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You don’t expect a story that begins:
“The brassiere is off, Louella” to gently break your heart, and
that’s precisely what makes Springfield writer Carol Manley’s
first collection of short stories irresistible. Church Booty, the
runner-up for the third annual Tartt Fiction Award, has just been published
by the University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press. In its pages,
Manley introduces a full-voiced, energetic group of characters that in the
hands of a less skillful writer would devolve into a collection of
minstrel-show caricatures. Nearly all of the residents of Manley’s
fiction are rather unrespectably comfortable living in the middle of the
battle between their push for devotion to God and the pull of their desire
for the comforts of the flesh. Somewhere within that tug of war they find
neither God nor very much booty; instead, they experience the fleeting
moments of connection that make us human. Every story rewards readers with
one moment in which characters (often frenemies, or else mothers and
daughters) come to a moment of true communion under improbable
circumstances and for unlikely reasons.
The characters almost never grasp this. A reader only
does upon reflection because these stories are so perfectly, wildly,
deceptively entertaining that you’re tempted to take them in as
clever junk food for the mind.
Readers who fret over political correctness might
also be tempted to feel squeamish about how Manley (a middle-aged white
woman) portrays the silliness of a number of presumably black characters.
(Manley never mentions skin color unless it is essential to the plot.) And all these people — no matter their
pigmentation — do crazy things. They wrestle their way down church
aisles. They switch lovers and babies’ birth certificates and then
tortuously and tenderly rationalize the exchanges. They constantly,
desperately unleash severe forms of magical thinking into an unstintingly
harsh and real world. And it is funny as all hell.
But that humor doesn’t come from any grease
paint and pantomime imposed by the author. Rather, Manley lets her
characters’ silliness arise honestly and naturally from their utter
lack of sophistication, their often sincere desire to (at least appear to)
be in the right, and the hard, bewildering social and economic
circumstances in which they live. Poverty, though it is a blithely accepted
fact of each of these character’s lives, is a dark undercurrent that
runs through the collection. Characters are often physically trapped (and
perhaps also trapped in shortsighted patterns of decision-making) by their
lack of money. They spend as much energy looking for rides as they do
looking for someone to love and be loved by, and they have to do it on the
cheap. In one tale, a good church sister comes home after a long Sunday
service to discover that her wayward cat has eaten a can full of bacon
drippings and soiled the house. She is thankful she resisted the call to
drop her last two dollars in the collection plate. In her world,
that’s a sign that God obviously intended that money for kitty litter
(although by story’s end she is far from certain as to why God has
allowed a police officer to mistake her for a $2 whore cruising in Brother
Bunion’s new Cadillac.) In addition to a sharp ear for voice, impeccable
comedic timing, and quick plotting, Manley brings to the work her own
street cred. She has known some tough economic straits and is the mother of
two mixed-race children. The stories “Intensive Care” and
“On the Bus” could very well reflect Manley’s own
experience of sorting through her emotions when her daughter was in a
near-fatal car accident a few hundred miles from home. Says the protagonist
of “On the Bus”: “Being a white mother with a black child
is the main thing I’ve been for as long I remember. Wasn’t no
big thing that was going to change the world, and I wasn’t the only
one who ever done it, but at least it was something where I always knew
what I was. . . . My daughter being gone made me just one more regular
white lady, which is the next thing to invisible that you can
get.”
If Manley herself ever felt that way, she
needn’t now. Church Booty proves that this invisible white lady and mother of
two black children is also one terrific writer.
Carol Manley will sign copies of Church Booty at a reception, 5-7:30
p.m. Wednesday, June 11, in the restaurant of the Public Affairs Center, on
the University of Illinois at Springfield campus.
Rodd Whelpley is the author of Capital Murder, a mystery set in
Springfield.
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2008.
