I listened to this years ago – one of my first Audio books – and I was amazed. So I was more than willing to read it again when it came up as a selection in the Modern Fictionreading group. It really is a modern classic.
*******
The Keepers of the House
by Shirley Ann Grau
1964 / 320 pages
read by Anna Fields 9h 17m
rating: 9 / classic US
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Abigail Howland has lived in her grandfather’s rural Alabama house for a long time. Her mother was born and raised there and returned after a time in England. And her grandfather lived there – in fact, there were a couple generations of Howlands who lived there prior to that. It’s an old, rich, well-established family.
But there are other children who are Abigail’s half-aunts and uncles. Children of her grandfather and his “freejack,”* long term housekeeper, Margaret. The town knew, but nobody talked about it.
The tale follows these characters as they live through the Civil War period to the very early 1960s just prior to the days of the active Civil Rights movement. Each of these characters three has sections devoted to their point of view.
It seems slow at times, but it builds to a somewhat tricky ending with the interracial characters in a land of bigotry. But the major characters are so carefully well drawn and the ambiance of the setting so delicate it’s totally worth the wait, the slow building of tension which seems to explode at the end.
This was written in 1964 – the same era as To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee/1960 ) and perhaps more like Go Set a Watchman, but some time after some of Faulkner’s best works where race is a motif and it shows. – There is a haunted feeling to Southern Gothic, a feeling of lush magic and evil and the ghosts of slaves – it’s in The Keepers of the House, too.
It took awhile for me to see that the “honesty” the reviews talk about is there – especially for the era? And it gets spectacularly racist by today’s standards- it feels odd that the country once felt like that, did those things – but I lived through it albeit in the North.
What about this book gave it the Pulitzer Prize for Lit? It is very nicely written and definitely an American story – still (spoiler) don’t look for a happy ending.
* “Freejack” was the term given to black men who were granted their freedom upon discharge from the the 1812-1815 War against the British. Their freedom was given as compensation for having served the United States under the command of Andrew Jackson. Large groups of freejacks tended to keep to themselves, resulting in the founding of the area known as New Church.
http://thepulitzerblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/entry-23-keepers-of-house-by-shirley.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/06/25/good-housekeeping/
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