The Keepers of the House

 I recently listened to the most phenomenal novel, one which I had never before heard of, called The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. One of the great novels of the Old South, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. I cannot imagine why there has not been a movie. It is a novel about the love between a man and a woman which transcends prejudice while simultaneously sowing the seeds of familial disaster in a hypocritical unforgiving world. From the Alabama Writers' Forum Blog:

The fiction prize has gone to an Alabamian three times. Most famously, the 1961 Pulitzer was awarded to Harper Lee. The other two winners are T.S. Stribling for The Store in 1935 and Shirley Ann Grau for The Keepers of the House in 1965.

In keeping with the Pulitzer centennial, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at one of the Alabama winners. (Not Mockingbird; enough has been said there.)

I am very glad I did. The Keepers of the House, which recently passed the fifty-year mark, is brilliant, powerful, stunning. The committee should have given Grau two Pulitzers.

Grau, raised mostly in Montgomery, set Keepers perhaps fifty miles outside the state capital, although the state is not named and the little town outside Montgomery becomes Madison City.

The story is told by Abigail Howland. Abigail is on the porch of the Howland place remembering recent events from the 1950s and some from her childhood in the ’30s. The past is powerfully present in Southern culture, and although most of the characters are dead, they are not exactly gone either; there are ghosts in this house.

The family narrative begins when her grandfather’s grandfather settled some land given for his service with Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. That Howland worked, farmed, hunted, and, over time, in spite of the Civil War, extended his holdings and prospered. The house itself was added to, wings and galleries, as needed. There would eventually be twenty-two bedrooms.

Two generations later Abigail’s grandfather William married in Atlanta and brought his wife home. That wife, Lorena, died, leaving a daughter, Abigail’s mother.

As a widower, William is not happy or unhappy: self-contained, but social, not a hermit, went to church, played the mandolin at parties, and had a mind of his own. He ignores local disapproval of his subscription to the New York Tribune even though the postmaster himself tells him, “William, I am plain afraid you have lost your mind.” (Read more.)

 

From The Dish:

The book nominally details seven generations of the Howland family, but the focus is primarily on two of them: the fifth William Howland and his granddaughter Abigail, who returns with her mother to live with her grandfather after her father abandons the family to fight in World War II, and ends up raised by her grandfather after her mother dies shortly after. William brought a young black woman named Margaret in to be the housekeeper after his own wife died in childbirth, and Margaret eventually became his mistress, bearing him three children, each of whom was sent away to schools in the north where their mixed heritage would not be held against them. While the relationship was commonly known in the area, the locals – depicted by and large as the sort of upstanding racists you might associate with the South of the 1950s – overlooked it as a quirk of those crazy Howlands.

After William dies, Margaret moves back to the black section of town with her family, and Abigail and her ambitious politician husband John Tolliver move into the Howland estate. When John runs for Governor of Alabama, a post he’s favored to win in a landslide, one unknown detail emerges about William and Margaret that derails his campaign and marriage while bringing the wrath of the town upon Abigail, thereby unlocking within her generations of outrage at the hypocrisy all around her, from the local whites who would tolerate such miscegenation up to a point to William and Margaret’s children who try to reject their black heritage.

The first three-fourths of Grau’s novel feel like many other novels in the subgenre of southern literature, telling a vast story of a family that once ruled a vast estate or accumulated great wealth but watched it fritter away via complacent or dissolute descendants. But Grau plants many seeds (no pun intended) in the early going to set up a dynamite climax (same) that gives Abigail two shots at revenge on her family’s tormentors, taking advantage of the unspoken dependence of the townfolk to enact a vicious vengeance. Abigail serves her revenge piping hot, and because of its genesis, it’s an extraordinarily satisfying conclusion for the reader.

It’s even more potent for Grau’s decision to tell the story with Abigail as the narrator. Imposing that fog over the family history – it’s passed down orally, so bits of it seem embellished, perhaps impossible – meant that images become clearer as the story approaches the material Abigail herself would have seen, and allows us to trace the development of her identity as a Howland, especially from the time when she goes to live on the family estate. In the time when Grau wrote Keepers, it was unthinkable to have a black character enact the sort of revenge Abigail gets – as it was, Grau ended up with a cross burned on her lawn after the book was published – so giving us a white woman who was raised in a house where black children were treated as cousins was probably the closest Grau could get. And in so doing, she never spared the white racists who smiled and said the right things but harbored the same centuries-old bigotry in their hearts. (Read more.)

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