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| Photo by Joe O'Connell |
As a child growing up in Fort Worth, she would travel with her family to elderly relatives’ homes. Off to the side was a woman, always white, who served as caretaker/nursemaid/confidante. She worked for room and board and a tiny salary.
“The thinking was white women were qualified by race to care for elderly white women,” Harris said in a recent interview. “There was always some story about them that nobody would tell me. It was often scandalous, or ultimately, just that the brother lost the farm.”
Harris’ Gival Press Novel Award-winning “Mayhem” examines just such a fictional scandal and goes deep into how societies and families get dysfunctional in rural 1936 Texas. It’s a world of prim, hardworking German-immigrant farmers.
“I had to imagine a back story — how a woman came down in the world,” Harris said.
She drew from a real-life account of a ’50s fight in the small Central Texas town Goldthwaite between two drunken locals and a couple of soldiers that led to the partial castration of one GI.
In “Mayhem,” the stakes are raised with a presumed marital infidelity/potential rape as the catalyst. But Harris’ narrator makes clear what the author also wants you to know: This is not a rape story.
“I mean, it’s not just a rape story,” said Harris, a retired University of Texas at Austin professor.
Indeed, it’s a larger story of family, vigilante justice and the moral expectations piled on women, in this case recent bride Evelyn Gant, in a society that is quick to assume their guilt and cast them out.
“It’s a double experience: What has happened to her and what has been done within her hearing by her husband and his brother,” Harris said. “She doesn’t remember the events deeply for the next 18 years.”
This German-immigrant place is key to “Mayhem.” It’s far from the center of civilization, and the sexual freedom of the Roaring ’20s proved not a ripple in their world.
“Culture doesn’t change easily,” Harris said. “I’m interested in the daily life of rural people — the work they do and the rhythms that brings to life.”
Harris employs an interesting form of narration to bring her story to life. Essentially a girl is telling the story she imagines for a live-in caretaker much like the one Harris encountered when she was a girl.
The narrator “writes” the story and is truthful about her twisting of facts and fiction to suit her story. So the story, in a sense, references itself.
It’s a trick, but one that works for this story because Harris is after something larger — that sociological layer of choices we make to coexist.
Consider that main character Evelyn, who a few years down the road could easily vamoose to San Antonio and work in the WWII industry for higher pay and anonymity, chooses instead to stay put where she is known as a pariah.
“There’s a certain conservatism where it’s important to know the people you have always known,” Harris said. “She is her family, her ancestors and all of her connections.”
It’s a first published novel for Harris, whose story collection “The Ant Generator” won the prestigious John Simmons Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1991.
But she’s been a regular writer since seeing a film years ago about time management. The message: “Decide what is really important in your life and do that first every day.”
“Mayhem” is set her parents’ era — they were married in 1936, the year of the book’s scandalous incident.
“I’m trying to see through the eyes of the past,” she said. “I’m drawn to write historically about subjects that seem alive to me in the present. Like gender, or trying to tell truths — slippery as they are — about the family past.”
Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.
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