"Magic" by Katherine Anne Porter (1924)

Katherine Anne Porter (1890 to 1980, born Indian Springs, Texas) is one of America's most loved writers. Her best known work is Ship of Fools.  Luckily, she also wrote a lot of short stories.  Like two other female writers from the American South with whom she is often grouped, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, she wrote about the old days in the South.  Like them, her stories often center around the troubled race relations of the period.  

"Magic",about ten pages, is set in New Orleans in 1924.  Even then, New Orleans was a place deeply into the occult, evil charms and dark spells.  The story is told via a monologue of an African-American woman telling her employer about her old job working as a cleanup up woman in a brothel, called at the time a "fancy house".  She tells her employer she saw many scandalous and shocking things while working there.  When a man wanted a girl, he paid the Madame and she gave him a brass token and when he was done with the girl,he have her the token.  At the end of the month the girls turned in their tokens and were paid.  There were lots of fights with the Madame who often short paid the girls.   If they tried to leave either the sheriff or paid thugs brought the back as the Madame would claim the girl owed her money. One of the black cleaning women claimed to know magic spells so when one girl tired of being cheated runs off, she casts a spell on her using remnants of her nail clippings and hair from a brush to bring her back totally subservient to the Madame.

"Magic" is beautifully written.  You can see the serving woman is using the story to cast her own spell over her employer.  

The Library of America has just published three E Books of the work of Katherine Porter, available now on I Books, and elsewhere but not yet Amazon.   If you download the sample edition of her Collected Stories and Other Writings, you can read this story and several others.

I hope to read her full collected short stories and novels. 

"The Grave" by Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter (Texas, USA 1890 to 1980) won just about every American literary award worth winning, including the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award.  Her most famous work is her novel, Ship of Fools.  I was very glad to see that an excellent web page I follow, Recommended Reading had placed one of her short stories online.  Her full collection of short stories comes to nearly 1000 pages and many say they are her best work.  Her stories work the same ground as Eudora Welty, William Faulkner,  Flannery O'Connor and Nora Hurston, the rural American south in the days between the world wars.  Like these stories, teachers should note that "The Grave Yard" contains politically incorrect racial terms.  

My main purpose in posting on this story, besides trying to seal it in my porous memory, is to give my readers the opportunity to read one of her stories online for free.  The story is set in rural Texas.  The grandmother of the family moved there some years ago as her husband wanted to buried there. In tie they start a family graveyard and lots of people join the grandfather.  A brother and sister, 9 and 12 are out hunting rabbit.  In an amazingly powerful scene, they begin to skin a rabbit they shot only to find she was about ready to give birth.  This deeply impacts the girl.   There is a lot in this story about life in rural Texas. I loved the closing lines of the story:

"Miranda never told, she did not even wish to tell anybody. She thought about the whole worrisome affair with confused unhappiness for a few days. Then it sank quietly into her mind and was heaped over by accumulated thousands of impressions, for nearly twenty years. One day she was picking her path among the puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city of a strange country, when, without warning, in totality, plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened, the episode of the far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind’s eye. She was so reasonlessly horrified she halted suddenly staring, the scene before her eyes dimmed by the vision back of them. An Indian vendor had held up before her a tray of dyed-sugar sweets, shaped like all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. They were in gay colors and smelled of vanilla, maybe… It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had remembered vaguely always until now as the time she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves. Instantly upon this thought the dreadful vision faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face she had forgotten, standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands."

There is a deep wisdom in this story.   

Mel uRead the story here

Three Great Short Stories by Ladies from the American South

"He"  by Katherine Anne Porter (1927, 8 pages)
"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty (1941, 5 pages)
"The Geranium" by Flannery O'Connor (1946, 5 pages)

Three Wonderful Short Stories by

Ladies of the American South

I know it  is considered in some very trendy quarters to be no longer correct to refer to a collection of women as "ladies"  but in the case of Katherine Anne Porter (Texas), Eudora Welty (Mississippi) and Flannery O'Connor (Georgia)  I cannot bring myself to refer to them in any other way.      Each  produced world class treasures in the novel and the short story.    I have posted on all three of these writers already so I just want to let people know about these three stories I have recently read.    The stories are a bit "regionalized" in the same way Irish short stories often are but don't let that stop you from reading these stories!

"He" by Katherine Anne Porter.    Porter (1890 to 1980-Indian Creek Texas) is probably best known for her 1962 novel Ship of Fools.   She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her collected short stories.   The received opinion is that, the same is true of all the writers of today,  her short stories are her best work.    (There is additional background information on her in my prior post on her.)   "He" is a heart breaking story about a mother's love for her mentally challenged son.   The family in the story is struggling to survive in the face of some of the worse times in American history.    The setting is small town Rural Texas just before the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.    This story, told in the third person, is so beautifully written it is almost painful.   As the story opens we learn that the mother cannot help but love him more than her other two children.    He is also a burden on her and her husband.   I think one of the biggest concerns of parents of mentally challenged children lies in their fears about what will happen to them when the parents are gone.     Who will take care of their mentally handicapped ten year old son when he is twenty, thirty, forty or fifty.   When he is stronger than his father?   Can or should he be prevented from reproducing?    Porter does a masterful job of making us feel the parents concerns.   We also see how having such a child can change (and sometimes wreck) a marriage.    At the end of the story we have to decide if the right thing has been done for the right reasons.   This story will make you think.

You can read "He" HERE

"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty (1909 to 2001-Jackson, Mississippi-Pulitzer Prize 1973) is a favorite of book bloggers world wide.    She was a good friend of Elizabeth Bowen and spent some time at her castle in Ireland (I would loved to have listened in at tea time!)    This story is set in small town Mississippi in the 1940s in  a time when all of the negative stereo types about the American South were reality.    As it opens a young girl is making a visit to a charity home for old people.    She is going so she can earn "points" in her Girl Scout type of group. What is great about this story is the interaction of the girl, the two very old women she visits (they are roommates) with each other and the women with the girl.    It is up to us to decide what the girl gets from the visit.   (There is additional information on Welty in my prior posts on her.)

You can read "A Visit of Charity" Here.    Lakeside Musings has an excellent post on this story.

Of these three writers, I guess Flannery O'Connor's star is now shining brightest.   Kenzaburo Oe treats her work as a near holy text.    O'Connor (1924 to 1964-Savannah, Georgia) was the author of the well regarded novel Wise Blood but it is her short stories that will bring her immortality.   (There is additional background information on O'Connor in my prior posts on her.)

"The Geranium" was O'Connor's master thesis at the famous Iowa Writer's Academy.   I think is one of her very first published stories.    She was only 21 when she wrote it.    I concede it does not have the full power of some of her more mature work but it is for sure worth reading and not just to see her first short story (but to lovers of the short story, that is really a good enough reason).   The story centers on an elderly man that has been rescued from a charity home by his adult daughter.    The fun of this story is in the depiction of the relationship of the father and his daughter and his interaction with his enviornment.   The story is also about race relations and it makes use of words that may rule it out as a class room story.

You can read "The  Geranium" HERE

Mel u

"The Old Order" by Katherine Anne Porter plus notes on An Interesting Old Collection of Short Stories

"The Old Order" by Katherine Anne Porter (1927, ten pages)

I have been wanting to read a short story by Katherine Anne Porter (1890 to 1980, Texas, USA) for a while now.   Her most famous work is the novel, Ship of Fools.   Book sales and sales of the film rights for this book made her financially independent.   She won in in 1966 the Pulitzer Price and the National Book Award (these are the  two top American Book Awards)  Her work will be covered by copyright law in the USA until 70 years after her death so it is not possible to read much if any of her work online.    Her best work is now considered to be her short stories.    Wikipedia has an very well done article on her.

Just a few days ago one of my cousins, Bonnie,  sent me a very interesting book that her late mother had owned for at least fifty years, A Treasury of Short Stories edited, selected and individually introduced by Bernardine Kielty.    The book was published in 1947.   Kietly was for many years on the editorial staff of Story Magazine and was the fiction editor of The Ladies Home Journal.    She was also on the selection staff of the Book of the Month Club.   This is a long book (884 pages) with lots of good stories, among them "The Old Order" by Katherine Porter.   Kiety's judgement seems  good.   She includes stories I have posted on by Mansfield, Bowen and Woolf and at least 10 writers not yet in the public domain that I have wanted to read including a Eudora Welty story.   Probably books just like this can be bought in thrift shops and yard sales all over the USA for a very low price.

"The Old Order", like many of Porter's stories, deals  with race relations in a post Civil War America.   It took me a few paragraphs to understand the setting of "The Old Order".    It takes place on a small farm in the American South right after the American slaves have been freed.   The farm  is managed by what seems to be a kind and considerate woman.   Many of the women in this era were war widows.    One of her slaves curses her terribly as she leaves for an unknown free future somewhere.   Her oldest slave, Nannie, who her father bought for $20.00 stays with her mistress as she had no where else to go.   The owner and the slave are nearly the same age and  grew up together.   They ave indulged in kind of a grim contest of seeing who could have the most children!     Many slaves stayed with their masters all their lives.

Porter just does a wonderful ever so subtle job of capturing the relationship of the two women, one a slave or ex-slave and the other her owner.   When the slaves brag about how much they cost it was very moving to see how they had been  trained to accept the values of their masters.   The slave woman wonders why God has been so cruel to her race?    She fears this cruelty make extend into the after life but her mistress insures her she is destined for heaven.   Of course this brings to mind debates about the use of Christian religious tenants to pacify and control slaves by telling them all will be right in the next world.  

In the story we see the struggles of the women to survive when they move to Texas.   We get a real feel for their relationship.   "The Old Order" is a very good story.    It may have language that would make it controversial as a class room book in some countries.   If I had to, I will say that I prefer Bowen, Mansfield, or Woolf to this story but I am very glad I read it.     From this collection I will next post on a story by Eudora Welty.


Mel u