Trouble No More Anthony Grooms Kennesaw State University, [email protected]
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Kennesaw State University DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University Faculty Publications 1-2006 Trouble No More Anthony Grooms Kennesaw State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/facpubs Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Grooms, Anthony. Trouble No More. Kennesaw GA: Kennesaw State Univ Pr, 2006. Print. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Anthony Grooms’s first collection of stories takes place mostly in the South of the 1960s, a time when the “colored” sign at a fast-food restaurant may have been removed, but “still people knew which line was which.” And the talk that animates these vignettes—from lunch counters to juke joints to family dinner tables—is an affecting reminder of the quiet courage, ingrained wariness, and rueful humor with which such individual decisions reshaped an uncertain community. —Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review These stories all take risks by going into virtually unexplored corners of race relations at a time when critics have declared the subject mined out… Grooms’s stories take us to the center of the phenomenon with an honesty and courage long overdue. —Phil Garner, Atlanta Journal and Constitution It is to Grooms’s credit that he has demonstrated in this collection the insider’s profound knowledge of the history and the struggles of African Americans, while consistently managing to circumscribe his breadth of understanding with a tender story-telling art. —Diptiranjan Pattanaik, MELUS Review … [A] first-rate collection of short stories that reveals a writer who feels deeply and who speaks openly about what most people are afraid to admit even to themselves. Anthony Grooms’s vision is a solid one, and his passion appears in acute glass-sharp details that carry an honest emotional impact. —Keith Hunter, First Draft: Newsletter of the Alabama Writers’ Forum 2 The Georgia 2005 Top 25 Reading List The Georgia Top 25 Reading List is a project of the Georgia Center for the Book. The list is made up of books set in Georgia or written by a resident or former resident of the state. The list was chosen by the public and members of the Center’s advisory council. The purpose of the Top 25 list is to promote reading and discussion and to enhance public appreciation of Georgia’s rich literary traditions. The Lillian Smith Book Award The Lillian Smith Book Award recognizes authors whose fiction and non-fiction writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator, and social critic who challenged her fellow southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. The Lillian Smith Book Award is the South’s oldest literary honor. 3 Trouble No More Third Edition Anthony Grooms This edition does not contain critical commentary. For the Third Edition with Critical Commentary go to Amazon.com 4 Copyright © 2015 Anthony Grooms All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without prior written consent of the author. Octopoda/Writers of Conscious Press Atlanta, GA D. Melamed, Head In cooperation with Plaid Hat Books, Atlanta GA Diana Plattner, Production editor and Kennesaw State University Press, Kennesaw, GA Holly S. Miller, Designer Cathleen Salsburg-Pfund, Editor and LaQuesta Press Woodside, CA Kate Abbe, Publisher Hilary Mosberg, Cover illustration Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grooms, Anthony. Trouble no more / Anthony Grooms.— 2nd ed. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-933483-05-4 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS3557.R562T76 2006 813’.54—dc22 2005032084 ISBN-10 1-933483-05-9 ISBN-13 978-1-933483-05-4 Originally published by La Questa Press Copyright © 1995 Anthony Grooms Second edition published by Kennesaw State University Press Copyright © 2006 Anthony Grooms 5 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications for permission to reprint previously published stories: “Uncle Beasley’s Courtship”: African American Review, “Sweet Milton”: George Washington Review, “The Lighthouse”: The Blue Plate Special, “How I Got My Person Politics” first appeared as “Mary’s Awful Wig”: Catalyst, “Negro Progress”: Callaloo. “Trouble No More” written by Muddy Waters, © 1955, 1983, Watertoons Music (BMI)/Administered by BUG. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 6 To Robert Earl and Dellaphine Grooms and Shannon and Mellinee Jackson: Yours was the generation of the great and little struggles. Special thanks to my wife, Pamela Jackson, and to my friend, J. D. Scott, for their encouragement; and to Kate Abbe and Susan Graham for their hard work and faith. 7 Someday, Baby! Ain’t no trouble for me anymore Trouble no more! —Muddy Waters 8 Contents Foreword 10 Preface 17 Acknowledgments 22 Uncle Beasley’s Courtship 23 Negro Progress 30 Hollow and Far Away 41 Food That Pleases, Food to Take Home 48 How I Got My Personal Politics 54 The Lighthouse 59 Sweet Milton 64 The Bottoms 68 Flora Devine 74 Jack ‘n’ Jill 81 Old Lee Brown 87 Rocket 88 97 Author’s Biography 104 9 Foreword The stories of Trouble No More serve us a bitter-tasting portion of human history. We wonder how we can stomach such behavior, how we can forgive. Poet and novelist Anthony Grooms does both with humor, love, poignancy, and bright honesty. His characters talk about the unfairness, the yearning, if not to be white, then, to enjoy the life perceived as the white life with its advertised ease and wealth, glamour and beauty. Fiction, Grooms says, is not for the mechanics of working out these frictions, but for exploring reconciliation and redemption through stories of “ordinary people in ordinary language.”1 The title and the epigraph of Trouble No More come from a song by Muddy Waters. Although both the book and the song promise a future without trouble, Waters’s lyrics suggest that such a time is “Someday, Someday baby.” The blues song about a man and a woman and their trouble with love concludes, “Someday baby, you ain’t gonna trouble poor me, anymore.”2 The twelve stories of Trouble No More are primarily about love and not-love between the races; love between men and women is secondary. Trouble No More tells us a good bit about the past that someday will be forgotten, a past that shows evidence of the strife, hatred, blatant unfairness, or fear that makes white humans act like numb, unthinking beasts.3 There’s no Uncle-Tomming by the black characters, no altruism by the white characters. The black characters speak their minds and we hear their thoughts, hear how the black world of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s suffers what W. E. B. DuBois a century ago eloquently called the “Veil of Two-ness.” These stories are about families, most of them intact, a few estranged, husbands and wives, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews, cousins. And it is clear that whether blessing or curse, family is what one has, constant and inescapable. Family has to be lived with, regardless of government policies or white reactions. The stories take place in small towns and rural areas outside Charlottesville and Richmond or in Birmingham or Georgia. The cultural and historical settings root the stories to the particular catalysts for the conflicts being represented, but the actions could take place anywhere in the Jim Crow South, as we know they did. The stories thus provide the opportunity to learn history: Bull Connor’s fire hoses and attack dogs in Birmingham, the four girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the disappearance and murder of Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew Goodman who were working for Civil Rights, the Ku Klux Klan night raids, the ever-present, abnormal fear of trouble. We read of the drinking culture well illustrated by white fiction writers John Cheever and John Updike, of the “colored act” on The Ed Sullivan Show, of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, James Brown, Diana Ross and the Supremes, of the stars and bars of the Confederate flag, and of nuclear power plants and their recreational lakes.4 Throughout the stories, the popular culture of the 1960s illustrates the ordinariness of the lives of the characters in such extraordinary times. Humor. Honesty. Heart. These we find in Trouble No More. The contexts are the personal and public troubles of middle-class blacks of the American South from Virginia to Alabama (where Grooms’s wife grew up) in an era inscribed in our national consciences with iconic images of burning crosses, white hoods, “Colored Entrance” signs, and a few blacks entering foreboding white schoolhouses. Grooms is a poet, not only by virtue of Ice Poems (1988), but also because he believes in the absolute power of language. As a poet, Grooms knows the efficacy of “trouble.” Trouble No More reads as interconnected stories, “inter-related but not inter-dependent,”5 as Eudora Welty described her Golden Apples. Although Grooms’s stories are not as “inter-related” as those of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and do not deal with a single constellation of families and citizens as Welty’s Morgana, Mississippi, stories do, Grooms’s stories nonetheless create a state of mind, and that place is Fear. Rural and urban, laborer and professional, uncles and sons, husbands and wives, sheriffs, teachers, and truck drivers, Grooms’s characters are in trouble.