Humble straw, spun to gold, but not the weaver or the princess. Crumbs of rye bread, waypoints dropped on the ground, but not the adventurous children entranced by a house of sweets. A little black bean that sprouts overnight, instead of the clever child who outwitted the giant. These are the fairytales reimagined by Magnolia, the bowed but unbroken heroine in House of Cotton, the provocative debut novel by Affrilachian author Monica Brashears who portrays the lingering, creeping grip of the Southern plantation.
House of Cotton opens tellingly at a funeral, with asides into Magnolia’s inner world of her fairytales with diminished outcomes. Death, literal and metaphorical, clutches the novel like the kudzu that Magnolia imagines choking her while she grieves the loss of her beloved grandmother, Mama Brown. She suffers indignantly but silently, through the ministrations of the infamous Southern church politeness, all surface sheen with barely concealed severe judgements. At the same time, she struggles to deter the creepy advances of the deacon who, as her landlord, attempts to exploit her sudden vulnerability. Magnolia feels acutely that space is closing in around her:
“Yes, places like these made for small living. How Mama Brown live her whole life hunched down, cramped? I want room to fill my lungs all the way up, room to exhale real slow. Maybe Mama Brown did know how suffocating our life has been, not having nothing but walls and a thumping heart. If she knew all my bad thoughts, she’d say: Magnolia, why you sitting in pity when we got a pearl in the sky, shoes on our feet, and love in our bones? I can’t see the moon as a pearl. If I’m sitting in pity, let me sit.”
Brashears develops this theme of space throughout the novel, as Magnolia’s world alternates between stifling contraction and illusory expansion, before nearly suffocating her. The tale is told in Magnolia’s voice, powerful and vibrant, slipping self-assuredly in and out of distinct registers for different environments, then expressing an uncomfortable fragility and dread of emptiness at her core.
That void is soon filled by a chance encounter at her dead-end job with the eccentric artist, Cotton, fresh from New York but a Tennessean like Magnolia, who leaves his business card and an unusual modeling offer. Desperate for cash to pay the rent and to afford a pregnancy test, Magnolia is pulled into the world of Cotton & Eden Productions, Cotton’s harebrained scheme to enliven his inherited funeral parlor business. With the help of Eden, Cotton’s aunt and a cosmetics sorceress, Magnolia undergoes a series of transformations for clients wanting a final chance to connect with a loved one who disappeared without a funereal. With each scenario, Magnolia channels the dead while inhabiting the roles of murdered socialites, vanished cosmeticians, or a romantic obsession that got away. The veil between this world and the next is continually torn asunder as Magnolia struggles to come to terms with the loss of Mama Brown and her own newfound, torturous success as doyenne of the dead.
In House of Cotton, the living and dead exist in an eternal state of co-dependence, so it is inevitable that Magnolia’s grief and her unusual communion with the departed will summon her grandmother. But Mama Brown’s ghost is no Gothic beauty:
“Mama Brown sits on the edge of the tub. One eye wanders. The other: gone. Her socket filled black with dirt. Her silver curls still fresh and tight from foam rollers. She sucks in air. A pebbled breath, words pushing through her teeth in the buzzing tune of a honeybee … A roly-poly crawls from her scalp, across her unblinking eye, over the hill of her nose, burrows in the soiled socket.”
Magnolia’s descriptions are rich with such details that ground these otherworldly apparitions firmly to the earth, and underline her intrinsic connection to this world while her thoughts may be fixated on the next. With each manifestation, there is less of grandmother, as fingers and limbs are shorn — and in a worrying development — are stolen by Mama Brown’s own boogeyman, “Cricket,” a white door-to-door Bible salesman — Magnolia’s grandmother had witnessed his sudden death and is haunted by it still. Cricket needs a soul in hopes of redeeming his own, and he sets his eyes on both Mama Brown and Magnolia’s recently aborted fetus.
As a Southern Gothic tale, House of Cotton is shaped through the strangeness of its characters, and propelled by their complex behaviors. Whether living or dead, black or white, each person in Brashear’s Knoxville hides an unsettling secret. Memories, letters, drunken confessions, and eruptions of sexual intrigue or perversity reveal their turmoil — and their tension in seeking some means of escape.
Much of the novel may be regarded as commentary on the long reach of the Southern plantation even into the age of encroaching exurbs, rampant narcissism, and casual Tinder hook-ups. The racial and historical connotations of Magnolia leaving her grandmother’s home in the woods to live in Cotton and Eden’s old-money palace are obvious, and emphasized by Cotton’s boast to Magnolia that he could “buy your family.” That claim is a key to understanding that Brashear’s ambitions for the novel extend beyond the themes of lingering racial bigotry and inequality. Magnolia finds overlapping layers of entrenched power and communal hopelessness.
Nowhere is this layering of power structures embodied more dramatically than in the two male characters who exploit and endanger Magnolia. Cotton’s initial insensitive comments aside, for a time it appears his influence will finally bring some financial security and hope. Despite the power he wields, Magnolia consents to an intimate shift in their relationship. That is at least more than can be said for her landlord, Sugar Foot, whose sexual violence leads to another fairytale fantasy.
“He drops bits of me on the ground. It’s okay because it don’t hurt. I am crumbs of rye bread. I don’t mind being scattered … He drops the last of me in the yard of a candied cottage … A fat crow swoops, lands. He pecks at me with his stony beak. I say: Get off me, you crow. I say: Your breath smells like the dead.”
Magnolia imagines becoming the inanimate, unable to feel pain, when faced with horrific abuse. Later revelations about Sugar Foot, who owns the house where Magnolia and her grandmother have lived since she was young girl and abandoned by her mother, blur the distinction between coercive dominance along racial lines, and the general struggle between the haves and the have-nots of any background.
Further shades of this universal class conflict are depicted in Magnolia’s relationship with her mother, Cherry, a white woman whose neglect of her child, substance dependency, and poor relationship choices lead to dire lifelong consequences for her only daughter. The sad circumstances of Cherry’s life will be woefully familiar to anyone who has witnessed the decay of their own rural communities, as a poor but once proud and self-sufficient populace is ravaged by ever-widening financial inequality and inequity, chemical dependence, domestic instability and violence, leading to child neglect and endangerment.
As bleak as all this must seem, the author holds out some hope for Magnolia. A target of injustice and abuse, she is far from a helpless victim. The power that Cotton thinks he holds over her is illusory; Magnolia gauges his weaknesses and turns it against him at a crucial point. Cotton’s and Eden’s names may be overloaded with symbolism, but aptly, the perseverance and endurance of the magnolia tree have preserved its own survival.
Magnolia blossoms and draws strength through the natural world. She and Mama Brown never put any store in organized religion, only reluctantly attending church at holidays and unavoidable occasions. But they share a belief in the healing power of herbs and roots, the transformative properties of the earth, whether in warding off the attacks of the ghoulish Cotton or inducing a miscarriage for a baby that Magnolia is unable to raise.
In a heartbreaking letter to God that Magnolia writes and rewrites in her head as she endures the suffering, she bemoans her fate while not expecting any help from that distant and unfeeling deity. “But now, I’m in that pocket of space between being hurt and being better. My hurt been so constant, so normal. Why you let me get the chipped teacup living?” Magnolia, chipped but not dashed to pieces, while straddling poverty and wealth, black and white, trauma and recovery, is a survivor, and though perhaps not yet convinced she is worthy of acceptance and love, she does sense that something better awaits her. After her journey accompanied by the dead and the not-quite-living occupants of House of Cotton, the reader can only hope she summons the strength to take the road suddenly opening before her, and discovers that she can be the heroine of her fairy tales.
[Published by Flatiron Books on April 4, 2023, 304 pages, $27.99, hardcover]
Gorgeous review of an unusual book.