De'Shawn Charles Winslow's In West Mills: The Big Secrets of a Small Town

Not long after the one-hundredth page, De'Shawn Winslow's sprawling debut In West Mills begins to make its grander ambitions known—this a larger story then you may have at first guessed. Winslow isn't content to tell just the story of a season in our heroine's life, not even the story of her entire life, but a story that contains generations, and with them all the secrets that are borne, kept, and come to light, of those generations. What a joyful surprise it is, as a reader, to see a novel unfold in that way—to seem to say: hold on; we're going farther still. The novel traces the history of its protagonist from her youth to old age. "Life is funny, ain't it?" Azalea Centre thinks to herself, near to the novel's final act. "I got two grown children—even two grandchildren— and I'm sittin' here, thinkin' about bein' somebody's child." As in life, In West Mills occasions for many such tender moments that ask us to pause in wonder at the delirious passage of time, and the lives we might have lived.

In West Mills is the story of a fictional, black, small town in North Carolina, circa 1941 and onward, rendered in exquisitely felt detail, and peopled with some of the most vivid, and sympathetic characters in recent memory. Our irascible heroine, Azalea Centre, more commonly called Knot (Winslow has a penchant for charmingly conspicuous nicknames), is a grade-school teacher, a prolific reader, and an even more prolific drinker of moonshine. The novel centers on Knot's struggle between the prospect of motherhood and independence, between societal expectation and her defiance of spirit. The heart of the novel, though, may just as well be long to Otis Lee Loving, our secondary perspective character, who takes it upon himself to keep Knot from disintegration, even as he has a family of his own to worry about. Not always so simple a task. His wife, Penelope "Pep" Loving, may be the one inhabitant of West Mills as stubborn as Knot. Otis Lee does his best, and we cherish him for it.

The town of West Mills, which Winslow navigates as assuredly and as gracefully as Marilynne Robinson moves through her town of Gilead, is a place as populated with secrets as it is characters. Happily, though, Winslow keeps no secrets from his readers. He delights in sharing the fraughtness of the buried past, which may return, it seems, at any still moment, to do its disruptive work on the present once again—to threaten the intricate house of cards that is West Mills. "Just `cause I talk `til I'm tired," Says Ma Noni, one of the novel's more alluringly enigmatic figures, "don't mean I can't hold a secret. I got secrets in here that'll make folks hate me if they got out. My own flesh and blood. Hear?" Of course, at the time Ma Noni says this to Knot, Knot has a key secret herself: she already knows Ma Noni's secrets, already counts them among her own. "But you know somethin' Knot?" Ma Noni adds, "Sometimes it's best to keep `em locked inside. Secrets. Best for everybody sometimes." Well, luckily for us, the secrets of West Mills, which take on character-like presences themselves, have no interest in being kept.

At times evoking Zora Neale Hurston, and elsewhere Charles Dickens, Winslow manages to bring sensibilities distinctly his own to In West Mills. Winslow's prose, never too much adorned, crackles with authenticity and insight. His dialogue sings with idiomatic speech, but never plays for laughs. Though, I should mention, too, that this a truly funny book. Maybe most distinctive of Winslow's sensibilities, is the generosity with which he draws his characters. Even when they're behaving at their worst, and their most desperate, Winslow pursues his characters with such a force of a tenderness—a stunning capacity to accept people as...