’s crushing on her too, promising to marry her and marking her as his own by nicking her earlobe with a pocketknife. (Outraged Maum Hannah forces him to allow Mary to nick his own earlobe to make things even.) July seduces Mary and then leaves to look for work on the mainland — but, in a bit of a shocker, returns and keeps his promise to marry her.

The signs and portents are a bit doomish from the get-go, however: Hannah notices a certain shameful swelling as she helps Mary to dress for the wedding, causing a bit of a row; a mouse gets into the wedding cake, necessitating a bit of last minute frosting spackling, and when it comes time for the reception, one of the town’s looser women drags July outside to dance. Mary, however, is not about to be shown up at her own reception and gets a bit of her own back by engaging in a solo dance routine that raises quite a few eyebrows (Baptists are forbidden to dance; publicly flouting church proscriptions means she won’t be able to attend services).

The ominous foreshadowing of the wedding day soon bears fruit, with Mary and July growing rapidly apart after their son is born. July soon takes up with another woman and then takes off, abandoning Mary completely to keep up their small farm and raise their son alone. At first Mary sinks into a deep depression, spending months in a funk doing little but crying and praying for July’s return. But eventually, she begins to come out of her funk a bit….with the help of June, July’s twin brother.

This is where the Scarlet part comes in. Because the book skips forward here about twenty years, with Mary’s oldest children nearly grown….and lots of other children, from various boyfriends who may or may not chip in for their care, having come after them. This part of the book is a rapid unfolding of consequences, with Mary’s eldest daughter dropping out of school and bearing her own child out of wedlock, while her eldest son returns from having worked up North, barely making it to his mom’s door before he dies of pneumonia. The death of her first, only legitimate, and much-beloved son sends Mary into a prolonged fit of repentance, and she ends the book having said goodbye to her scandalous ways and returning to the church.

Such a description of the book’s plot might the island community depicted seem quite a conservative one. But it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. For instance there’s quite a large contingent of folk, members of the community in good standing, who drink and dance and smoke and sing therefore don’t go to church, though they do sometimes hang around outside during services to overhear the preaching. The attitude seems to be, “well, yes, everyone understands what the godly path here is, but that’s damn hard and you can’t expect everybody to stick to it all the time, for goodness’ sake.” And so there’s a bunch of islanders who go to church and obey its strictures, and a bunch who don’t, but little enmity between them.

Little enmity, but lots of gossip. When Mary first takes up her life of sin, it works out, frankly, pretty damn well for her for twenty years, and she’s pretty shameless about it, with the book spending several whole chapters explaining over and over her “hey, man, I got lemons, and I used this fine ass to make some lemonade, and had a fine ol’ time doing it, too” attitude toward her situation. The ending and her repentance almost seem tacked on to get the book past the censors rather than a well-deserved moral come-uppance the author’s handing out. Speaking of which, the plot as a whole is rather thin for such a long book; July makes a re-appearance toward the end, but his finally confrontation with Mary is a whimper of a thing, a tiff on a doorstep, not a dramatic climax.

Indeed, the thing seems more like an excuse for the writer to show us the culture and rituals of this unique place — she spends far more time explaining what kind of food you’d find at a wedding reception, or who sits where in church and why, or how you spruce up a one-room cabin when you’re dirt poor (everything you can’t whitewash you wrap in newspaper), or what they have for breakfast (sweet potatoes baked slowly in the banked ashes of the fire overnight) than exploring the inner motivations of her characters. Mary herself we get to know; we learn a little about Maum Hannah; but everyone else is a rice-paper sketch. This semi-anthropological approach seems to be born of a genuine love for the place; indeed, Peterkin comes close to making the island seem like an earthly paradise.

Which is actually kind of troubling, you know? Because if you step back a minute this is a book set among a black community in the Jim Crow south. A perhaps uniquely independent black community —- there’s barely a mention of white people in the book — but still one with, presumably, their fair share of troubles in real life. But all such darker themes are carefully expunged here — the characters are depicted, basically, as dirt-poor-and-loving-it. In dialect, also. All of which is to say, there are plenty of times in reading the book when the overt racism just slaps the modern reader upside the head, to the point where other passages—-passages that when you read them seem lovely, lyric, pastoral — in retrospect are troubling for their glib joy (“Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh”). But that seem a shade too unfair — for all the complexities of the relationship between the author and the characters she’s writing about — it seems too harsh, just as unfair the other way, to decide that her depiction of all the lovely things about this community which seems to fascinate her so must be false. So it’s a bit of an odd duck, and I’m not sure what I think about it, in the end.

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