What Stories Do

The stories in Margaret Whitt's collection have work to do: a revolution diverse and profound in its effects and fraught with emotional complexity is taking place or had taken place. The stories gathered here convey the experiences of men and women caught up in that turmoil. We are taken beyond a superficial understanding of the civil rights era and into identifications with individuals experiencing those travails.

To her credit Whitt includes a range of responses. Eudora Welty's stunning "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" that appeared in the New Yorker in 1963 soon after Medgar Evers's assassination, the event on which the story is based. The voice is the killer's. His dialect is perfect as he recounts the murder and unwittingly reveals the roots of his rage: "I done it for my own pure–D satisfaction," he tells us. "Anyways, I seen him fall. I was evermore the one."

At the opposite pole appears John Updike's "Marching through Boston," also in the New Yorker (1966) and told through the persona of a callow, middle-aged, upper-middle-class Bostonian. A Harvard graduate, he is quite sure that he has scoured out his West Virginia upbringing. He condescends to his socially concerned wife when he agrees to attend a Boston protest march. Superior to all he beholds, he mocks the earnest speakers: "I don't mind them sounding like demagogues; what I mind is the god-awful boring phony imitation of a revival meeting. 'Thass right, yossuh.'" He comically diminishes all that he sees. But, as in the Welty story, this Updike character unwittingly mocks himself. We regard him with irony; he is the fool. In these two stories, nearly opposite responses to civil rights are placed before us.

James Baldwin's chilling "Going to Meet the Man" (1965) is included. It is a fictionalized account of the lynching of Emmett Till as witnessed by a white child who as an adult continues to suffer from what he saw. The final story, Alice Walker's autobiographical "To My Young Husband" (2000), is a moving reflection on the failure of a marriage between a white and an African American that had been forged in the civil rights era.

To aid readers who might know little or nothing of the civil rights movement, Whitt footnotes events and figures. But she overdoes it. A mention of Jefferson Davis High School brings us a footnote on Davis. The same treatment is given to Walter Cronkite, Mary Tyler Moore, Robert E. Lee, and the lyrics of "Dixie," among many other instances. In addition, the work of the collection would have been clearer if a representative story of the era before civil rights had been included.

The collection is organized by historical topics: sit-ins, marches and demonstrations, and acts of violence. A typical story is Anthony Grooms's "Negro Progress" (1994), which concerns the Birmingham demonstrations. A young man, middle class and African American, will soon be married. He has excellent business prospects (contingent on his staying out of the demonstrations), but he feels compelled to join the Birmingham struggle. Further complicating his situation are his dreams of escaping to Paris. The story embodies a comprehensive view of the choices faced by African Americans in that era. On the other side of the racial divide is Joanne Leedom-Ackerman's "The Beginning of Violence" (1985) set during the violent sit-ins in Nashville. The principal character is an earnest Vanderbilt University coed who is a student journalist. Pursuing a story, she befriends an African-American student at Shaw University who participates in the sit-ins. What she publishes in the student paper has the unintended consequences of betraying her friend and doing serious harm to her family. The character says, "Because I didn't heed dark, unexplored places in myself, I fell inside...