Comfort by Ann Hood

Photo: from Ann Hood's webpage, here.

When a 5-year old child dies...Well, I can't really even finish the sentence, much less write a book about it.  Such loss is inexplicable.  It is impossible to imagine, even by a person like Hood who makes her living from her literary imagination.  The talent to do so must be immense.

You have to do honor to yourself, your own emotions, the child, to the death, to the reality of how it happened.  The details.  The exact details.  Details so exact you have to live your own worst nightmare over and over and over and over just to get the details right.  Because to get them wrong--purposely wrong--is a sort of blasphemy.  Yet you also don't want to sound whiny, or maudlin, like you don't realize other people have lost their kids, too.  You have to write about the cold hard facts, and how do you describe emotions at all, especially as cold hard facts?

And you have to write it well, not like a diary or a journal.  You have to write it over and over, drafts innumerable, to get the tone of everything above, and everything I can't even think of, just right.  It is a high-wire act, a balancing act of art, and therapy, and confessional, and literature, and a sort of diary-journal in memoir form.

I'm a writer--hopefully a pretty good one--and I can't imagine ever being able to do this.  Ann Hood, a former (or current?) Rhode Island College professor [full disclosure: I attended RIC but did not have the good fortune to get Ms. Hood as a professor, though of course I did have some good ones] does the high-wire act and succeeds because her writing is that direct, that honest, that good.  This book will jab you with its simplicity and it's reality.  Not realism, which is a fakeness of literature that makes the unreal real.  This book is all real, all the time.  It is one of the heavier 186-page book you'll ever read, and read it you should.

It doesn't matter if you've never lost a child.  When you reach a certain age, as I guess I have, you've probably lost somebody, and no matter how old they were, I'll bet you thought they weren't old enough.  And you're right.  At least, I think you are, because that's how I've felt about my loved ones who've died.  In fact, I feel that way about everyone I know who've died, even those who were quite old.

More than the death of her child, that's really what Comfort is about: Death.  The death of anyone.  Anyone you've loved.  Anyone you thought died too young.  Weren't they all too young?

Of course, it's harder to explain when they are really that young.  How do you explain the death of a 5-year old girl?  Especially when it's your own daughter, how do you explain that?  Another thing this book tells you is that there is no explanation.  There's no Why.  How can there be?  How can we possibly understand why such a thing happens?  Hood makes it very clear right away, and reminds us throughout, that she doesn't know why it happened.  She doesn't have a belief about it, either.

It happened.  That's the source of the grief, and maybe of the comfort.

It happened.  And there is no why.

A remarkable work that deserves to be read.  When you're done you'll feel something, which is what good books are supposed to make you do.

The Wife of His Youth--Charles W. Chesnutt

Photo: Cover of the Library of America edition, from this link.

I wrote a blog last year about a very real-to-life and entertaining short story by this guy, here.  Please read that one, if you haven't, before you continue on here.  I just re-read it myself, since I wrote it last year, after all, and I'm still impressed that a man who could pass as white, as he was apparently 7/8 white, refused to do so, instead listing himself as African-American.  He became a popular writer of short stories, and made apparently a very good living for himself, as he joined some high-falutin' social clubs, which is the subject of his ironic and classic short story, "Baxter's Procrustes," the subject of the linked blog above.  So read that entry, and his story, too.  The link to the story is in the blog linked above.  (And a quick note about that entry: It continues to be one of the most popular I've written, as it consistently shows up on the side of the blog, in the "popular entries" section, which is generated by the numbers provided by Google's Analytics, not by me.  As of this writing, it has been the second-most popular entry of the past month--and that entry was written on August 8, 2012.)

This entry is about "The Wife of His Youth," another story that could only happen to a man of mixed race, who comes across as white and who looks white, but who is not entirely white, and if I have written a more real but ridiculous sentence recently, I'm not aware of it, because why any of this matters is beyond me, anyway, and if you think this is crazy, Google the "One Drop Rule," which was an act actually passed by this country's local and federal Supreme Courts in 1910 and 1924.  You won't believe it--or maybe you will.  But don't get me started, and I digress, anyway.  If you're interested, read about the "One Drop Rule" here.

Anyway, the long and short of it is this: a black man who doesn't look black and who is therefore walking around a free man in the south is soon to be captured by the slave-owner of a black woman (whose skin is very black) and sold down the river.  She tells him this, and he runs, vowing to come back for her.  He does, but she's sold down the river for tipping him off.  He looks for her for awhile, maybe a couple of years, and then, deciding that he'll never find her, comes to Groveland (real-life Cleveland), Ohio, and sets up a life as a very social and sophisticated gentleman--a man whose race is never discussed, since he's 7/8 white and nobody realizes there's a discussion to be had there about his race, which therefore means there isn't, but whatever.  So he becomes high-falutin' and popular and rich and sophisticated, and nobody knows he's black, and he doesn't tell anyone, which at first seems like a betrayal, but then you realize that maybe the subject of his racial identity never came up, and that maybe the whole matter ceases to matter to him, too.  Anyway, all the women around wants this guy, but he pines for another woman, and she wants him, and he wants to ask her to marry him, so to make the proposal fit the prosperity of the people themselves, he throws a lavish ball to match the woman's awesomeness, and it is here that he will propose to this woman and live happily ever after.  (And she's white, too, which could've been a whole story in of itself, since nobody knows there's a mixed marriage about to happen there.  But Chesnutt, perhaps wisely, in 1899, never goes there.)

So this guy is about to ask this woman to marry him, when in walks this wrinkled, very black woman, who tells the main character that she comes to speak to him because he is a known intelligent and social man of the area, someone who knows everyone, and she's looking for a specific someone--her husband, who she got sold away from, twenty-five years ago.  She's been looking for this guy ever since.  For twenty-five years.  She's never stopped looking for him, though he, the main character, had stopped looking for her, a long, long time ago.  This woman is uneducated, doesn't speak well, not socially sophisticated, and all that, and she doesn't recognize the man she's talking to, as it had been twenty-five years ago, after all, and he had been quite a bit younger than she had been, so she's pretty old now.

What is this guy to do?  She's been looking for him for twenty-five years, and he may, or may not, love her anymore, and he definitely does love someone else, this rich and beautiful white woman, who wants to be with him.  And nobody, including, perhaps, this beautiful white woman, doesn't know that he's black, but everyone sure as hell will if he introduces this short, old black woman as his former (and current) wife.  But if he isn't honest about who she is, and about who he is (which is the point of the whole story; because, after all, does his "hidden" blackness matter at this point--if it ever did to begin with?), then he will violate all of the ideals of honor and respect, love and fidelity, that his classy and sophisticated gentleman persona publicly believes in.  He wants to do the right thing, but what is the right thing?  For that matter, what's the question?

So what does he do?  Well, you'll have to read it to find out.  Read it here.  Do so now.  Who was this Charles W. Chesnutt?  He was a helluva writer in his time.  He shouldn't be as forgotten as he is.

This is another entry about a short story sent to my email for free from the Library of America.  I don't write blog entries about each story, but they're all interesting, for one reason or another.  I heavily recommend that you sign up to receive them, which you can do by clicking the icon in the upper right-hand corner of the page you'll go to when you click here.