“Roselily”
The litany of the marriage ceremony is ironically sliced into tiny pieces which thread together a narrative short on dramatic incident, but simmering with dramatic tension as a young black woman of a somewhat less than idyllic innocence (she’s already given birth to four children) wonders if the whole thing is a big mistake in real time as the ceremony is taking place.
“Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?”
Myrna desperately wants to be a writer and she’s got the talent for it. Her husband, Ruel, desperately wants her to give birth and just be a wife and mother. Mordecai Rich is a man with his own ambitions toward becoming a writer in whom Myrna appears to have found a soulmate and she gives herself to him body and soul. More than that: body and soul and access to her writings. Not long after, Mordecai is no more, Myrna is subjecting herself to attempts at getting pregnant and life is barely tolerable. Before too long, Myrna is checked into an asylum after suffering a breakdown upon learning that Mordecai has published her work under his name. The question becomes: which of these two men does Myrna blame for the most for ruining her dreams?
“Her Sweet Jerome”
An uneducated beauty shop owner falls under the spell of a school teacher named Jerome Franklin Washington, III. The marriage is never really a happy one and the fire is fueled by her intense jealousy. Spurred on by the type of gossip that serves as currency inside a salon, she is determined the identity of the hussy who has stolen the attention of her sweet Jerome. The other woman turns out to be a radical political theory and the story ends in a conflagration of suspicion and self-hatred.
“The Child Who Favored Daughter”
This is a story told in three parts, but which ends as it begins: with a black man patiently waiting on his porch for the arrival of a school bus, a shotgun at the ready. In the opening section, he is waiting to confront his daughter over an illicit love letter to a white man. The middle portion delves into the psychology of the man on the porch, specifically, the complexity of an incestuous urge toward a sister named Daughter. The death of that sister grotesquely impacts his psyche and the broiling mix of misplaced sexual desire ultimately results in a gruesomely violent physical attack of his daughter ostensibly over the issue of her love for a white man.
The most famous and oft-anthologized story in this collection is Walker’s subtly drawn symbolist masterpiece of character study. The story is about an old sharecropper and her two daughters: one who has gone off to much bigger and better things and the other who has stayed home and suffered the consequences both emotionally and physically. At the symbolic center of the tale hand-woven quilts and the expressions of superiority and entitlement adopted into the worldly daughter since leaving home.
“The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff”
A story that with elements that seem to call upon the brilliant conjuring stories of Charles Chesnutt, this is an eerie sort of voodoo horror tale about updated to modern times. The object of the bad mojo is a particularly telling one within the life experience of African-American women in the latter half of the 20th century: a white woman with an almost gleefully malevolent desire to prevent the legally sanction issuance of food stamps. The lack of this particular government-issued social service results in tragedy. And so the revenge of Hannah Kemhuff is perfectly understandable within the context of a psychological twist to the power of voodoo: your racism killed my children, but your own guilt will be the agency of your demise.
