Jamey Hatley: 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner
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2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner
JAMEY HATLEY
[End Page 767]
Hatley’s “Who’s Got the Body?” is a well-constructed scene, paced with knowing detail within the ever deepening stream of grief. There is much to capture the reader’s interest early on. The morticians are pillars of a community—dependable and professional. The episode suggests that the Harrises have buried many from that community, that the community members have shared in and witnessed each other’s grief. The descriptive details, especially tactile gesture and imagery, are effective: “a firm hand to the small of the back”; the air “crisp like a fall day”; “rubbed her wrist where her watch would rest if she had been wearing one.”
Then there is the sign, the remembered warning, varying in its detail yet so familiar throughout close communities. The detail of the crumbs left on a plate is reminiscent of a different kind of loss announced in the “matchbox (left) on my bed” from Billie Holiday’s classic lament.
The efficiency of the dialogue which follows and builds during daughter Gloria’s first and horrific encounter with her father’s body at the funeral home is admirable.
There is much to applaud in these very brief pages and much to encourage in the completed work and hopefully more pages ahead. [End Page 768]
JOHN MCCLUSKEY, JR., an associate editor of Callaloo, is Professor Emeritus of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he taught fiction writing and literature. He is the author of two novels, Look What They Done to My Song and Mr. America’s Last Season Blues. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Ploughshares, Southern Review, Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, Best American Short Stories, and Calling the Wind.
