The Darkest Child

From Publishers Weekly
Phillips's searing debut reveals the poverty, injustices and cruelties that one black family suffers—some of this at the hands of its matriarch—in a 1958 backwater Georgia town. Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn loves her mother, Rozelle, but knows there's "something wrong" with her—which, as it soon becomes clear, is an extreme understatement. As the novel opens, Rozelle is getting ready to give birth to her 10th child (by a 10th father) and thinking about forcing the obedient Tangy Mae, who longs to stay in school, to take over her housecleaning job. Using a large cast of powerfully drawn characters, Phillips captures life in a town that serves as a microcosm of a world on the brink of change. There's Junior, the perpetual optimist, who wants to teach people to read and write so they can understand the injustices of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan; Hambone, a here today/gone tomorrow rabble-rouser whose anger against white men and their laws inflames those around him; and Miss Pearl, the only true friend to the Quinn family. At the dark heart of the story is Rozelle, the beautiful mixed-race head of the Quinn family whose erratic mood swings, heart-wrenching cruelty and deep emotional distress leave an indelible mark on all her children. Through all the violence and hardship breathes the remarkable spirit of Tangy Mae, who is wise beyond her years; forced to do unspeakable things by her mother and discriminated against by the town's whites, she manages to survive and to rescue a younger sister from the same fate. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For readers who like their novels king-sized, filled with grand plot events and clearly identifiable villains and victims, Delores Phillips's debut novel, The Darkest Child, will not disappoint. This story of an African-American mother and her large family is loaded with killings, maimings and other sensational turns. Readers who prefer a more subtle exploration of the nuances of characters and their situations may find themselves wishing for more restraint and a much closer look at the racial and familial complexities at the novel's center.The first-person narrator, Tangy Mae, is 13 when the story begins in 1958, and the life that she has with her nine siblings and their mother, Rozelle Quinn, perhaps one of the most villainous characters in contemporary American fiction, is one of degradation and brutality. Rozelle not only tries to keep her children from escaping her with such vicious tactics as frequent beatings, ice picks driven through hands and hot pokers used for brandings, she also forces her daughters to provide sexual favors to the men of Pakersfield, Ga., in return for money. Tangy Mae stands out because she is the darkest-skinned of Rozelle's children, and also because she is the most intelligent, the one who loves school and learning and who dreams of a different life for herself.This dreaming, of course, is a poignant and urgent matter, and we can't help but feel the burden that Tangy Mae carries -- the simultaneous desire to love and honor her mother rubbing up against the intense need to create her own life beyond her cruel dominion. The success of the novel, then, depends on Tangy's ability to narrate the story from her perspective beyond its events. She must dramatize the action while also revealing the inner lives of the characters involved. This requires a clarity of vision that Tangy clearly has, not only as the narrator who looks back at her family's story, but also as the child participant in the midst of its horror. Unfortunately the novel never allows either Tangy, the child or the adult, her full range.Phillips never permits Tangy to use her promised powers of intellectual and emotional savvy to strip away layers of a complicated world of family abuse and racial tension until we arrive at truths we never could have glimpsed otherwise. For all the strengths of the story itself, Tangy remains a narrator capable of more insight than she ultimately displays. At critical junctures, she fails to see her world and its circumstances with enough sophistication and clarity to convince us that all is true and valid.What are we to make, for example, of the fact that, in spite of Rozelle's despicable behavior, so many of her adult children believe that they have no recourse but to honor her? After she deliberately drops Judy, the baby of the family, into a gully, killing her, how are we to accept that Tangy begins to doubt what she has already described for us in vivid and exact detail: "Mama stood at the edge of the porch dangling our baby sister over the side by one arm. As Martha Jean rushed toward them, Mama swung out once, twice. . . .With my hands to my throat, I waited for a third swing that never came. Mama, staring blankly into space, opened her hand and released Judy. I saw my baby sister sail through the air, flipping and jerking, as she began a descent that took her over the rocky incline and down into the gully."When Rozelle claims that she had merely been playing with the baby and that Judy had kicked herself free from her grasp and fallen, Tangy finds her mother's story convincing, thinking that no mother would be capable of such outright cruelty. This comes at a point in the novel when Tangy has already witnessed and been the victim herself of similar brutalities that her mother has levied against her children: the beatings and brandings and stabbings. Tangy knows that her mother is prone to fits of delusion and paranoia, to the point that one day Rozelle becomes convinced that Satan has come into the house and "crawled in that baby." That Tangy comes to believe that her mother never meant to hurt her children, that she was "a gentle woman" is more than the persistence of a daughter wanting to believe in her mother's love. It is a feeble, belated attempt to add dimension to the character of Rozelle. It feels imposed rather than growing organically from the story and the consciousness that presents the tale to us. It is a distortion of the truth that the narrative spins, a truth to which the narrator remains blind for too long: Rozelle Quinn is a wicked, dangerous woman, beyond redemption.Tangy's naiveté is problematic in a novel that is otherwise lush with detail and captivating with its story of racial tension and family violence, a story that requires a clearer and more probing eye in order to portray its many complexities. Reviewed by Lee MartinCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"THE DARKEST CHILD is a fierce and bitter story, told with striking authority. Delores Phillips has created a family and a town rich with resonant voices, all of them caught up in struggles both personal and public, and a mother so wildly commanding she earns a place beside some of the great madwomen who embitter the lives of the children who love them." -Rosellen Brown

Review
"THE DARKEST CHILD is a fierce and bitter story, told with striking authority. Delores Phillips has created a family and a town rich with resonant voices, all of them caught up in struggles both personal and public, and a mother so wildly commanding she earns a place beside some of the great madwomen who embitter the lives of the children who love them." -Rosellen Brown

Book Description
Rozelle Quinn is so fair-skinned that she can pass for white. Yet everyone in her small Georgia town knows. Rozelle_s ten children (by ten different daddies) are mostly light, too. They sleep on the floor in her drafty, rickety three-room shack and live in fear of her moods and temper. But they are all vital to her. They occupy the only world she rules and controls. They multiply her power in an otherwise cruel and uncaring universe.Rozelle favors her light-skinned kids, but insists that they all love and obey her unquestioningly. Tangy Mae, thirteen, is her brightest but darkest-complected child. Tangy wants desperately to continue with her education. Shockingly, the highest court in the land has just ruled that Negroes may go to school with whites. Her mother, however, has other plans.Rozelle wants her daughter to work, cleaning houses for whites, like she does, and accompany her to the "Farmhouse," where Rozelle earns extra money bedding men. Tangy Mae, she_s decided, is of age.This is the story from an era when life_s possibilities for an African-American were unimaginably different. Delores Phillips was born in Georgia. She is a graduate of Cleveland State University and works as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in Cleveland. This is her first novel.


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A grim tale, set in the dying days of segregation, about one young woman's struggle to escape her past, her mother, and her duties. Phillips writes vividly and certainly creates memorable characters-most of them, however, remembered for their nastiness, there being an absence of redeeming features. The blacks who live in Pakersfield, Georgia, are almost as nasty as the whites, who are all racist, vicious hypocrites. Both races father illegitimate children, and while the older blacks fear confrontation, the younger want to act immediately. The story, told by Tangy Mae, begins as her mother Rozelle gives birth to her tenth child, Judy. All the children have different fathers, Tangy Mae the darkest, while Rozelle herself is the product of a white man who raped her mother. Rozelle, who takes center stage, is a monster whose treatment of her children reads like a charge sheet. Which is the novel's fundamental weakness: Rozelle is beyond awful, disowned even by her mother, but the author offers no explanation for her cruelty. And as Tangy Mae, a bright student, struggles to stay in school, keep Rozelle happy, and care for her siblings, she records the horrors her mother inflicts on her children. She insists that all the money they earn, including that of her two grown up sons Sam and Harvey, be given to her; she forces daughters Tara and Mushy to work at a local whorehouse, and she beats them, burns them with cigarettes, insists they shoplift , and denies them proper education. While Rozelle becomes even more out of control, a young black activist is hanged, and Sam and his angry cohorts burn down white stores, with inevitable repercussions. The most lethal damage, though, is till to come atthe hands of Rozelle. Good intentions, but overwrought.


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