One of my favorite stories to read with my senior fiction writing students is J. California Cooper's blackly comic story "The Watcher." The narrator of the story is a sour old woman who keeps her nose in everybody's business, even while her son is dying of an overdose and her daughter nearly dying of a self-administered abortion under her own roof. The story gets its humor and power from the voice of the woman herself, who narrates her own story, oblivious to her own hypocrisy:
Use to be a big ole fat sloppy woman live cross the street went to my church. She had a different man in her house with her every month! She got mad at me for tellin the minister on her bout all them men! Now, I'm doin my duty and she got mad! I told her somebody had to be the pillar of the community and if it had to be me, so be it! She said I was the pill of the community and a lotta other things, but I told the minister that too and pretty soon she was movin away. Good! I like a clean community!
Reading the rest of the collection, titled Homemade Love, had the effect of diluting the power of "The Watcher" for me. Most of the pleasure of the story relies in the faithfully rendered voice, but while none of the other various narrators of Homemade Love are as blinkered as the Watcher, they all seem to partake in the same voice. The exclamation points I thought were an expression of the woman's melodramatic point of view turn out, for example, to be in common use, and appear as something else: a mark, maybe, of earnestness among those who have not "learned" to be sparing with them.
Although Cooper's stories really have only one voice, it's a powerful voice. It's a voice steeped in the African-American dialect of rural areas, a voice that belongs to people in poverty and other difficult circumstances but who have earned a kind of folk wisdom. They tell stories about love, as the collection's title suggests: about bad marriages that are abandoned for good ones, and the virtue of choosing a husband and wife for their character rather than their looks or money. "He a little plump, hair almost gone on top," the narrator of "Down That Lonesome Road says about her husband, "but so am I plump." In "Living," an old man decides he's had enough of life in the country, leaving his wife of decades to go live in the city, where he ends up in the hospital every time he tries to venture out. Eventually, he comes back home to his wife's loving arms, having learned the lesson that's at the core of Homemade Love: the things we think we desire most are never as fulfilling as a steady home.
These stories are funny. "The Watcher" especially, but I appreciated the moment, too, in "Down That Lonesome Road" when a lonely woman ventures by accident into a sex shop, where she's overwhelmed by the array of sex toys she hadn't even known existed. She buys one, out of befuddled desperation, but when she gets it home, she doesn't know what to do with it: she buries it under the chicken coop, and when at last she gets married--there's no substitute, after all, for the real thing--she decides never to tell her husband that it's there.
Reading them in a row, these stories can get a little cloying: that's why I appreciated "Swingers and Squares," narrated by a woman who lets her family crumble because she's devoted to a life of drink and fun, and who looks down on those whose lives are stable and family-focused, unable to understand their peace of mind. It's the closest the collection comes to the ferocious humor of "The Watcher" again. But the earnestness of the other stories buttresses real wisdom and emotional power, both of which are made reliable by the power of the narrator's voices. When they are at their best, the stories in Homemade Love feel like a conversation with a wise and beloved old family member, whose advice you'd ignore at your own peril.
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