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The Voice at the Back Door (1956)

door Elizabeth Spencer

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1694160,314 (3.58)23
In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret. In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.… (meer)
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Toon 4 van 4
I wanted to love this book, written in the early 1950s. Unanimously chosen by the Pulitzer Prize jurors as the best novel published in 1956, it wasn't awarded the prize by the Columbia University Trustees, who have the final say. They said nothing. While I know nothing of the trustees in 1956-7, it suits me to picture them as all white men, the generals of business, banking, and industry, Masters of the Universe (though Tom Wolfe was decades from coining that phrase). But still reluctant to endorse this indictment of Southern Culture, this roiling of...mmm…"the race issue". This...erm...exposé was not to be condoned.

Elizabeth Spencer's third novel depicts a dry Mississippi county whose voters must elect a sheriff because the office-holder has died. He departed this life in a grocery store in the town of Lacey, where he'd gone—knowing his life was expiring—to endorse its proprietor as his successor. That man, Duncan Harper, is a local, a low-key man who was, nonetheless, the greatest running back in Mississippi football history.

The sheriff expects Harper will maintain his policies, but Harper is intent on enforcing the county's ban on liquor sales and is supportive of rights for Blacks. As interim sheriff, Harper personally busts a bootlegger. The bootlegger is a life-long friend who has always loved the woman Harper is married to. With the help of a local Black, Harper is set up so his views on race will be publicized in the county and beyond. Then the bootlegger is shot, and rumor quickly spreads that the shooter was Black, that Harper knows who he is and where he is, but that he's covering for him. The victim won't say who shot him. In only a few weeks, Harper's electoral support evaporates. Still, he remains interim sheriff and he continues to investigate the shooting.

As the story unfolds, Lacey society reveals itself as implacably segregationist. The mob rules, but it's easily manipulated. Familiar ring, isn't it?

What is shocking to contemporary readers is the endless, casual use of the n-word. You have to understand that in 1953, not only in the South, but throughout the country, it was a commonly used word. To really appreciate how oppressive the racial climate was, you have to immerse yourself in the conversation of the time. I think it's an essential element of the history, the culture, the story.

Spencer grew up in Mississippi, a member of a socially elite family, living on a plantation with an army of Black servants. It was after receiving a Guggenheim grant that allowed her to retreat to Italy that she was able to confront her own upbringing and write her novel of repudiation. Thereafter, she lived and worked in Italy, London, and Montreal, returning to the South (to Durham, NC) only in 1986.

So did I love [The Voice at the Back Door]? Not really. But I do like it and I admire it. I think it deserved the Pulitzer. I view it as an accurate reflection of an unsavory culture in the 1950s.
1 stem weird_O | Nov 3, 2021 |
time/life books
I wanted to like this. it was interesting to see how southern men thought their wives should keep house, look good, cook well, look after kids but they were really stupid. I found the book really hard to follow and there were too many characters for me. I think she might have told the story in her own order but I think she should tell her readers. I resent being expected to read the book twice to figure it out. ( )
  mahallett | May 31, 2019 |
Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: Travis Brevard is dying, and he knows it. For years, he's kept the lid on his county, the sheriff without rivals or challengers, turning a blind eye to what suits him not to see and zooming in like an owl on a mouse if he's a mind to; but this 1949 day, his life is over and he knows it. Not convenient with a tax list in his pocket, doom for them that hasn't paid and salvation for the elect on the list, and an election before too long. Looks like Travis needs to make sure there's an anointed successor.

He chooses Duncan Harper, town grocer, husband of Tinker and still in love with Marcia Mae Hunt, socially far above a mere shopkeeper and son of a shopkeeper; now returned to her hometown, a war widow, and a source of anxiety for Tinker...and Duncan.

So is set in motion the plot of Antigone...the power change is coming, huzzah huzzah, but not without deaths and secrets exploding in the faces of all and sundry. King Creon's role is assumed by Jimmy Tallant (formerly the swain of Tinker), a bootlegger who advocates for the power of the state and the adherence to the law, albeit as the law is actually practiced if not written. Antigone, mourning love lost or died, is Duncan's role, the advocate for the right of the actual people, as opposed to the state-constituted We-the-People, to assemble and thereby agree on and cause change.

The structure of the argument between the two forces is the campaign for sheriff, eating up that entire summer. At the end of the book, a crime is resolved, the new sheriff is baptized in the deep and cold pool of race and politics as practiced in the Southern States since the end of Reconstruction exactly as in ancient Athens during its civil unrest and social change during Sophocles' time, and a tangle of old feelings, old hurts, and old bonds reformed...all the same strands that drama has always woven into cloth, whether whole and bright enough of color to last for centuries or not, since catharsis was invented by the priestly healers and crying in reflected rage and pain was recognized as more medicinal than the finest potions or pills could ever be.

My Review: Spencer's well-mannered Southern-lady language, with its stateliness and its rather deliberate pace, will likely jangle in modern ears. Her liberal (!) use of the n-word (I loathe political correctness, but I was raised by a mama who thumped me if I uttered that word because it was disrespectful of people I'd never met, and that was Not Allowed, so I just can't type it...I flinch too hard, waiting for the blow) is not of today, not done in coolness. (I go on record here as thinking that behavior is not cool, no matter who does it. I also don't like constant swearing for the same reason: It's not cool. It's just ill-mannered.)

Well, anyway, this novel won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, at least according to the jury, but the board declined to award the novel the prize. Rather like 2012, the board felt the jury chose an inadequate exemplar of the year's American fiction crop. Happen I agree, in this case, as I agreed with the board's 2012 decision not to award a prize to any of the literary chaff nominated by the 2012 jury. Only I can't find a list of the other books the judges considered, so I can't say I the board was simply being conservative (in 1957, remember, the Little Rock riots happened and LBJ got the first-ever civil rights legislation through a very very very scared and divided Congress, so there's some logic to this) or if the field consisted of microbooks like it did this year (srsly, Swamplandia! for a still-major literary prize?! Sheesh).

This isn't High Literature, and it's nowhere near as good as Spencer's short fiction. It's just fine. It's a middlin'-good story, it's got nicely drawn characters that I've already gone hazy on, and it's got a few lovely turns of phrase that are so typically Southern that I felt no need to note them down.

I'd put it in the Better Beach Reads category of my own private bookstore. More meat than shudder Dan Brown. A book for Rehoboth Beach, not Venice Beach. ( )
1 stem richardderus | Apr 28, 2012 |
2741 The Voice at the Back Door, by Elizabeth Spencer (read 7 May 1995) This book was written in Italy in 1953 and published in 1956. It is a story laid in Spencer's native Mississippi and the author, when she returned to Mississippi, after Brown v. Board of Education, believed a character who believed in fairness for Negroes and ran for sheriff would then be impossible. Now the book tells of another age, with blacks being regularly elected in Mississippi. This is an excellent book, and while it does not have a happy ending, I found the ending moving and satisfactory--it is a powerful indictment of most Mississippi whites the way they were. This is a great book and Spencer is an able writer. ( )
1 stem Schmerguls | Mar 4, 2008 |
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In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret. In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.

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