Alice Walker’s story Strong Horse Tea is a good example of a story framed quickly and expertly. Here’s the opening:
Rannie Toomer’s little baby boy Snooks was dying from double pneumonia and whooping cough. She sat away from him gazing into a low fire, her long crusty bottom lip hanging. She was not married. She was not pretty. Was not anything much. And he was all she had.
The story is not about a baby. It’s about what people will do when they’re desperate. Rannie is contemptuous of Sarah, an elderly neighbor known for her home cures. Rannie wants a real doctor and accosts the postman, begging him to bring help.
Sarah asks Rannie whether she really believes the white mailman is going to summon the white doctor to help.
People say trust is the foundation of all human relationships. I suppose they’re right. Have you noticed, though, that the lack of trust is a theme in a lot of the literature about my part of the country?
• Source and note: Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forker and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 355-62.
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