I read and thoroughly appreciated the audio version of the short story collection, Neighbors and Other Stories. Diane Oliver wrote the stories in a period of continued civil rights activity in the United States just when the major Civil Rights Acts were before Congress and ultimately passed. She died in 1966, two years after their passage. Oliver writes about ordinary but extraordinary people, mostly Black southerners living in the Jim Crow South. Libby, with five children, whose husband Hal disappeared, leaving her to take a “domestic” job for an employer straight out of “The Help.” In fact, over and over, her stories foreshadow later books by those who survived to write their fiction.
Several of the stories focused on young people becoming engaged in the movement: The white Maryland older teenaged son who plans to head South to help out, with an unusual source of support against his father’s ranting; the Black teenaged girl who joins three friends at a Department store tearoom sit in, with small town results; the little boy on the night before he is going to desegregate an elementary school a la Ruby Bridges. Others look at different perspectives on Southern Black family lives, from poor rural families, to well to do professional families to one very disturbing family that is living off the grid before that was a thing. One of the stories is partly feminist, partly a long word poem that feels straight out of the beat generation and partly a tragedy told from the perspective of a not very nice guy. Another examines an interracial relationship from the perspective of the white divorcee who gets involved with a Black man. The flavor of the times, the fifties and sixties is present throughout, but Oliver speaks with a contemporary voice about privilege, about women’s rights, about the challenges of being Black and poor in the USA as well as the cultural relationships within the Black community of those who have “made it” and those who have not.
Oliver would have been right up there with the other writers of her generation and the loss of this sharp voice and writing that immediately connects us to her images of humanity feels devastating. I want more. The publication of this book of short stories is an act of love and I am so delighted to discover her work. She wasn’t just a promising writer when she died in a motorcycle accident at age 22, She had published several short stories and was going to be a star. I listened to the audio version of this collection. Tayari Jones, author and academic, wrote an introduction that pays homage to the work and Oliver’s talent. Narrator Emma Rachelle slays it.
They Called me Bookworm 