No Marble Angels, and: The Dark Path to the River (review)

These two books, a collection of short stories and a novel, are in print again thanks to the good offices of the Authors Guild, which has developed a way through print-on-demand technology that "authors and their estates" may reissue in a quality paperback format "fiction and nonfiction works that were originally brought to the reading public by established United States publishers but have fallen out of print." The reappearance of these two well-regarded works by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is especially timely, each volume's in its own way. The collection No Marble Angels takes setting and time for most of its nine stories from southern cities at key moments in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s (e.g., Raleigh and Baltimore, 1968; Little Rock, 1956; Nashville, 1960). As the fortieth anniversaries of Martin Luther King's and Robert Kennedy's assassinations pass and an African American presidency has become a reality, recalling the turbulent early years of the struggle for civil rights helps to remind us simultaneously of how much progress has been made, and of how much more there needs to be. Though no African American female college student any longer need participate in a protest against lunch counter segregation, we need to be reminded of the tremendous psychological and physical cost of such activism to its participants, as one story here, "The Beginning of Violence," told from the point of view of a white Vanderbilt sorority girl who decides to write about a sit-in at a Nashville Woolworth's for the university paper, deftly accomplishes.

The stories, whether focused on race or not, are told from a great number of perspectives: from that of the white Vanderbilt sorority reporter to that of a fat African American seventh-grade boy (both first-person narratives), and from that of a disaffected fourteen-year-old small-town Texas farm girl to that of a retired Jewish accountant who is a widower in New Jersey. The first three stories in the collection, apparently the most autobiographical, explore the consciousness of a young privileged well-educated white North Carolina woman named Shannon Douglas. She has attended college in the Northeast and at the end of the title story returns there for graduate school at Columbia before moving to Baltimore, the location of the collection's second and third stories. In each of the three, Douglas attempts to understand, bridge, and ameliorate the differences between herself and less materially well off, discriminated-against groups and individuals such as an African American maid's family and an illiterate impoverished African American woman with fiercely angry, deeply conflicted children.

The collection's extraordinary variety of place, voice, and perspective, though handily managed in most instances, nevertheless ultimately left me with the feeling that I was reading an assemblage of experiments, of an author attempting to find a voice and a style of her own: at times we feel squarely in Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor territory (especially in the story "Sissy Mamma's Wig"), at others that of Anne Tyler (the Shannon Douglas stories) or of young John Updike or Philip Roth ("The Impostor" and "Death Stalks a Building Once It Enters"). In a collection well short of 200 pages, such ventriloquistic virtuosity results finally in an unsettled quality that distracts from the many strengths of these stories. My advice to readers of No Marble Angels would be to avoid reading it in a sitting; one or at most two stories at a time will allow for the necessary narrative reorientation.

The reprinting of The Dark Path to the River is likewise timely. All one need do is be familiar with the latest news stories (at least as this is being written) about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and his hapless opposition, or the fumbling of the United Nations in...