The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
"The Lottery" was stunning. I read it twice to make sure I picked up on the clues that foreshadowed the ending. At first, I didn't understand how the other five works were even in the same book. I just didn't understand what was so scary about "The Other Stories" Then something happened in my life. And the chill of the Lottery suddenly stood out to me much more clearly.
Shirley Jackson writes horror for polite white women. She teases them for being tight lipped and proper, pokes at them for being terrified of what what other people might say or think. "The Lottery and Other Stories" are tales of what happens when you find yourself on the outside of the society that raised you. When you make just that one wrong choice and suddenly you are "Put Out".
Among the other stories "Flower Garden" stood out to me the most. A young woman, Mrs Winning, is the newest member of the Winning family, the oldest family in a of their small Vermont town. She makes friends with a new comer, Mrs. MacLane. Mrs. MacLane is a widow from the city. She's beautiful and has bought the lovely cottage that Mrs. Winning has always wanted to live in.
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| photo by Ksena Chernaya |
Mrs. Winning tries to warn Mrs. MacLane; she points out that all of Johns children are mixed with white, and that their mother moved away. Mrs. MacLane doesn't hear the warning. She continues to behave "oddly".
The story is told from Mrs Winning so we can see her react in horror as the town suggests that she warn Mrs. MacLane, seeing as how they are friends. Mrs. Winning doesn't want the community to think she'd be friends with someone they are obviously turning against.
When Mrs. MacLane finally catches up to Mrs Winning she asks her if her new gardener is
the reason everyone has suddenly turned on her. Mrs. Winning smiles and lies. She even promises to visit. In her head though she's disgusted that Mrs. MacLane would openly complain and even more so that she'd blame the poor Negroes for her troubles.
"The nerve of her, trying to blame the colored folks" (99) After all between Mrs. MacLane and Mr. Johns, she's the one with the all the power. It's not the Negro's fault that she is taking advantage of them.
This is how so many white people talk about race, even today. "I'm not racist but -" "I'd never say that word." "I just don't see why they can't get over it." "We just want everything to stay "nice" and "pleasant", equal and never ever changing."
What puzzled me, after reading this, was the hypocrisy. The black man is a handy-man in town. Others had hired him before. What was the big deal?
The problem, I gradually realized, wasn't what he was doing - it was who everyone thought he was doing. Mrs. Winning was trying to warn MacLane that the man was unmarried, and that he already had a history of sleeping with white women. They'd be alone together in that house without any supervision. "People will talk!"
The problem is sex!
Is sex the root of a racism?
"Flower Box" by Shirley Jackson goes hand in hand with "The Boy Detective and the Summer of 74 by Art Taylor.
In this story a young man at the cusp of puberty stumbles upon a mystery that no one cares about but him. He discovers several large bones in the neighbor’s yard and wonders where they are from.
He throws himself into the mystery to distract himself from the fact that this is the last summer of his childhood. His friends are too interested in a torn page from a playboy magazine to help him. His father is always lecturing him about the approaching responsibilities of manhood. A new girl in town further complicates his feelings by taking interest in the case he's trying to solve.
Everything comes to a head when Cooper learns that he is to meet this girl for a play date. His mother is nagging him with questions about her when, thanks to his rising hormones, Cooper solves the mystery. To distract his mother from his personal thoughts and feelings he blurts out his conclusion. Thus, utterly ruining the lives of two adults that have nothing to do with him, the girl, or the end of his childhood.
*spoiler!**spoiler!**spoiler!**spoiler!**spoiler!**
Cooper discovered that the Negro butcher from the far side of town visits the lonely white widow next door after dark. The butcher brings a soup bone to keep the widow’s dog quiet when he comes into the yard. It's that chewed up soup bone that capture's Cooper's curiosity.
Because Cooper was nosey and insisted on being a detective, he may have gotten the butcher killed. Because of the racism of the rest of the town, that lonely woman was probably
left traumatized and further ostracized when Cooper's father, and the other men of the town, descended on her home to reinforce their social order. No one cared about the widow, and she’s not likely to ever marry again after this incident. The butcher was a threat purely because "We can't the other's think it's ok. We let one get away with it, others may try".
And because Cooper's just a little white boy, he moves on with his life oblivious to the damage he's done until well into adulthood. and is reflecting on the last summer of his childhood. The worse thing that happened to him, was that his father stopped going to the black side of town to get stakes after that.
Like the Flower Garden the characters in the story do not acknowledge the injustice of the situation. The characters are on the side of the status quo. They keep the their side of town pure. A black man vanishes and everyone just goes on with their lives as though nothing happened.
The horror lies in the shadow of innocence. That's what Shirley Jackson was writing. I didn't understand it fully until I myself was married to a white man, gave birth to our little light skinned daughter, and began to experience the disguised kindness of “well meaning” strangers - the doll-like smiles, the out of nowhere compliments "Oh what a beautiful child!" "What lovely hair!" from people who would not otherwise have seen me. It's my own family code switching in front of me to talk to my husband, then getting hand-written responses declining the invitation to our wedding. It's the not really being welcomed at Christmas anymore because my presence makes a certain uncle fighting mad. It's folks on the white side of the family not existing until after the election in 2016, then suddenly being very vocal about their beliefs, but not about me or us. I'm “one of the good ones".
Its idiots marching in the streets, and barking online about being replaced.
It's about a black man being gunned down while jogging, not because he looked at house being built, but because his killer's daughter was dating a black guy.
Racism is about sex. About keeping the races separated so that we always know who’s them and who’s us.
How would Shirley Jackson have written the years following the 2016 election? What young Art Taylors will grow up to speak of the horrors outside of their bedroom windows that they didn't see until they were older? Where do we go from here, now that the curtain has been pulled back, and we see how nasty the glass has been all this time?
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| Photo by cottonbro studio: |
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