A great read, a great buy!!

A great read, a great buy!!

A great read, a great buy!!

the edition of Neighbors i own has a forward by tayari jones. in her introduction jones cites oliver as one of her literary foremothers, a remark I did not fully appreciate until as an afterthought, a couple of weeks later, i finished readng Neighbors. of tayari jones, she has forged a successful literary career by mining marriage as a theme, which has made her one of our best living authors.diane oliver, jones’ foremother, took in Mint Juleps not Served Here, a pivotal story in this collection, a traumatized family unit, father, mother and son, and moved them to an all black environment where they soon discover they can’t escape the white face of bureaucracy. what distinguishes this story from oliver’s other stories is an intact marriage. to read Mint Juleps Not Served Here as integrated with most of the other stories is to see, disturbing as the pivotal story is, how this story functions as a revenge story for the racial injustices of several of the other stories.james baldwin, citing a blues lyric in one of his essays, wrote that when a woman gets the blues, she hangs her head and cry, when a man gets the blues, he catches a train and says bye. well, oliver’s women are seldom given to tears, they are too stunned by what they must do and the outcomes of taking seats in a segregated tearoom, accompanying a very young sibling to a school which has never admitted black students. as mothers, husbands gone, left to work as domestics to raise children so many in number as to bear out a stereotype, while a middle class, college educated woman is an adulterous wife with her many lovers, stretches the promiscuity of the stereotype. other forms of marriage, the returned husband, the second wife, the white wife, came under oliver’s pen.oliver died in 1966. her stories are situated in the south, during the civil rights movement. the dynamics of intimate relationships in the south explored by her show scrutiny of the ideas in the published essays of james baldwin. in one amusingly story, Banago Kalt, a school visit by a university student with two of her white classmates to an all white town in switzerland, is reflective of baldwin’s 1955 essay, A Stranger in the Village, collected in Notes of a Native Son.besides tayari jones, diane oliver’s influence, however minimally intentional or unintentional, can be seen in the works of alice walker, toni cade bambara, and gloria naylor. a talented life cut too short, leaving us to wonder what she would have done had she more years.

the edition of Neighbors i own has a forward by tayari jones. in her introduction jones cites oliver as one of her literary foremothers, a remark I did not fully appreciate until as an afterthought, a couple of weeks later, i finished readng Neighbors. of tayari jones, she has forged a successful literary career by mining marriage as a theme, which has made her one of our best living authors.diane oliver, jones’ foremother, took in Mint Juleps not Served Here, a pivotal story in this collection, a traumatized family unit, father, mother and son, and moved them to an all black environment where they soon discover they can’t escape the white face of bureaucracy. what distinguishes this story from oliver’s other stories is an intact marriage. to read Mint Juleps Not Served Here as integrated with most of the other stories is to see, disturbing as the pivotal story is, how this story functions as a revenge story for the racial injustices of several of the other stories.james baldwin, citing a blues lyric in one of his essays, wrote that when a woman gets the blues, she hangs her head and cry, when a man gets the blues, he catches a train and says bye. well, oliver’s women are seldom given to tears, they are too stunned by what they must do and the outcomes of taking seats in a segregated tearoom, accompanying a very young sibling to a school which has never admitted black students. as mothers, husbands gone, left to work as domestics to raise children so many in number as to bear out a stereotype, while a middle class, college educated woman is an adulterous wife with her many lovers, stretches the promiscuity of the stereotype. other forms of marriage, the returned husband, the second wife, the white wife, came under oliver’s pen.oliver died in 1966. her stories are situated in the south, during the civil rights movement. the dynamics of intimate relationships in the south explored by her show scrutiny of the ideas in the published essays of james baldwin. in one amusingly story, Banago Kalt, a school visit by a university student with two of her white classmates to an all white town in switzerland, is reflective of baldwin’s 1955 essay, A Stranger in the Village, collected in Notes of a Native Son.besides tayari jones, diane oliver’s influence, however minimally intentional or unintentional, can be seen in the works of alice walker, toni cade bambara, and gloria naylor. a talented life cut too short, leaving us to wonder what she would have done had she more years.