The slight, carefully wrought stories in Mary Ward Brown's Tongues of Flame (1986) remind us not so much of Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty as of such earlier writers such as Chekhov or Joyce or de Maupassant. Broiwn's stories are so casually and economically written, with an unassuming and concise prose style, that one is not immediately aware of how seamlessly crafted they are. Set in rural Alabama between the 1950s and 1980s, Brown's stories focus mostly on middle-aged and older women coming to terms with the shrinking limitations of their lives. Many if not most of the stories turn on a concluding epiphany in which a sudden insight changes a character's perception of the world. Brown renders these moments so subtly that sometimes one must read and reread the stories before "getting" them. The best story in the volume is the first one, "New Dresses," in which a daughter-in-law who has always remained distant from her mother-in-law takes the ailing woman shopping. She does so out of guilt. She has always resented her husband's devotion to his mother and has never spent much time with her as a result, especially during the older woman's gradual decline. She leaves her ailing mother-in-law at a dress shop she wanted to visit and goes elsewhere. When she returns, she finds the woman exhausted, and in possession of a type of dress she had not expected her to buy. On the dress itself, and the awareness it brings, the conclusion of the story turns. The word exquisite can virtually never be appropriately applied, but for this story it is the proper adjective.
These stories are often narrow in scope. They do not move outside the world of the author and of the people she knows. Yet within that world, in a restrained and careful way, they delve deeply. Some of them indirectly and inferentially concern the coming of the civil rights movement to rural Alabama (it had come much earlier to other parts of the nation). Older whites react with surprise and concern to a new generation of African Americans who do not show the expected subservience of their predecessors. Brown does not seem to mourn or regret these changes in behavior, but she does mark them. In "Let Him Live," the black and white citizens of the town pray for the recovery of a respected town lawyer from brain surgery. He has suffered complications and lies near death. He is known for his ability to mediate crises, to bring groups in disagreement together, to fend off conflict. He may have been what people used to term in the South a racial moderate. If he dies, the town's last source of stability will be gone, and the uncertainty of modern times will descend. In a sense, the white citizens see the lawyer as their protection against sudden change, against the demands of more extreme black citizens in the town, against upsetting the racial balance that has prevailed for years.
Another story, "The Cure," an elderly black woman, on the brink of death, and surrounded by her daughters, demands that an elderly white doctor be summoned to treat her. She is certain he can cure her. The daughters are unwilling because the doctor, retired for years, is widely known for his alcoholism and is suspected of senility as well. But they relent and summon him. He is not a particularly sympathetic character, and he has no special feelings for the dying woman. But he examines her, diagnoses her illness as old age, which he admits to suffering from himself, and in the final scene they both are dozing in her room while the daughters stand outside talking about who will be responsible for taking care of their mother .
The final story, "Beyond New Forks," concerns the relationship of a white woman in her sixties to an elderly black woman named Queen Esther who worked for her for decades. Esther lives near the woman's house but works for her no longer—she is too old. The narrator needs a housekeeper. She is past the point of keeping her own house and worries that without someone to keep house for her she will lose her independence. Esther agrees to take her to the house of her granddaughter, who lives far out in the country, in hopes that the girl will agree to work for her. Here again the narrator encounters an individual and a situation that she didn't expect, that upsets her sense of equilibrium and forces her to think about her own vulnerable place in the world. Although she and Queen have an uneasy alliance—however much she may think of Esther as an old friend, the story makes clear that the older woman does not return the feeling—it is clear that Esther too has her own difficulties with the modern world and old age. This story explores an intricately complicated set of relationships that tie the women to each other and at the same time separate them.
Some of these stories describe characters that may at first seem of little substance or significance, but Brown is able to uncover their significance and illuminate essential elements of their human condition. The best of her stories are very fine indeed.
Originally published in Blogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/11/30/111253.php
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