The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips Discussion

We will be discussing The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips. Phillips's searing debut reveals the poverty, injustices and cruelties that one black family suffers—some of this at the hands of its matriarch—in a 1958 backwater Georgia town. Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn loves her mother, Rozelle, but knows there's "something wrong" with her—which, as it soon becomes clear, is an extreme understatement. As the novel opens, Rozelle is getting ready to give birth to her 10th child (by a 10th father) and thinking about forcing the obedient Tangy Mae, who longs to stay in school, to take over her housecleaning job. Using a large cast of powerfully drawn characters, Phillips captures life in a town that serves as a microcosm of a world on the brink of change. There's Junior, the perpetual optimist, who wants to teach people to read and write so they can understand the injustices of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan; Hambone, a here today/gone tomorrow rabble-rouser whose anger against white men and their laws inflames those around him; and Miss Pearl, the only true friend to the Quinn family. At the dark heart of the story is Rozelle, the beautiful mixed-race head of the Quinn family whose erratic mood swings, heart-wrenching cruelty and deep emotional distress leave an indelible mark on all her children. Through all the violence and hardship breathes the remarkable spirit of Tangy Mae, who is wise beyond her years; forced to do unspeakable things by her mother and discriminated against by the town's whites, she manages to survive and to rescue a younger sister from the same fate. From The Washington Post For readers who like their novels king-sized, filled with grand plot events and clearly identifiable villains and victims, Delores Phillips's debut novel, The Darkest Child, will not disappoint. This story of an African-American mother and her large family is loaded with killings, maimings and other sensational turns. Readers who prefer a more subtle exploration of the nuances of characters and their situations may find themselves wishing for more restraint and a much closer look at the racial and familial complexities at the novel's center. The first-person narrator, Tangy Mae, is 13 when the story begins in 1958, and the life that she has with her nine siblings and their mother, Rozelle Quinn, perhaps one of the most villainous characters in contemporary American fiction, is one of degradation and brutality. Rozelle not only tries to keep her children from escaping her with such vicious tactics as frequent beatings, ice picks driven through hands and hot pokers used for brandings, she also forces her daughters to provide sexual favors to the men of Pakersfield, Ga., in return for money. Tangy Mae stands out because she is the darkest-skinned of Rozelle's children, and also because she is the most intelligent, the one who loves school and learning and who dreams of a different life for herself. What are we to make, for example, of the fact that, in spite of Rozelle's despicable behavior, so many of her adult children believe that they have no recourse but to honor her? After she deliberately drops Judy, the baby of the family, into a gully, killing her, how are we to accept that Tangy begins to doubt what she has already described for us in vivid and exact detail: "Mama stood at the edge of the porch dangling our baby sister over the side by one arm. As Martha Jean rushed toward them, Mama swung out once, twice. . . .With my hands to my throat, I waited for a third swing that never came. Mama, staring blankly into space, opened her hand and released Judy. I saw my baby sister sail through the air, flipping and jerking, as she began a descent that took her over the rocky incline and down into the gully." When Rozelle claims that she had merely been playing with the baby and that Judy had kicked herself free from her grasp and fallen, Tangy finds her mother's story convincing, thinking that no mother would be capable of such outright cruelty. This comes at a point in the novel when Tangy has already witnessed and been the victim herself of similar brutalities that her mother has levied against her children: the beatings and brandings and stabbings. Tangy knows that her mother is prone to fits of delusion and paranoia, to the point that one day Rozelle becomes convinced that Satan has come into the house and "crawled in that baby." That Tangy comes to believe that her mother never meant to hurt her children, that she was "a gentle woman" is more than the persistence of a daughter wanting to believe in her mother's love. It is a feeble, belated attempt to add dimension to the character of Rozelle. It feels imposed rather than growing organically from the story and the consciousness that presents the tale to us. It is a distortion of the truth that the narrative spins, a truth to which the narrator remains blind for too long: Rozelle Quinn is a wicked, dangerous woman, beyond redemption.