THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406240476
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACKIE R. BOOKER
DATELINE: 940626 LENGTH: Medium
GWENDOLYN M. PARKER
{REST} Houghton Mifflin. 260 pp. $19.95.
\ \ THESE SAME LONG BONES is a novel as much about the setting, Durham, N.C., as about the main characters, Sirus and Aileen McDougald and their daughter, Mattie. Time is also important, as author Gwendolyn M. Parker describes events in the present by examining the past, using Mattie's accidental death as a looking glass into the characters' lives and their community.
Set in Parker's birthplace during 1947 and 1948, this work establishes a truism about Durham and its black community: Some blacks - ``colored'' was the most common term used during the Jim Crow era - were prosperous. Sirus, a light-complexioned man who could have passed for white, amassed a small fortune. President of a black bank, he also earned considerable money from the land. While his father farmed, Sirus was a land speculator and developer.
As seen through Mattie's eyes, Aileen is a troubled wife, dutiful but unhappy with a marriage that soured after initial bliss. Circumscribed in her marriage and even more so by Durham's racial segregation, Aileen can work only as a volunteer nurse, despite her extensive background and qualifications. In addition, Sirus devotes so much time to his business interests that he neglects Aileen. She becomes a symbol of his success, not a wife.
Mattie, 12 at the time of her death, is talented, articulate and precocious. She represents a new hope among Durham's black middle class and also a link to the segregated past. Her death, a loss and a defeat for Sirus, further damages the relationship between Sirus and Aileen. But her memory also serves as a challenge to Sirus when he is pressured to join white businessmen in an unscrupulous venture: the construction of substandard housing for Durham's poor blacks.
Parker develops her characters and themes against a backdrop of black middle-class life in Durham. Black preachers, insurance agents, doctors, butlers, domestics and others all had their successes and failures within society. Still, none could completely control his or her own destiny; black men, women and children all looked to Sirus, Aileen and Mattie to lead them to a better life. One middle-class black person, in describing this dependence on Sirus's leadership, suggests: ``Sirus thinks the future should look like the past; that's why he can't understand real progresses.''
Parker's use of the child's death as a prism to capture the past and the present is both confusing and effective. Her transitions between time periods are not always clear and sometimes lack significance. Using Durham's post-war black community, however, does add a necessary historical dimension.
Most blacks, then and now, put their hopes and aspirations in prominent black families and in their children. For Sirus, Aileen and Durham's black community, Mattie's death symbolizes defeat, but it also presents a heady challenge and eventually engenders the will to overcome.
by CNB