“Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait” is a piece of advice for novelists attributed variously to Charles Dickens or Charles Reade. For now let’s say it was Dickens, whose name and works are invoked several times in De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel In West Mills. Some of Dickens’ most recognizable literary elements are evident as well: crisply drawn characters with fixed attributes, an episodic plot, a prevailing sentimentality, and a comedic verve.
Winslow brings these features to bear on a narrative about relationships within a black community in West Mills, a rural town in North Carolina. The story opens by introducing the headstrong Azalea Centre, a 27-year old school teacher who has lived alone on Antioch Lane since arriving from her family’s home in Ashokie, N.C. It is 1941. She hates her job but does it well. Azalea was given the Dickensian nickname “Knot” by her father because “she would ball her little body up almost into a knot” in order to hold onto whatever she had grabbed for her pleasure. Also living on the lane are the aptly named Otis Lee Loving, his wife Penelope (“Pep”), and their son Breezy. Otis Lee’s most notable qualities are generosity and care; when Knot has drunk too much corn liquor, he makes sure she gets a decent meal upon sobering up. Several other characters join the cast, including Knot’s lovers.
In West Mills is a novel about the nature of intimacy, narrated by a conventional omniscient with a tight focus on close encounters – an impossibly endowed perspective that nevertheless tells us: a vast empathic peering and recall are required to understand people. Winslow’s genius is to make this state feel accessible. Furthermore, his choice of materials says: we must look where we haven’t cared to look before. The people living on Antioch Lane, or enjoying friendship and drinks at Miss Goldie’s Place, or gathering staples at Manning’s General Store, have only sparsely populated our fiction. Intimacy in this story is also enclosure and division: whites are cited but don’t appear. There are very few references to the greater world.
On Antioch Lane, if a mother feels she can’t keep her newborn, another couple is ready to adopt. A boy grows up to become the lover of that now teenage adoptee whose birth-mother interacts with her as well. There are secrets, open and concealed. Why does the mother give up her child? It is as if Winslow is saying: just observe, just listen. Lean in and feel the tension and release. You will recognize these challenges, losses and desires.
The vibrancy of In West Mills derives mainly from Winslow’s attuned ear for the vernacular, employing it not to demote characters into homey types but to reveal the force of their response. One of Knot’s few close friends is Valor, the gay bartender at Miss Goldie’s Place whom Knot calls “Valley.” It is Valley who consoles her with wine when her lover Pratt departs for the war and her beloved father, a dentist and avid reader who taught her to love “The Old Curiosity Shop,” tells her she is unwelcome to visit the family:
“I do wish you’d let up ‘bout me and my pa, Valor.”
“Well,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her, “at least ya sisters still nice to ya.” Then he sneezed. They lay there silently for a few minutes, passing the flute back and forth. “You know what, Knot? I think I’ll join the service. Air Force.”
Knot rolled her eyes at him and said, “Boy, please. You ain’t joinin’ shit. Hand me that glass.”
“It’s a flute,” he retorted. Before he handed it to her, he examined it closely. “Where you get this flute, Knot? It look like –”
“Yours,” Knot affirmed. She had taken it from his apartment that last time he’d written and asked her to go and make sure he had emptied all the food from his icebox. Then she said, “Don’t be a fool like Pratt. With this service talk, I mean.”
“Military ain’t foolish,” Valley shot back. Then he sneezed.
“We probably live in one of the few places in this whole damn country that live our lives the same, war or no war. Why can’t folk live well enough alone?”
Winslow’s characters probe, cajole and argue; they turn away and come back for more. Sometimes years pass before a character reappears. The story proceeds fluidly over a span of nearly five decades. At the end, there’s another Dickens trait: a character who comes into one’s fortune after a long trial. (You may think I’m making too much of this Dickens echo. When Knot is hired to teach, another teacher is dismissed and leaves her husband, Milton Guppy, who becomes Knot’s antagonist. In Dicken’s Bleak House, a lawyer named William Guppy provides comic relief. No coincidence.)
However, Winslow hasn’t crafted In West Mills as an homage to Dickens. Rather, the novel is an impeccable application of the familiar to the disregarded. He may be disinterested in modernist gestures and themes, at least in this project. But Winslow shows us that the old ways of being new never lose their currency when the hand directing the art is steady, deliberate and as willfully delighted with itself as Azalea Centre.
[Published June 4, 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing, 261 pages, $26.00 (US)]