Books: February 7, 1996
Forbidden Love
A Man and His Canine Companions
Books Received
The author offers a searing indictment of white racism
Sweetbitter
Reginald Gibbons '69
Broken Moon Press, $21.95
"Nigger ain't what you is, it's what they make of you. And believe me: they will." This is spoken by one of the many sympathetic blacks in this often riveting, fully rendered story of interracial love in turn-of-the-century East Texas. Reginald Gibbons's hero, Reuben Sweetbitter-and hero he is-had a Choctaw mother and a white father he never knew, but to most of his fellow Texans, not being pure white is as good as being "cullud."
Reuben is at home with no group, especially after his mother dies during their trek toward the Indian reservations in Oklahoma, leaving him utterly alone at 11. A pious black woman takes him in with her already overcrowded family and gives him her own surname. Noting his intelligence, she teaches him to read the Bible. When Reuben goes back out on his own again, he is at least equipped with the knowledge to make his way. His path, however, is "an unwinding one, going wherever he wanted or happened to go."
But then he meets Martha Clarke, the smartest child of a prominent but arrogant white lawyer in Three Rivers, Texas. Martha is unlike her conformist parents, her dull sister, and her boorish brother. Indians were a rarity in turn-of-the century Texas and Martha's curiosity about Reuben's people has been aroused by the inaccurate and inadequate reports she has sneaked glimpses of in her father's library. She is drawn to Reuben, at first attempting to interview him and take notes, but quickly dropping the pencil for his hand.
The relationship is foolhardy for Martha but insane for Reuben. Interracial sex between a white woman and a nonwhite man is "the one unmentionable crime" for which the only adequate punishment, virtually all whites seem to agree, is lynching. The knowledge of this and the continued threat of "the white mob's recreational hatred" hanging over Reuben drive this book with a tension that is often extreme. Sweetbitter offers a searing indictment of white racism. A few more sympathetic white characters might have given the book more balance, but Gibbons's point clearly is to show how racial distrust builds upon itself and works both ways. Gibbons highlights the Negroes' raw deal by subjecting his half-white half-Choctaw hero to it.
Gibbons, whose paternal grandmother was half-Choctaw, is the editor of the literary magazine TriQuarterly and the author of three volumes of poetry. He has written a first novel that is softspoken but outspoken, measured but not slow, replete but not dense.
The book is as much about memory and identity as about Reuben and Martha's moving, mostly uphill-dare I say bittersweet?-attempt to merge discrete worlds through love at a time when segregation was the norm. There are short chapters on Indian lore and historical background, yet the narrative is never stagnant. In fact, many sections have you racing nervously through the pages to see how their arduous flight from Three Rivers will end, or how Reuben will handle yet another charged encounter. Gibbons has created characters you feel for and root for, however "provisional" their happiness may be.
-Heller McAlpin '77
Heller McAlpin is a novelist and freelance critic who reviews frequently for PAW.
The Dogs Who Came to Stay
George Pitcher
Dutton, $18.95
Canine lovers will soak up George Pitcher's story of two dogs that wander into his life and steal his heart. Some 20 years ago, a stray pregnant dog, her nipples brushing against the high grass, meandered into his backyard in Princeton. With lectures to prepare, research to be done, and his thrice weekly trips to a New York psychoanalyst, Pitcher, a philosophy professor, emeritus, thought his life was too hectic for dogs. His roommate, Edward T. Cone '39 *42, a music professor, emeritus, agreed. But before long the canines won their hearts. Pitcher and Cone kept the mother, which they named Lupa (Italian for female wolf), and one "brazen runt," called Remus.
Pitcher was entranced by his canine companions, who worked their way into almost every part of the bachelors' lives. The men took them to dinner parties, on the QE2, into restaurants in France. In fact, Pitcher and Cone never considered taking a vacation without Lupa and Remus. And, as any dog lover knows, the canines seem to be more than animals. The bachelors loved and cared for them as parents love their children. Lupa was also for them "a mother figure." The dogs helped Pitcher overcome a "crippling inability" to express genuine affection and hastened the end of nine and a half years of therapy. Lupa and Remus also taught him how to face death peacefully. The obsessed owner of a yellow lab, I needed four hankies to make it through the final chapters about the dogs' decline. Lupa, writes Pitcher, "taught me how to be with a person in her dying, how to comfort her . . . how to say farewell. And she taught me, at last, how to grieve."
-Kathryn F. Greenwood
Books Received
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald '17, edited by
James L. W. West III
Cambridge University Press, $34.95
Who Is Witter Bynner?
A Biography
James Kraft '57
University of New Mexico Press, $19.95
The Selected Witter Bynner: Poems, Plays, Translations,
Prose, and Letters
James Kraft '57, ed.
University of New Mexico Press, $24.95
Stories of Virtue in Business
C. Edward Weber *58
University Press of America,
$24.50 paper
Brain Tumors
Andrew H. Kaye and
Edward R. Laws, Jr. '59, MD
Churchill Livingstone, $195
Journeyman's Wages (poems)
Clemens Starck '59
Story Line Press, $10.95 paper
Lifebank, A Novel of
Medical Suspense
Howard Olgin '61, MD
Dell Publishing, $5.99 paper
The Reagan Way
Jeffrey Morris '62
Lerner Publications, $22.95
Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers,
and Shrieks: Singularities
and Acausalities in
Relativisitic Spacetimes
John Earman '64 *68
Oxford University Press, $35
On Drugs
David Lenson '67 *71
University of Minnesota Press, $21.95
The Life and Death of
Carolina Maria de Jesus
Robert M. Levine *67 and
José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy
University of New Mexico Press,
$29.95 cloth, $15.95 paper
Papal Patronage and the Music of St. Peter's, 1380-1513
Christopher A. Reynolds *82
University of California Press, $60
Identity Designs, the Sights and Sounds of a Nation
Karen A. Cerulo *85
Rutgers University Press, $50
Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City
Derek Krueger *91
University of California Press, $35