Book Review : Reality and Racial Deception
Can’t Quit You, Baby by Ellen Douglas (Atheneum; $17.95)
My father was a radical during the ‘60s, but he was an old guy by then, and he’d come from an old Southern family--his father had been given his own slave when he was born. During the civil rights uprisings of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, my father realized the inevitability of all that was happening, knew in his mind that the blacks had suffered terrible injustices, but his emotions kept sending out different messages.
“It was a different world when I was a child,” he’d insist to unbelieving friends. “There was a trust between the races. Every black family had its own ‘white folks’ they could go to. . . .” It is just this “white” state of mind, eyeball deep in self-deception, hip deep in somewhat good intentions, that Ellen Douglas examines in “Can’t Quit You, Baby.”
The time in this novel is the late ‘60s, when the last of the Southern feudal system was breaking up. (Never again would whites be able to oppress blacks and maintain that it was good for them.) The place: a small city in Mississippi, backwater in a larger battleground. But the bigger battles will be ignored. There are only two women characters here: white employer, black housekeeper. They’ve already been together close to 15 years.
Author Jumps In
The author jumps in to tell us right at the beginning: “Here are some situations that will not be explored: The white woman--Cornelia--is driving Julia home from work. The latter is sitting on the back seat of the car (or the front seat. For the purpose of dramatizing a point either will do). Cornelia is taking Julia to register to vote (or declining to take her, or Julia is declining to go) under the perilous circumstances of black registration in Mississippi in 1964. Or they are listening together to the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. . . .”
All these events occurred in the official, public history of things, and the two women in this novel are caught up in the entwined patterns of their own private lives. And again and again the author comes forward to explain her own difficulties with this. It’s easy to describe Julia, the maid, physically; to catch the cadence of her speech, even to invent the grisly past that would have ended her up in the spotless kitchen, working for a white woman whom Julia perceives as immensely rich.
But Cornelia is the hard one. She “may be the last woman in America who has never been alone.” She comes off a system that looked perfect on the surface but was based on brutal oppression: In her mother’s generation, “upper-class girl-children had nurses or nannies or mammies, depending on where they lived. At 5 or 6 they went to private or public schools or had governesses. . . . At 15 they went with properly brought-up young men to properly chaperoned parties and dances. At 22, they married and had husbands and children and servants.”
Southern Perfection
Cornelia, having come of age in World War II, had been lucky enough to break part way out of this restrictive pattern. She has married a pilot (who literally had to rescue her from a locked room in her family home), but once “out,” she sets about creating a “perfect” domestic background with children who have “straight backs, straight A’s, straight teeth,” a world of furniture polish and crown rib roasts. But to create perfection, especially in the South, and in those times, it was necessary to ignore about 90% of life. Early on, Cornelia goes deaf enough to ignore what she doesn’t want to hear.
For page after page, Julia, her maid, tells her tales--of a father so desperate for money he tried to kill her by burning her house down, of a husband who refused for a year to sleep with her because of boils on her face, of repellent white men “crazy for black women”; tales of disaster, poverty, hatred and self-hatred. Cornelia keeps her hearing aid turned down.
Then, tragedy strikes both women. Cornelia’s downfall is a direct result of her self-imposed self-deception. For Julia it is more of the same, a senseless disaster that finally forces her family to call upon their “white folks. . . .” The hatred that blazes out from this transaction is brilliantly conceived, but so is the love, and makes this far more than just a “women’s novel.”