This is about Peter Taylor’s story “What You Hear From ‘Em?” The only way I can tell you what I think would spoil it for you. So you might want to skip this note until you’ve had a chance to read it.
What I think: The subject of race relations in the South is so big and ugly, so monstrous, that it’s probably pointless to try to write about it. Or you could write about an old Black woman, Aunt Munsie, who keeps pigs in her backyard in the small town of Thornton, Tenn. Munsie, who was about 12 when the Civil War ended, has kept pigs for a long time. Because she does, she hauls a slop wagon through town, collecting table scraps from people who know her. Everyone knows Aunt Munsie.
Munsie hauls her wagon down the middle of the street. She’s so blind, people worry she’ll get hit. She’s so deaf she doesn’t hear high-school boys hollering at her to move over. She isn’t so deaf that she doesn’t move over when people ask her politely.
What do you do about that?
Munsie raised Dr. Tolliver’s white children after his wife died. Munsie wants her favorites, Thad and Will, to move back home permanently. But they’ve gone off to the big cities, Memphis and Nashville, to seek their fortune. They daydream about coming back. But their fortunes are elsewhere. Before they realize it, so are their hearts and lives.
The Tolliver boys can’t just tell Aunt Munsie she’s too old to haul her slop wagon down the street.
But there was a time, now gone, when it was like this: If you were the son of a squire you could prevail upon the city fathers to ban pigs in town. Since you had standing, you could quietly buy all the pigs from the few people who still kept them. You would pay a generous price.
Then you would explain to Aunt Munsie that the law had changed — progress and all that. And she would accept the new order and would not feel that it was an affront to her or her age or her ways.
That’s not anything like a complete picture of the way the South once was. But the story suggests nuances in a way that people once understood themselves and each other. Those nuances are now lost — or rather are historical artifacts, not part of a living culture.
Peter Taylor was born in Trenton, Tenn., the Thornton of his fiction. I’m descended from another family of Taylors from Trenton. The two families were not related. They were separated by class. My family barely survived the Depression. Peter Taylor’s family had servants.
When I was a boy, I used to go by the big house that Peter Taylor’s grandfather R.Z. Taylor had built on College Street. I knew characters who were like the characters of his stories.
Peter Taylor looked at the culture he grew up in and tried to tell people what it was like. Her once told an interviewer:
That’s the world that I knew growing up, the world of the so-called upper-class people. I know everything that was wrong and wretched about them. But, on the other hand, they fascinate me.
I think all good writers, no matter their background, could say something like that.
• Sources: Peter Taylor’s “What You Hear From ‘Em?” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 327-42.
The quotation is from Hampton Sides, “A Conversation with Peter Taylor”; Memphis Magazine, February 1987. The interview appeared in the magazine’s newsletter here:
https://memphismagazine.com/features/longform/a-conversation-with-peter-taylor/
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