SOURCE: “Negro Characters in the Fiction of Doris Betts,” in Critique, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1975, pp. 59–76.

The sensitive portrayal of Negro characters by Doris Betts creates realistic situations in which mild and explosive confrontations occur. Whether the Negro characters are stereotyped as servants or emerge as the moving force of social change, they are a necessary and convincing part of Betts' stories and novels. Writing of the small town in piedmont North Carolina, Betts has indeed established her place, that element where, Eudora Welty says, the writer “has his roots, place is where he stands; in his experience out of which he writes it provides the base of reference, in his work the point of view.”¹ Betts's saturation of place has made the roots flourish, and her command of subject has produced excellent fiction.

Her first book, The Gentle Insurrection and Other Stories (1954), contains several Negro characters somewhat stereotyped by their social roles. Although Nettie Sue Morrison in “The Sympathetic Visitor” works as a cleaning woman and lives in Rabbittown, she becomes the focus of attention when her brother shoots off his mother's head, rampages up and down the streets, and finally kills himself in Keener Hampton's pasture. The sympathetic visitor is Miss Ward, Nettie Sue's employer, who feels obliged to come and offer condolence. The story centers on Miss Ward's automatic distaste and fear of Negroes—“Every nigger in Rabbittown knew where Nettie Sue lives, especially now. But they didn't want her to know. Miss Ward sighed”²—and on her fascination to see just where the body lay on the kitchen floor as well as to hear a complete recital of the details, Miss Ward parrots the proper statements, “I was so sorry to hear, Nettie” and “It's a real tragedy” which Nettie Sue accepts with appropriate “yessums.” But Nettie Sue keenly senses Miss Ward's desire to come close to violence and death: “You'd like to see, wouldn't you?” “It was a statement of fact. ‘You'd like to see where it happened.’ Was that a smile that flickered on her face?” (14).

The primitive strangeness of the house rushes up to Miss Ward as the women mourners wail the lament, “He won't come home no more, Christ-God / He won't come home no more” (11), and her immediate response is to see savage African women swaying before straw huts. The lament chant occurs five times, persistently echoing the theme of futility. The twisted forces of war and fate made the brother's deeds inevitable and only the sad refrain remains—“won't never come home no more.” Even though the double murder is sensational, even though the senseless violence is especially bitter (Nettie Sue continually asserts that her brother was “a good boy” turned inside out by the war), the world that Miss Ward encounters in Rabbittown was at least not the vapid, self-centered, proper one she herself knows, more carefully avoiding living than she can realize. Pity should go to Nettie Sue for the plight of her dead relatives and for the conditions of life that bind her, but the reluctant tears that sting Miss Ward's eyes at the story's end are for herself. They are for her own safe life in an uncaring world. As first in the volume, the story's position emphasizes its importance. Although early in Betts's career, it establishes her ability to make significant comments on society and human condition.

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In her third book, The Astronomer and Other Stories (1965), Betts draws another Dilsey-Lady Malveena character in Scandinavia Burns, the faithful servant-nurse in “Careful, Sharp Eggs Underfoot.” Again the traditional role dominates; however, the social order is changing. When the comic melee erupts during the Egg Day Celebration, Scandinavia rushes toward home, as egg rockets and umbrella lances flail about as busy weapons. The ladies of the lemonade stand have already set Scandinavia's glass aside for special washing, and she needs no part of the greater upheaval that threatens violence. In four quick sentences Betts recounts the twenty-odd years that Scandinavia has managed the Thomas family:

Scandinavia had been their cook since he and Marva were married, and had nursed Marva through cancer, operations, death. Then she stayed on to run his house and rear his daughter; at present she was supervising the long, slow death of Wriston Thomas, Sr., his father, of strokes and old age. Scandinavia seemed to him like a large, dark lodestone, drawing pain and trouble into herself, sponging up his own fatigue, absorbing his father's senile temper. He relied on her as sailors might rely on the North Star.³

When Wink Thomas' daughter, Sherrilee, home on vacation from the women's college in Greensboro, activates her liberal notions by trying to convince Scandinavia's son, Kestler, to go to college, she succeeds only in making him restless enough to go off to Raleigh and join the army. The carelessness and naivete of the girl bring great bitterness to Scandinavia:

“Now who'll cut my stove wood? … Left me here,” she grumbled. “Left your shrubbery to grow and nobody to do them windows at your office. Left Mr. Teed Kiser with nobody to cut his yard or clean his chicken house. Left us all. … I can't crawl up there and shingle my roof,” said Scandinavia. She was less sad than angry. “I can't shoot no squirrels for stew. I need help turning Mr. Thomas in that high bed.”

(121–2)

Scandinavia is less demonstrative than Lady Malveena, but they share practical wisdom and good judgment that come with age and experience. Scandinavia views “Jim Crow as a complicated joke on white people,” and “was glad she didn't have the responsibility of drawing that line between what was allowed and what forbidden” (123). She had come to terms with life far more successfully that had Wink Thomas who lived in the futile hope that fame and fortune would visit him and his town. We are shown just enough of Scandinavia to know that she will endure despite the unexpected deprivation of an absent son and the token politeness of church ladies at lemonade stands on town holidays.

In the same volume, “Clarissa and the Depths” takes a young, motherless Negro girl, Clarissa, from age eleven (at which time she stopped school and occupied herself keeping house for her father, uncle, and grandfather) up to age thirteen (at which time she earned fifteen dollars a week and hand-me-down clothes working for the white Sullivans). Betts explores several aspects of Negro life. The uncle, called The Terrapin, preaches pride of race and urges Clarissa to continue school; both pleas bring ridicule from Clarissa's father, Harmon, and from the grandfather who labels all such notions automatically—“uppity.” Clarissa herself hears The Terrapin but cannot follow his suggestions.

The grandfather borders on being a thoroughly wicked old man. He lies, declaring that he has owned their leaning house for sixty-two years when it has been only twelve; he takes pride in his illiteracy; he spits unceasingly and unmercifully on the rose bush his late wife planted too near the porch. Harmon remains unconcerned when his daughter quits school, concentrating all of his worry upon the dangers that attend her physical maturing. With his wife dead, Harmon solicits aid from a female cousin, Winnie-Faye, to explain the facts of female life to Clarissa. A bewildering trip through the Scriptures and a side journey into reality leave Clarissa guessing that her periodic visitation may well be like having a tapeworm. Her father warns her against men—colored and white—and she is constantly to “watch herself.” Although her father and the female cousin had convinced her that fooling with men before marriage was as bad as murder, Clarissa cannot resist the way Philo Mingle whispers her name at the door of her room any more than she can resist the tightening and loosening sensations within herself. Her bare hand goes on his chest and the sharpened butcher knife lies on the chair unneeded.

The tone of the story remains light, but the complacent injustices are not ignored: no one really complains that at age thirteen Clarissa is committed to adult work and sexual roles; no one really cares that Cousin Lacy Thorndyke loses her job at the Sullivans because she gets pregnant, a condition that might prompt the white children to ask questions; no one really complains when Miz Sullivan declares Clarissa too long a name for her children to pronounce and says that they will call her Claire instead; no one even chastizes the grandfather for his insensitivity: upon Clarissa's return from her “talk” with Winnie-Faye, he cackled, “‘You knows now, don't you?’ … He spat into the bush almost gaily, as if he were including it in their fun. ‘I guess it's all come home to you now’” (47).

Three depressing events occur, however, which do suggest serious conditions. At the end of the story The Terrapin, who represents the only voice calling for change, falls into the useless Sunday afternoon diversion of sitting on the front porch to watch the cars go by, arguing with his brother and father over the make and speed of each one. The dream Clarissa had also suggests the stalemate that traps them all: she was tied to a tree, hand and foot; her father appeared, left a knife (which her captive hands could not reach) and warned her not to use it unless she had to; The Terrapin also appeared to leave a candle and the warning to “stay and burn.” Among the overtones of these symbolic acts are the father's desire for things to stay as they are, and the uncle's futile desire for change and progress among the Negro people. The story is told with such careful casualness that the reader needs to be reminded that all—going into an adult work scheme, sending twelve of the fifteen-dollar-a-week salary home, willingly taking part in seduction—has happened to Clarissa, age thirteen. Speculations for the future hold little promise; Clarissa has learned at least to retreat into herself, for she has no friends to turn to. Whatever happens, one does not expect her to pine away in abject grief. Her tragedy may be that she will not, cannot, “stay and burn.”

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Betts's most recent collection of stories, Beasts of the Southern Wild (1973), contains “The Ugliest Pilgrim.” Here she is at her best, combining humor, satire, and the grotesque within the framework of a twentieth-century pilgrimage to a pink plastic Jesus. The protagonist, Violet, leaves her North Carolina mountain home to journey by bus to Tulsa, where she fully expects the TV preacher to “HEEAUL” the deep, crooked, ax-made scar that runs down her face. Since the preacher has gone to Tallahassee, Violet first faces his assistant and then God in her futile attempt to exchange her infirmity for another one that is not so noticeable. Violet is more successful in her bus companions than in her interview at the Hope of Glory Building. One of them is a card-playing Negro paratrooper named Grady “Flick” Fliggins. To Violet Negroes are “like foreigners” since there are so few in the mountains: “Mostly they live in Carolina, on the flatland, and pick cotton and tobacco instead of apples.”⁴ Flick has already interested Violet; she watched him play cards on the bus and warns his white soldier friend that Flick is “a mechanic”—he uses a one-handed grip dealing and can peep and cheat. Such unexpected knowledge makes Violet one with the soldiers, and they return from the bus terminal lunch counter to the bus card-playing friends.

The interchange between Violet and Flick shows what sensitive people they are; although the white-skinned, blue-eyed Monty “catches” Violet, first in the cheap hotel room in Memphis and again at the end of the story, Flick expresses more concern about her welfare. When Violet explains her Tulsa mission, Flick immediately suggests that he go with her and “be there for the swapping.” Violet is prepared to take a cough or a limp in exchange for an unscarred face, but quickly retorts, “I'll not take black skin, no offense” (8). The slightly humorous line quickly turns into a serious dialogue. Flick bitterly replies that he did not want the black skin any more than she did, and Violet's sensitive understanding of Flick's frustrations prompts her to worry about what she said and then to apologize.

Flick's instinctive common sense comes through his card playing—he was so good he did not have to cheat. When Monty talks across the state of Arkansas about his motorcycle exploits, Flick listens and then says he rode a Harley once—“turned over and got drug. No more” (12). When Violet considers calling some cousins (whom she does not know) in Memphis, Flick warns her: “Kin people can be a bad surprise” (14). In a dream Violet hears Flick's voice say, “You can't go by looks” (16). Another distinction that marks Monty's and Flick's feelings for the girl is their pronunciation of her name. Monty, whom she yearns to love, immediately says “Vii-lut”; Flick carefully divides the syllables to emphasize the last one: “Vi-oh-LETTE.” Flick's last significant gesture toward Violet occurs when the soldiers remain in Fort Smith and the girl proceeds to Tulsa. “Flick lets his hand fall on my head and it feels as good as anybody's hand” (21). The Negro-white theme takes its place in a story that explores the pathos of isolation and the mystery of love, and which satirizes the craze of the TV preacher-healer who inspires faith in far distant listeners whose hope is attached to shows “taped weeks ahead” (24). However, the brief encounter of Violet and Flick shows the respect and concern mortals are capable of.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the title story of the volume, blends reality and fantasy in a careful balance—nine pages of fantasy, nine of reality. The opening episode is a dream which puts Carol Walsh in a Negro prison atrocity camp, the result of a great revolution. From it she is “chosen” by a Negro named Sam Porter and enters a life of comfort, luxury, and ultimately, love. Paradoxically, her real life as the white wife of a white man, Rob Walsh, is a real nightmare: he resents her education, ignores her feelings and needs, and inflates his hollow ego: “He was thinking how tired he was of a know-it-all wife, who'd have been an old maid, if Rob Walsh hadn't come along, a prize, a real catch” (57). In Carol's fantasy-dream, black men are conquerors, university provosts, and wealthy men: white men and women are prisoners, housekeepers, yard men, and chauffeurs. The new regime completely reverses the social status, and at first Carol is a victim thrown into utter hopelessness by prison indecencies. When Sam Porter takes her from the prison to his home, she still remains the victim and waits for him “like a mongrel bitch he has bought from the pound” (48).

The nightmare is suspended as the story moves into the deadening routine of reality: children quarrel before breakfast; Carol functions as Rob's transistor box; her English students remain lazy and depressingly inept. Before going to bed at night, Carol eats an apple, munching “out the pulp from every dark seed, cyanide and all,” and Persephone-like descends into fantasy: “There was nothing on television to compare with the pictures she could make herself” (52–3). Within the other world, the courtliness of Sam Porter is reflected in the large linen-covered table, the multi-course dinners, the well-lined bookshelves. Everything contrasts sharply with Rob Walsh's petty attitudes and his idea of “class”: a new house in the subdivision with marbelized vinyl foyer, half-Japanese and half-Virginia wall paper, plastic firelogs. Rob Walsh is Earl Fetner with no redeeming qualities; he is sure that if George Wallace were in the White House, interest rates would not have risen; he resents having to reupholster the sofa of a Negro family even though they are paying customers; and he has no capacity for justice or compassion.

As the pettiness of her real life increases, Carol finds that the sophistication of her fantasy life grows. Sam Porter is provost of New Africa University which Carol attended under its old name. With him evenings are spent quietly sipping brandy and reading poetry—“Innisfree,” “Sleuth Wood,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Sonne Rising.” Carol skips “Leda and the Swan” as she reads from Yeats, and Sam catches the omission. Never forcing himself on her, Sam waits for Carol to come to him; after he has recovered from an illness, she does indeed come: “I am taken into his warm darkness and lie in the lion's mouth.” The ecstasy of her fantasy-dream breaks into reality and rouses Rob who quickly proposes love making and afterwards goes to sleep with “one arm over hers like a weighted chain” (64).

The story ends in the fantasy. Sam Porter finds Carol hysterical, raped by an intruder—a white man. The social roles take a last turn when Carol names the man—Rob Walsh. Sam, dressed in black suit, black mask, and black cloak, hunts him down. Returning at dawn, Sam is tired and sick from the finished deed; he turns away from Carol sighing, “There's no love left in me tonight” (65). Now Carol becomes not only the willing partner, but the aggressor, and completely abandons her role of victimized woman; all reservations about Sam Porter are lost now in her love for him. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is technically very fine, shifting from fantasy-dream to reality. Betts shows here quite forcefully her contempt for the prejudices of the middle-class mind.

The fiction of Doris Betts is extremely competent in presenting a great variety of Negro characters distinguished by personality and individualized by special traits. The plight and progress of the Negro in the small Southern town are seriously rendered by the clear divisions of white opinions which manifest themselves during the confrontations with Negroes. Betts's stories and novels are not sociological excursions, but she does not choose to ignore the problems that surround daily living and social change. That “place” which Welty guards as the writer's source has recently been dismissed as a mystique itself and “one form of a mystique of time, which is why so much Southern fiction took the shape of invented family history and of inherited moral dilemma and quest.”⁵ Even though “place” or “home” cannot be limited by definition to a region, the unfolding of events against a land convincingly described and within the doing of indigenous deeds should not be dismissed as archaic. Thus far, Doris Betts's fiction is Southern indeed, and her careful exploration of the events that expose the humaneness of man as well as the remnants of utter cruelty creates characters in a place surrounded by deeds they must do, actions they must perform, confrontations they must face, and mores they must, on occasion, violate. The Negro characters in Betts's fiction stand as a necessary part of the Southern place and clearly reflect the difficulties of social survival that are universal.

Notes

1. Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 55 (January 1956), 68–9.

2. Doris Betts, The Gentle Insurrection and Other Stories (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1954), p. 4. Subsequent references are to this edition and to those cited below.

3. Doris Betts, The Astronomer and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 117–8.

4. Doris Betts, Beasts of the Southern Wild (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 6.

5. Richard Gilman, review of The Surface of Earth by Reynolds Price, New York Times Book Review, 29 June 1975, p. 1.