Cane (1923) by Jane Toomer

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Cane (1923)

by Jane Toomer

Hancock County, Georgia

Georgia: 17/23

 Published 5/21/14

Cane (1923)
by Jean Toomer

It makes sense that the first significant African American novelist-writer wouldn't consider himself an African-American writer, and would be so upset by such a designation that he would move to France and turn to spiritualism, never writing another novel. Jean Toomer is present on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list as the first African-American author. Post Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American's were a central THEME in American literature, but typically as characters in the work of well meaning Whites. The rise of African American authors, alongside other non-traditional literary voices, is one of the key occurrences in literature in the 20th century, so even as a one hit wonder, being first in time within that category is a significant achievement.

The vehicle for the emergence of African American literature written by African Americans was the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a multiple discipline artistic frisson that reached across music, studio arts (painting, sculpture) and literature. In the area of literature, the Harlem Renaissance produced the first world famous African American novelists, short story writers, novelists and poets.

Jean Toomer was the mixed-race or "Creole" son of an established Creole family from Georgia. He moved to Washington DC as a child and was raised in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood. He studied at several colleges but graduated from none of them, eventually moving to New York, where he landed in 1919. In 1920, he returned to Washington DC to care for his ailing parents. In 1921, he took a job as a school teacher in rural, African-American Georgia, where he was exposed to that culture for the first time.

Cane is not a conventional novel, but rather a mix of short stories and poems. The characters are largely African Americans: The only white character I remember is a deranged lover who is killed by an African American romantic rival via a slit throat. Toomer is free with his use of the 'N' word and discusses sex frankly and without prudery. The frequent dropping of the n bomb might be one reason this book is little read. Another might be the non-standard format combination of poetry and prose. Regardless of present popularity, it is the first significant work of literature by an African American in the period immediately prior to the Harlem Renaissance (which gave birth to MANY significant works of literature by African American authors.) so it is very much worth seeking out.

Also, Cane is only 160 pages, so you can read it in a sitting.

1,001 Novels: A Library of America, South Carolina

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 South Carolina

Published 10/25/24

Sweetwater Creek (2005)

by Anne River Siddons

Hunting Island, South Carolina

South Carolina: 1/13

   Anne River Siddons was (d. 2019) a well-known writer of popular fiction of and about the South.  She never won any major literary prizes but she had some hits, and signed a 10 million dollar book deal at a time when that was still a lot of money.  Sweetwater Creek is the first book from South Carolina.  South Carolina has a pretty distinctive role in the history of the South by being a primary market for the slave trade.  At the same time, there is some of the social flexibility that is more typically associated with New Orleans- the idea of an urban class of free blacks and mixed-race people that is absent in other parts of the South. In Virginia, for example, freed slaves were forced to leave Virginia almost immediately upon pain of death, which meant that the population of free blacks was very limited. 

   Charleston also developed an intellectual culture that drew upon the outsiders who came and went for trading purposes- more outward looking than comparable locations in North Carolina and Virginia.  Which all goes to say that the area around Charleston is the most interesting place in this chapter.  Sweetwater Creek doesn't take place in Charleston but it operates in the orbit of Charleston, since the plot is a bildungsroman about a young girl who crosses paths with an alcoholic college age southern debutante who is in full flight from her life as a well-to-do young Charleston lady.   I listened to the Audiobook since it looks like I'm going to run out of available Audiobooks from titles in this chapter long before I finish reading the non-Audiobook titles.

  As Audiobooks go, it was one of the excruciating ones- with a third person narrator telling the story entirely from the perspective of this adolescent girl who has never left her Dad's spaniel raising operation in the South Carolina low country.  I lost track of the number of times the protagonist broke down in tears and ran crying to her room to be comforted by her dog.   I did think the depiction of the low country was really memorable and that was really the only thing that kept me slogging through the story to the end.

   

Published 11/4/25

Indigo Girl (2017)

by Natasha Boyd

West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 2/13

   I'm running two or three states ahead of reading physical books, so I'm listening to Audiobooks set in South Carolina and reading books set in Virginia.  That figures to be the major dynamic going forward since I'm almost positive I will close out all the Audiobooks from this chapter months before I finish reading the rest.   I liked Indigo Girl because it is set in the Colonial/Pre-Revolutionary period- when I started the 1,001 Novels project it was clear in New England that the editor favored contemporary stories over historical stories, and I accept that, but all things being equal, say a plot that is a bildungsroman about a young woman in a rural area of America, I'd rather read about the past than the present. 

  The protagonist of Indigo Girl is the oldest daughter of a British Naval Officer who is sent to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. Daughter endeavors to save the family plantation by growing indigo, which has never been tried before in the Carolinas.  This character is a historical person- she ended up marrying Charles Pickney who was the father of one of the signers of Declaration of Independence.  The author added an afterword where she noted how she used historical artifacts- letters by the real version of her character- to give voice to her story. 

Indigo Girl was also interesting to me because it was set in the period before the slave rebellion's in Haiti solidified white opinion against a more genteel form of slavery.  One of the plot points in this book revolves around the fact that in the timeline of the story, South Carolina has recently made it a crime to teach slaves to write, though they did not make it a crime to teach a slave how to read, a fine point picked up on by the heroine and her husband to be, lawyer Charles Pickney. 

  It's not literary fiction, but as historical fiction goes it is well suited for its depiction of early Colonial Charleston.

Published 11/6/24

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)

by Jacqueline Woodson

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina: 3/13

   South Carolina is a geographically distinct state- the southern equivalent of Rhode Island on a bigger scale.  If you look at the map you can see that unlike Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, South Carolina is cut off to the point where it basically looks like a city-state surrounding Charleston.  It's not hard to imagine some alternative history where South Carolina extends across what became Northern Georgia, but the Spanish and French presence in the South precluded expansionism early on, and then Georgia took that part of the US for itself. 

   Brown Girl Dreaming is one of only four South Carolina titles that takes place outside of the Charleston/low country area- Greenville is located in the northwest corner of the state and I had to look up its Wikipedia page to find out that it has a population of 1.5 million.   Brown Girl Dreaming was another easy target- a four hour long Audiobook which is "written in verse"- not poetry, exactly, but not prose- really a succession of very short chapters telling the story of the eponymous protagonist/narrator, the daughter of a single mom from Greenville, who is herself the child of Jehovah's Witnesses. Mom doesn't observe the faith, but the kids do, particularly after Mom decamps for New York City.  Her children eventually follow her up there, and this is another example of a 1,001 Novels title that could be placed on more than one location on the map.  Here, I thought the perspective of a Jehovah's Witness was interesting and I believe the first book which touched on that particular experience but this book didn't add much to my understanding of South Carolina or Greenville- basically all the narrator does in Greenville is hang out with her grandparents and go door to door with her fellow Jehovah's Witnesses. 

   Like many novels written from the perspective of pre-adolescent children, there is, simply put, a limit to how interesting a child under the age of ten can be in the pages of a book- and it's an even sharper limit if the author adheres to anything close to realism.

Published 11/19/24

South of Broad (2009)

by Pat Conroy

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 4/14

   I will say that Charleston, South Carolina seems like the only globally interesting culture in this part of the United States (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina).  The whole idea of the southern aristocrat comes alive in Charleston, which is also a genuinely interesting city which I'd someday like to visit.  Pat Conroy, of course, is one of the most well-known authors in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  He achieved huge popular and limited critical acclaim for this novels, most (all?) of which were set in this part of the world.  Several of his books were adapted into big-budget Hollywood pictures that further cemented his place in the literary imagination of America.  

  South of Broad tracks the experiences of a group of friends from their time in high school in the late 60's to the present day- the book ends after Hurricane Hugo.  The narrator is Leo King, an obvious stand-in for the author.  The book traces back in forth in time from Leo's troubled childhood, marred by the suicide of hid older brother (this is the fourth or fifth older brother to commit suicide in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project) and his own mistake of being caught holding the cocaine of a popular athlete at a high school party.  Leo's Mother is a lapsed nun turned high school principal.  She is also a scholar of James Joyce, a fact that King/Conroy bandies about without it ever impacting the writing style or plot of his book.

  

 South of Broad is a great pick within the parameters of the 1,001 Novels project because Conroy's narrator is a newspaper writer who is himself obssessed with the beauty of Charleston.  He also does a good job explaining the different cultural dynamics of this place, though he seems a bit treacly in his sentiments.  At 20 hours, the Audiobook was no walk in the park, particularly in the early going, but as the plot cranks into gear I found myself enjoying the dramatic third act.

Published 12/5/24

The Hunt Club (1998)

by Brett Lott

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

South Carolina: 5/14

   The Hunt Club is what you call an interesting failure- half of a conventional thriller about greed and life in South Carolina as seen through the eyes of the 15 year old protagonist and half a work of literary fiction about said 15 year old and his family.   It doesn't really land either punch, but it is short enough and there are enough interesting moments to make it a worthwhile read- certainly within the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American it is a good representative of South Carolina, with plenty of tromping about in the marshy landscape of the area north of Charleston.   One of the things I've learned from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project is that there are geographical similarities between the low lands of South Carolina and the swampy wetlands of southern New England- at times I feel like the descriptions- here of lowland South Carolina could equally apply to summertime New Hampshire.

  The Hunt Club has several of the worst tropes in thriller/crime fiction including multiple scenes of various villains loudly explaining what they are doing to people they intend to murder in cold blood.  I've never understood it since seeing James Bond villains do it as a child.  So much talking but at least The Hunt Club was short.

Published 12/9/24

The Invention of Wings (2014)

by Sue Monk Kidd

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 6/14

  I've finished all the audiobooks from the Delaware to South Carolina chapter of the 1,001 Books project, so I'll be moving on to Pennsylvania in one direction and Georgia in the other- fewer than half of the books on this list have Audiobook editions so I suspect I'll be done with all the Audiobooks from this list months and years before I finished reading the rest.   The Invention of Wings is a based-on-a-true-story about the abolitionist daughter of a South Carolina slave-owning plantation family and her relationship with her slave-maid, Handful.  Both characters assume narrating duties, meaning The Invention of Wings takes 14 hours to tell a seven hour story.   The abolitionist daughter, Sarah Grimke is based on a real person with the same biography.

   It's a pretty boring story, to be honest- with no sex (Grimke lives and dies a virgin) and little violence for a book that theoretically chronicles the slave holding society of South Carolina.  The plot even includes a slave revolt, and the resultant violence is limited to one oblique hanging.  I'm pretty sure that is not how that went down. 

   

Published 12/11/24

 The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020)

 by Grady Hendrix 

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

South Carolina: 7/14

  I hadn't heard of author Grady Hendrix before I read his book so I didn't know until after that Hendrix is a writer of what you might call horror-comedy.   Based on the title and the opening chapter I had assumed this was going to be some kind of cozy mystery/comic novel cross-over but as it turns out the horror is taken quite seriously and as I progressed to the business end of the vampire hunting there were several truly horrific scenes:  An old woman eaten alive by rats,  a book club member raped by the suspected vampire and a method of vampire feeding that involve suckling on to the inner thigh of the victim.   These Charlestonians aren't part of the planter aristocracy or the South of Broad professional set, rather they are a bunch of housewives in the traditional sense of that word- five women who do  not work outside of the home and have dedicated their lives to raiding children and taking care of their thankless husbands.

 The issue is, of course, that no one takes their warnings seriously forcing them into a DIY vampire hunt.   The South Carolina stuff is pretty muted- it's clear from the accents of the characters that this book takes place somewhere in the suburban south, but it could have been anywhere.  

Published 1/16/25

The Tubman Command (2019)

by Elizabeth Hobbs

Combahee River, South Carolina

South Carolina: 8/14

   The Tubman Command is a work of historical fiction imagining an episode from the career of Harriet Tubman.  Tubman is best known for her success as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, where she personally led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom.  This book is about her work for the Union Army during the Civil War as a scout, where she was sent ahead of Union forces to reconnoiter and gather information, at great personal risk to her person.  Specifically, it's about a raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina to free blacks from several of the great plantations in that part of the state.   It's a fairly interesting story but the fact that this is a white author writing from the perspective of a famous African American person made me a tad uncomfortable.  Certainly, if you know that fact you know that there is not going to be a single negative observation written about any of the African American characters.  The Tubman Command is more like a hagiographic work than a novel.

Published 1/20/25

Gap Creek (1999)

by Robert Morgan

Gap Creek, South Carolina

South Carolina: 9/14

   Gap Creek is an "Oprah book," i.e. a book selected by Oprah Winfrey for her "Oprah's Book Club."  I would never openly mock Oprah Winfrey, but I've never been a fan of Oprah's club or any of the other celebrity book clubs which followed hers.  A couple hundred books into the 1,001 Novels project I can now say that I look forward to "her" books on the 1,001 Novels list for a couple reasons.  First, chicken or egg questions aside, Oprah picks hits- people actually read the books she likes, which makes her a person of significance in the world of literary fiction because;  second, Oprah and her team have genuinely good taste- it's a taste that clearly favors stories of struggle and adversity often featuring characters from the lower levels of the socio-economic ladder, but those are exactly the type of narrative I'm trying to access through this project, so that makes it a match.  

   Gap Creek was picked more or less from obscurity- it was published by a regional press (Algonquin Press of North Carolina) and half of the New York Times review- published two months before Oprah picked it for her club- spent half the review trying to convince readers not to ignore Gap Creek for a variety of reasons related to the marketing.  Julie Harmon, the narrator and protagonist is the middle daughter of a struggling Appalachian hill family.  Dad is permanently disabled, forcing Julie into the role of provider on the family farm (she is something like 15 when the action starts).  As will surprise no reader with any familiarity with how things go in this category of novel, Julie leaps to marry literally the first man who talks to her as a means of escape.

   Though she frequently bemoans her quick choice throughout the book, I, for one, thought she did just fine, since the husband she picks doesn't beat her up or abandon her, which is pretty rare behavior in this part of the country as far as literary fiction goes.  Julie and her husband re-locate to a shared "house" in Gap Creek and start building a life together.  Although there is less interpersonal drama than a reader might expect from the place and time of the book, the physical environment picks up the slack, providing a series of natural and man-made catastrophe's,

   I agree with the New York Times reviewer and presumably Oprah's selection team that Robert Morgan is a rare American author who can write convincingly about manual labor.  Unlike many of the narrators/protagonist in this part of America, I actually liked Julie Harmon: give me a plucky American broad any day of the week.

  

Published 1/21/25

Edisto (1984)

by Padgett Powell

Edisto Island, South Carolina

South Carolina: 10/14

   Edisto was the debut novel from Padgett Powell. It was nominated as a finalist in 1984 for the National Book Award and that was just about the peak of Powell's literary prominence despite five more novels over the years- including a sequel to this book, Edisto Revisited, published in 1996.  Edisto is a conventional bildungsroman written from the perspective of Everson Manigault, living with his eccentric, semi-single Mother, "The Doctor" (she's a professor) in a ramshackle model home of a beach house on the South Carolina coast.  The plot is coming-of-age 101, but Everson is a class above your normal teen, American narrator, with a wit and verve that bring to mind an 80's era hipster more than the struggling son of a (well-educated) single mom with a drinking problem.  Of course, where would the bildungsroman even be without inattentive parenting.

    I was also challenged by the modernist flourishes introduced by Powell- removing narrative guardrails and leaving the reader guessing about what was actually going on throughout large portions of the plot. "Challenging" describes almost none of the books in the 1,001 Novels project, so having to go back and re-read certain chapters really stood out to me during my reading experience.  

Published 1/30/25

Mama Day (1988)

by Gloria Naylor

Willow Springs, South Carolina

South Carolina:  11/14

   Mama Day is an intergenerational family novel written from a variety of perspectives about an matriarchal African American clan that managed to obtain title to an island in between South Carolina and Georgia in the time before the United States was a country.  Every since, the clan has lived between and apart from the surrounding world creating a distinct African-American world that operates in the absence of white people. As is always the case, the use of multiple perspectives telling the same set of events once, twice and three times over slows down the pace of reading.   Particularly, the main plot line, about Ophelia AKA "Baby Girl" AKA "Coco" the scion of the imperial line of Days, and her relationship with George, a self-made orphan who has risen to be a co-owner of his own engineering firm in New York City, is told first by Ophelia then by George, or vice versa, for the entire length of the book.   As it turns out, despite interesting moments, neither character is particularly insightful about their situation, George having been raised without a family full stop and Ophelia having been raised in a matriarchy with literally no strong male role models.  

  Neither one of them has a clue, and that might have made for an interesting book, but after the couple head back to Ophelia's home island, the book bogs down in a magical-realist witchcraft plot that does no favors to any of the characters.  Mama Day was a swing and a miss for me, with some interesting moments- honestly, ANY African American characters who aren't totally poverty stricken are a welcome break from the usual tone of the titles selected by editor Susan Straight, and the scenes set in New York City, specifically the courtship between George and Coco, fit this bill.  However, the scenes that are set down in the South are tedious, and the idea that this whole book eventually boils down to (spoiler alert) Coco being voodoo hexed by a rival struck me as preposterous- and that's writing as a fan of magical realism, not to mention speculative fiction.

Published 2/11/25

In the Heat of the Night (1965)

by John Ball

Wells, South Carolina

South Carolina: 12/16

  I am inching towards closing out Virginia/North and South Carolina.  In the Heat of the Night was a welcome respite from the parade of sad girls that populate a majority of the 1,001 Novels project and it's a certified classic as well- I checked out the Penguin Classics 50th anniversary edition from the library.  My sense is that In the Heat of the Night has been soft-dropped out of any applicable canon because it's a book with a black protagonist written  by a white guy AND because the white characters use the n-word like it is going out of style throughout the book- they are an obviously unsympathetic bunch, but I swear, there is an n word on almost every of the 150 pages of In the Heat of the Night,  It's hard to imagine a contemporary reader stomaching the rough language without taking offense (or wanting to read a similar book written by a black author).  

  The black police detective from Pasadena- Virgil Tibbs- is a very pre-1960's type of fellow- always careful not to give offense to his racist white hosts, even as the n bombs explode around him. The idea that Tibbs would want to help these people solve a murder seemed laughable to me. 

Published 2/13/25

Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

by Dorothy Allison

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina:  13/16

    Bastard Out of Carolina had me searching for the "Trauma Porn" wikipedia page (which they have titled "Misery Lit" to see if this would have been one of the first books in that genre and sure enough, the Wikipedia page lists Wild Swans (1992) and Angela's Ashes (1996) as "seminal works establishing the genre."  I think there is a good case to add this book to that list. In more old fasthioned terminology it's a bildungsroman about the miserable childhood of the author who was raised by her mother and abusive (physical, mental and yes, sexual) step father in shit town South Carolina (AKA Greenville).  Bastard Out of Carolina still has a capacity to shock over thirty years later- particularly the scenes where the protagonist pleasures herself to the thought of her (physical) abuse at the hands of her stepfather.  

   When things escalate to full blown rape later in the book, she does not take delight in the experience.  Besides exploring that extremely, extremely forbidden link between childhood sexual abuse and precocious sexuality,  Bastard Out of Carolina is also notable/ahead of its time in the way it depicts a mother who ultimately choses her partner over her child.  That continues to be a fraught subject, as the recent turmoil surrounding Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, demonstrates. 

Published 2/14/25

Scarlet Sister Mary (1928)

by Julia Peterkin

Fort Motte, South Carolina

South Carolina: 14/16

    I actually do want to visit South Carolina, Charleston, particularly, and I thought the books from that part of the state were interesting and the ones from outside the city less so.  Scarlet Sister Mary is a Pulitzer Prize winner and it is also a book about freed black slaves written in dialect by a white author so.... kind of cringe? I mean, it's cringe, but what are you going to do.  Mary, the eponymous protagonist, is a woman who marries young and is quickly abandoned by her husband, leading her to have multiple children with a succession of men to the mild approbation of her community.  Having now done enough non-fiction reading (largely via the NY Times hundred best books of the 21st century, which has a half dozen titles on the subject), I now understand that the idea of imposing conventional bourgeois morality on a formerly enslaved population is absurd since the women were forced to have sex by their owners whenever and wherever they pleased, and their children were then frequently sold as slaves.  Where does Christian morality have a place in that world?

  So, I guess beside the entire premise being ridiculous, it's an interesting milieu and one entirely absent of white faces.

Published 2/28/25

Porgy (1925)

by Dubose Heyward

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 15/16

    Here is another novel written about African-Americans by a white dude- using the "Gullah" dialect. (which to contemporary ears sounds like the way racists think black people talk in the South but which is actually a distinct dialect with deep African roots). Heyward turned this book into Porgy and Bess, an opera which had worldwide success but I'm assuming was racist as shit which is why no one talks about it anymore.  It was hard to get over the racist tropes in Porgy and I would def ask editor Susan Straight about this pick for sure.

NOT READ

Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982)

by Ntozake Shange 

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 16/16