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Reviewed by:
  • We Are Taking Only What We Need by Stephanie Powell Watts
  • Erin Nicholson Gale (bio)
Watts, Stephanie Powell. We Are Taking Only What We Need. Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press, 2011.

Great stories articulate something we did not realize we already knew. They provide words for common joys or miseries we may not have stopped to think about directly before reading them. Stephanie Powell Watts’s debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need, features the lives of poor black North Carolinians. Though the pain her characters experience is ordinary in its prevalence, it is no less devastating, especially given Watts’s unique account of it. Above all, Watts eloquently gives voice to what it means to be alone.

It is lonely to live a cliché, especially if you recognize your experience as such but cannot stop yourself. Watts’s opening story, “Family Museum of the Ancient Postcards,” describes the life and death of the narrator’s aunt from the point-of-view of her niece. Aunt Ginny finds a mate at forty-two, desperately, and returns home when she recognizes that he is violent and unreliable. Like the narrator, the reader watches the train wreck we all see [End Page 223] coming: “Though we wanted different for her, we knew Aunt Ginny’s story would take one of just a few predictable shapes” (12). And though it does, Watts nonetheless makes the story new with dazzling lines such as: “To say we had a lot in common is wrong on the face of it, but same knows same, one desperation calls out without speaking to another, and we became friends” (13). In this moment, the narrator describes her special bond with her romance-novel-loving aunt. The peripheral narrator and Watts are both able to recognize that predictable narratives still hurt and haunt.

Watts’s stories are nothing if not haunting. In “If You Hit Randolph County, You’ve Gone Too Far,” Dee climbs into the back seat of her own car because she does not know what else to do with herself. She is one of many of Watts’s female characters at a loss for what to say, who to be, or where to go. Dee wants to feel connected to and nurture her younger siblings but is incapable of sugar-coating reality for them because she too is wounded. In the back seat of her car, it is “too early for screaming, too early to cry out like a fool” (50). She does and does not want to be noticed by her family. The mid-day sun becomes a metaphor for her life; it is “way too early to know for sure that nobody will listen, good enough or long enough to hear you yelling over and over: I am so afraid” (50). While her younger brother is able to wonder aloud, pitifully, if anyone will bail him out of jail, Dee suffers alone. Dee’s inability to be vulnerable with her family is common, yet Watts’s portrayal is so fresh that readers cannot help but examine and sympathize with Dee’s pain.

Watts frequently takes readers to moments that people would rather not look at. In the unrelenting story for which the collection is named, the featured children and husband/father are abandoned. All of the characters in this story are like the suicidal dogs at the beginning of it, aching to be put out of their pathetic misery. Tammy, the white teenage babysitter the father, Roger, impregnates; Portia, the eldest of her charges; the young and hungry Cal; and the love-crazed Roger are “taking only what” they “need,” but everything they have is not enough. Portia admits, repeatedly, in moments of quiet desperation, that she wants her mother. Tammy, no less desperate in her flirtations with every male she encounters, admits to eleven-year-old Portia that she miscarried her “sister” and ate part of the dead fetus that fell from her body, looking like “grape jello” (67). In this way, this story (and the collection at large) just keeps getting deeper into the heart of miseries we would rather avoid. But just like the domestic abuse scars...

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