Confederacy of Mermaid Matriarchs: Carolyn Ferrell's "A History of China"

It's really nice when a story smacks you in the face with what it's telling you. I'm talking about lines like "She was having fun, wasn't she?" as in Emma Cline's "Los Angeles." Lines you can highlight with confidence, knowing those are the breadcrumbs that will lead you to the heart of the meaning of the story.

Then, there are the stories like "A History of China," where I start to follow half a dozen different trails, only to have them all lead me into a brier patch. If I hadn't committed to blogging my way through Best American Short Stories this year, this is the kind of story where I'd finish reading it, think "Huh" to myself, and move on to the next one. But committing to critiquing something means committing to being a good reader, even with a story that asks a lot of you.

I don't think I'm going to be able to get to the mother lode of meaning on this story, but maybe I can trace some of the excavations I did looking for it.

The simplified plot

Sasha Jean is at a family reunion in North Carolina. Her father, the black sheep of the family, has died, and Sasha Jean feels it is on her to let the family know. Before dying, Sasha Jean's father willed the 37 acres of North Carolina land where the reunion is taking place to Sasha Jean. He'd swindled the matriarch of the family, Elldine, out of it before she died. In the father's will, he told Sasha Jean to bulldoze the entire land and build something new on it. The family suspects Sasha Jean's father had tried to do this, but don't know he succeeded. They're still looking for this black sheep to come back home so they can forgive but not forget. Sasha Jean can't bring herself to tell them about her father's death or the will.

A giant-ass family tree

I tried to sketch out the family as it's given to us in this story, but I failed. I think great-aunts are being called "aunts," which made a mess of all my branches. We are told that Sasha Jean's father, Bobby Lee, had only one sister, Vitrine, but then the story goes on to name several other "aunts" of Sasha Jean. They definitely aren't coming from her mother's side, so I don't know where they're coming from.

More immediately to Sasha Jean, besides her father, black sheep Bobby Lee, there is her mother, a post-WWII German girl the father met while stationed in Germany in the Army. The mother, Elspeth, came to the U.S. after running away from her mother, stealing the dishes meant for her wedding day. When Elspeth comes to the U.S., she lives with Bobby Lee in the house of his mother, Barbara.

A janky timeline

One of the things that frustrated my attempt to crack this story open was a timeline I couldn't get to make sense. I don't think these are plot holes, but I did have a hard time with placing the times in this story. The reunion is happening some time after 1997, although it's not clear how long after 1997. Elspeth came to live with Bobby Lee five months after getting a letter from him in April 1961. However, the second day she is in Bobby Lee's mother's house, she sees a photo of MLK on the wall with the words "I have been to the mountaintop." I realize MLK probably used that allusion before 1968, but would it have been that closely associated with him before then?

More confusingly, it is also 1961 when Bobby Lee and Elspeth are talking to a real estate agent about buying a house on Long Island. And Bobby Lee is rocking little baby Sasha Jean while they're looking at the house. But that's impossible, because Elspeth just came to New York in late 1961.

How old is Sasha Jean at the reunion? At least 36. She might be pregnant. How old is she when she might be pregnant? Over 40?

Elspeth is old enough to remember World War II. So,  let's say was born in 1935. Then, she'd have been four when Germany invaded Poland and ten when the war ended. Old enough to remember a lot of it. But then she'd have been 26 when she came to Long Island, and she seemed much younger than that.

I don't believe this carefully written story has plot holes. Maybe I made mistakes not realizing we had jumped from one time to another in the story, although handy little lines usually clued the reader in that a break in time was coming. But if they're not mistakes, then how do I read these things?

Some of the false paths I went down

So here are some of the ways I tried to peel back the onion on this story and didn't quite have it work out:

1. The family's old land is a relic that needs to go. Bobby Lee was a not a good person. When everyone realizes Elspeth is in New York to marry him, they all worry that he won't be able to settle down. The family cites an entire page of grudges against him. Easily worst of all, he sexually molests Sasha Jean when she is ten.

The plot of land where the reunion takes place is reminiscent of an old-South plantation. It's got a big, old, crumbling house and seven ramshackle trailers on it. At least one family seems to have lived in one of those trailers. Sasha Jean frequently associates the land at the reunion with slavery. She muses that she will eat "slave food" at the reunion. Sasha Jean has sewed her father's will into her dress, "sort of like the way slaves traveled with their papers." Sasha Jean remembers her father encouraging her to remember slave history in school. Finally, in the final dream-like pages of the story, in which Sasha Jean and her closest cousins will continue to stay on the land:

...even with the brays and hollers of the slave women in these woods, their feet smashing snakes, their arms tattered by thorned vines, their minds agape with the babies they could not afford to carry. The slave women are deafening, the slave women are worse than ghosts. You wonder if your parents are trapped here with the slave women. Would they torture your parents like ghosts in a cheap horror flick? Would that make you feel any better?

As flawed as Bobby Lee was, maybe he was on to something. Maybe there was a reason he left North Carolina and never came back. Maybe knocking the the plantation down is a good thing, and needed so everyone else can start over again, too. Although the rituals of the family carried over from slave days were useful for surviving slavery, they make less and less sense the further from slavery we move in time.

But does that make sense? The cousins closest to Sasha Jean, the ones most forward-thinking, seem to be a little mixed on the notion of what to do with the house. Although Kate, the white girlfriend of cousin Monique, agrees with tearing it down (and then immediately says she loves it), Monique vows defiance: "If Bobby Lee (who she doesn't know is dead) intends to take back Grandma Elldine's house, he's got another thing coming. Family is family. We got our own ideas."

2. It's about matriarchy and the power of women. The men are hardly named in this story. Bobby Lee gets a big role, and cousin Stanley comes in to get his pills stolen, but mostly, we don't know who the men are. All the old men are just "the uncles." In the dream-like sequence at the end, the four friends all turn into mermaids (known to lure male sailors to their death) as they swim in the pond in the woods full of slave ghosts. Sasha Jean might be pregnant, but we hear nary a word about who the father might be.

Does that make sense? It's an incomplete takeover of the system by the women, if it's supposed to be about the power of women. When Sasha Jean sees her fellow mermaids, they seem strangely "bloodless," meaning they've failed to kill any men. Monique's rebellion against the men amounts to nothing more than low-level vandalism. Elspeth fails to take Sasha Jean away from her molesting father. And there is rebellion within the matriarchy: Elspeth's entire reason for leaving Germany seems to have had been largely fueled by revenge for her mother.

3. It's about being syncretic and absorbing the best of other cultures in order to keep yours healthy and vibrant: The family immediately takes to Elspeth when she arrives from Germany. And she turns out to be good for them. Cousin Meggie calls Elspeth the best mother ever, and credits Elspeth with saving her life. When Meggie was living in poverty and neglect (I think in a trailer on the land where the reunion takes place), Elspeth confronted Meggie's mother to make her take care of Meggie. "Your mama saw, Sasha Jean. And she said something. And at that point, my mama had no choice but to look at me."

There are children in the family with names suggesting influence from many cultures: Juan, Cleopatra, Johann, Clotilda.

The whole name of the story is about "China," but not the country. It's about China the dishes. Elspeth brought dishes with her from Germany, but later was gifted others and then bought an expensive set the day after she learned her child had been abused. So the title is a clue that the story has something to do with bringing new things from other cultures into the mix.

Does that make sense? Elspeth also comes across as menacing, like a rich tourist walking through the third world to find poor children to help. She is also described as a "queen," suggesting she is something like the lady of the manor come down to the slave quarters. And all three sets of dishes have negative connotations to them.

Ultimately, I can't really make any way of reading this story stick. Here are a few other random bits I don't know how to parse:

-The name Bobby Lee. Sasha Jean's dad is named for the guy nearly synonymous with the old south. What's the significance of this?

-The story ends not with Sasha Jean, but with her mother on the day after she moves to America. Elspeth is thinking that her mother will now be finding out that not only did her daughter run off, but that she took the dishes. She imagines her mother's face, "disappointed and yearning at the same time. Not at all the right punishment for the crime."

What does this mean? Whose punishment are we talking about? It could mean the mother's crime, the one that made Elspeth run off. Elspeth remembers the mother refusing to help Jews just out of the concentration camps, pretending not to know they were starving. It would be consistent with Elspeth's character to consider not helping someone in need a crime. In this sense, maybe Elspeth thinks the mother's punishment is too light. But Elspeth has also committed a crime in running off with the dishes. Her punishment, that of raising children with what she now sees "Bob" to be, seems too severe.

People often describe stories like this as "haunting." I think that's code for "I didn't understand it, but I kept thinking about it, trying to make sense of it." I might describe how I feel right now as more hungover than haunted. I need a day off before I read the next story.

Personal notes on the writing

Nearly all stories are a little disorienting at first. Starting en media res is good for drawing a reader in, but it's also a struggle for the reader. The stories in this anthology so far have been more disorienting at the opening than most, I've felt. "A History of China" came at me right off the bat with a lot of names to keep straight.

It's always such a struggle for me to write openings that won't immediately get me thrown off the island. I'm scared of challenging slush pile readers too much, most of whom I know don't read beyond the first few pages. I tend to baby them. But these stories don't. I think this kind of confidence, this kind of trust in your reader, can only come from success. Right now, I don't trust myself, much less the reader, because I keep sending in work I like and seeing it come back rejected. Maybe writing something that trusts the reader like these stories do is something to strive for, because it will mean I trust my own writing.

FOR KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS STORY, GO HERE.