The Manner of Our Seeing, the Conditions of Our Love
A Reconsideration of Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone
by W. Ralph Eubanks
Originally published in The Sewanee Review
The passage of time sometimes confines exceptional books to the literary shadows, while others continue to shine brightly through the years. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, both published in 1922, are often hailed as preeminent masterpieces of modernist literature. Yet Virginia Woolf ’s groundbreaking work of modernist fiction Jacob’s Room—which was published in the same year—is often overlooked as a work of literature of equal standing. I’ve always thought Woolf did as much in Jacob’s Room to pave the way for multiple points of view as Eliot did in The Waste Land, yet she is remembered more for To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway, the character of Jacob is more absent than present in Woolf ’s novel, making Jacob’s Room stand out as a book that haunts the reader because of the pervading spiritual presence and looming absence of its central character. Yet the elegiac language in Jacob’s Room and the impressionistic writing style—right down to the spatial silence in the white gaps Woolf leaves on the page—has lingered in my mind since I first read it. And it is a book I have returned to countless times.
In the case of African American literature, some writers fall in and out of favor because of changing tastes or politics, as has been the case with Richard Wright, whose reputation is now being reevaluated with the publication of The Man Who Lived Underground. In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin accused Wright of compromising his art for the sake of making a political statement. For decades, Baldwin’s words hung over Wright’s work like a dark cloud and placed his work on the margins of African American literature. Now that Americans are confronted with the precarity of Black life on nearly a daily basis, we are beginning to see how Wright’s natural realism was more than a political statement. It reflects an American reality that we still live with.
As the African American literary canon grows and is defined and refined, a few bright sparks of creativity continue that eternal pattern of being obscured, whether by evolving tastes or by brighter lights. Maxine Clair’s coming-of-age novel in stories, Rattlebone, is one of those books that deserves to be brought out of the shadows of African American literature and back into the spotlight it so rightly deserves. Released in 1994, Rattlebone was reviewed nationally and was enthusiastically received not only by critics but by writers as well, including Terry McMillan and Howard Norman. Ann Patchett remembers the book as one with “indelible characters and an enormity of heart.” The book that seems to be its corollary is Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City, a book of stories rescued from obscurity by Jones being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World. But Rattlebone is also a book written in the same tradition as Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood trilogy, given its strong sense of time and place.
Rattlebone takes place in 1950s Kansas and tells the story of a young Black girl named Irene. In her New York Times review, Veronica Chambers said Clair’s collection had “magic dust sprinkled over each and every page”—words I wish I had written to describe this book. Like Jacob’s Room, this is a book I have never forgotten, even in the years that it has been out of print and excluded from the cultural conversation. Now that Rattlebone has been reissued by McNally Editions, readers get another chance to engage with Clair’s characters, who navigate a world as intently concerned with manners and appearances as if they reside in the shadows of Southern magnolias or live oaks. Despite the seemingly Southern sensibilities of Rattlebone, its setting and geography rest squarely on the flat midwestern prairie of Kansas, a setting that seems as if it is eternally in search of a vista. As the descendants of “exodusters” who left Mississippi and the Deep South looking for what historian Nell Irving Painter described as “real freedom,” Clair’s characters are caught between space and silence. They have brought the South with them but have chosen to suppress their link to a painful and violent past in places like Mississippi and Arkansas.
As Clair recalled to me in a recent conversation, it was not until she read Painter’s Exodusters several years after Rattlebone was published that she realized she had internalized the culture of the South that was part of her community’s silent past. In the Black community of Kansas City, Kansas, where Clair grew up, creating a new life rooted in the present and focusing on the future was a core value. The present and the future mattered more than what might have happened in the distant past. “When I wrote Rattlebone, the driving idea was to tell the story of a Black girl coming of age—somewhat naïve in ways and wise in others—who was just a real person trying to become an adult.” Clair remembered that she “didn’t want a narrative about suffering and about slavery. I didn’t want the darkness of the past to intrude on this girl’s story,” since it had never intruded on her own. “I just wanted her to be a person trying to go to the corner market to get herself a popsicle, the way I did in my childhood.”
Rattlebone is a book that I stumbled across as a new parent in Washington, DC. With two young children at home, my wife and I were caught in a world of what Woolf describes in Jacob’s Room as “the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles.” The entangling strings of domesticity seemed to control every movement of our lives in those days. Our only escape from that world was a once-a-month visit to the PEN/Faulkner reading series, which we could walk to from our home on Capitol Hill and use a minimal number of hours from our babysitting co-op. At the time, we thought the readings and conversations with writers would keep our sleep-deprived minds from turning to pure pablum. That was indeed the case, but those readings were also memorable evenings out that introduced us to the important work of Francisco Goldman, Susan Straight, and Robert Olen Butler.
I’ve never forgotten hearing Clair read her story “October Brown” from the stage of the Folger Theatre. Perhaps it was her description of the prim school teacher, the title character, a brown skinned woman marked with a light patch of skin on her face that the children in her class described as a “devil’s kiss.” The narrator, Irene, describes how the children assembled their teacher’s origin story: “We put this together with what we already knew, which was that a patch of bleached skin meant death was on the way; the white would spread. When it covered your entire body you died.” Later, Irene begins to sense that a “no-name, invisible something” like the patch on October Brown’s skin has descended on her parents’ marriage and that her teacher is to blame.
The idea of a character that bore the mark of Satan seduced me from the moment I heard it. What was more, I realized that I had known women like Miss October Brown: highly educated Black women whose only opportunity for professional advancement meant being a teacher, since back in the segregated 1950s and 60s there were few other options. I immediately thought of the woman who gave my sisters piano lessons, who trained at Juilliard but by some odd twist of fate ended up as a school music teacher in rural Mississippi and supplemented her salary by giving private lessons. Though I never thought of these women as bearing the mark of Satan, their education and cultured demeanor marked them. And the evil of racism kept them from seeking a position of higher status. Clair remembers women like October Brown as being set apart by their knowledge and persistence, despite the restrictions placed on them. For example, married women were not allowed to be teachers, and some women hid their romantic and domestic arrangements in order to remain in the profession. As Clair described those women, “They were all dedicated women, and some of them were brilliant. And during segregation, they taught us everything we knew, as well as some things we weren’t supposed to know.” These were women indelibly labeled by loss and love, who wanted more and had less, and were not being understood by the people in the community around them.
Irene’s world and her coming of age takes place with the Brown v. Board of Education decision as a cultural backdrop, yet the stories Clair weaves together are timeless. The mystic chords of history reside safely in the background of these stories and are never framed didactically. As Irene goes from the age of eight to graduating from high school, we begin to see how her way of seeing and thinking evolves. For instance, when she memorizes James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” for a school recitation contest and wins, she’s not allowed to compete at a state level because of her skin color. Irene has internalized that line “I’ll make me a world” even though the shock of not being able to compete throws her slightly off-balance.
Rattlebone concludes when Irene re-encounters October Brown at an interview for a college scholarship offered by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. When the pair are reunited, the wounds of the third-grade classroom are reopened. Initially, the reader wonders if Irene will disappoint us. But she instead demonstrates an evolved self-awareness of her personal failings:
“One final thing,” Miss Brown said. “I’d like to ask you, Irene, if you had to name your worst flaw, what would it be?”
Miss Cates interjected, “It doesn’t have to be something dreadfully wrong or ugly, Irene. Just something you would like to work on.”
I felt ambushed. Quickly I went down the mental list of the Ten Commandments. Did she want me to say lying? I feared God, honored my parents, I’d never kill or steal. Covetousness was the only commandment I could think of that I could break and still be a decent person.
As Irene chooses to reveal her flaws, the woman she will become begins to come into sharper focus.
Clair crafts each narrative carefully, and she artfully connects each story in a way that makes her characters and the world they inhabit feel familiar. That is why Rattlebone feels like a narrative whole rather than a novel-in-stories. There are threads that connect each story, whether it’s the tensions in Irene’s parents’ marriage or her evolving relationship with her friend Wanda Coles and Wanda’s disabled brother, Puddin. And instead of a book where a Black woman grows up and meets a horrible end, Rattlebone leaves the reader seeing power and strength at the core of Irene’s Blackness. This is not a world defined by Black-girl magic or by Black tragedy, but by a character’s humanity.
In my conversation with Maxine Clair, she recalled that as she wrote these stories, she was simply trying to capture the microcosm of a place she once knew and to fill in the details of her memory with her imagination. Like the memory of the white woman who wandered through her neighborhood seeking to convert children to Catholicism and called herself Sister Joan of Arc. The Sister’s proselytizing and religious superiority led one mother to sharply proclaim, “You had better let God save their souls and stick to saving your behind while you still got it.” Or using a tumultuous flood as a backdrop to “Cherry Bomb”—one she remembered from 1951—and using a plane crash that shook the Kansas City of her youth as a detail in “The Last Day of School.” Here’s Clair, in that same story, describing the crash:
By the time we considered running, it was too late. The whole room exploded in a fury of glass.
Screams and cries, explosions went on forever. I remember seeing blood on my hands and my ears ringing. Mr. Cox on the floor. I became aware of the fire alarm sounding and a man’s voice on the public address telling us which door to use. John and I held on to each other and bolted into a hallway jammed with other students. There seemed to be no way to get outside. Then we were a swarm in confused flight, darting down stairways, a herd of frightened cattle hurtling through the gym and out the building.
For Clair, the past was something she used to wrap her imagination around to create a tightly woven fictional world. As she explained to me, “As long as you can bring humanity into the story, it can become something universal. I decided to write about all the emotions we will ever feel, about the details from my past that I wanted to understand. Well, maybe not the actual details, but what it means to be invited to a funeral, or what it means to be stopped by a policeman, or to be a gossiper, whatever it is we lived through.”
Anyone who reads Rattlebone will see its relationship with other important works of African American literature published in the same year, like Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory or Alice Walker’s The Complete Stories. In Walker’s stories, and in the work of Danticat, there is a clarity of artistic vision on display that is in conversation with Clair’s Rattlebone. All three works use a matter-of-fact tone and are seeking to achieve an artistic complexity that is individual as well as centered in Blackness. Yet it is through Blackness that these writers also say something universal and seek to fill an absence in the consciousness of their readers who never knew there was something there lacking that needed to be filled. That is the conversation they all seem to want to initiate: to begin to see the Black experience not as “other” but as one with which any reader can seek to connect.
In Virginia Woolf ’s diary, as Jacob’s Room was beginning to crystallize in her mind, she wrote about the work she was beginning: “My doubt is how far it will enclose the human heart.” Clair had similar misgivings about her work, remarking that the stories in Rattlebone came from “a little seed that was there in my mind, one that I had questions and doubts about. I had to figure out who my characters were and what was driving them.” Like many readers of Rattlebone, I am grateful that Clair worked through her artistic hesitations and has written a book that will find a special place in the hearts of all who read it.
Ralph Eubanks is the author of The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South and Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, which Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. He has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, the Wall Street Journal, WIRED, the New Yorker, and National Public Radio. He is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia and served as director of publishing at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., from 1995 to 2013.