Wordhoard(er): "Man of the House" by Kim Coleman Foote

"The Man of the House" by Kim Coleman Foote does with words what its main character, Jeb, does with things most people would throw away: it holds onto them. Jeb isn't quite a hoarder; he and his friends are able to get rid of all the stuff he was storing on the lawn of his deceased mother's house and move it to the woods in a day. Jeb had a reason for acquiring all the things he acquired. As a retired garbage collector, he's developed an eye for discarded worth. He seems to have seldom actually followed through on his intended purposes in acquiring the things, though, which is a common characteristic of hoarders. 

At around 8,400 words, "Man of the House" isn't quite holding onto more than is good for it, either, but for a short story, it's coming close. It does something most short story writers are told not to do in their stories, which is continually dive into the past, not letting the present moment develop momentum. There are numerous flashbacks, some of which are interrupted by their own flashbacks. It's not advisable storytelling, but it works in this case, because form is following theme, as the neither the story nor Jeb can seem to get out of the past and live in the present. It isn't until the end, when Jeb goes back to Florida to face his past, that the story actually stays in the present. 

Jeb's sister Verna, who has usurped the deceased mother's house for herself, demanded Jeb get the stuff off the lawn. He didn't have a different place to take it, so he and his friends dug a hole in the woods, covered it all up with tarps, and left it. If the things Jeb has held onto are a symbol of the past he can't let go of, you'd think burying those things would be a recipe for trouble. It sound similar to repression. It turns out, though, to be maybe just what he needed. Soon after he buries all the things he'd been holding onto, Verna suggests they travel down to Florida to see where the family had lived before they left early in The Great Migration for New Jersey. Jeb initially resists but soon changes his mind and goes on his own, leaving Verna in the hospital. 

Through the many flashbacks, we learn that Jeb has lived a life that could represent hundreds of thousands of other black men of his era, maybe millions. His family left the segregated South when the police were looking for a tall, black man who had allegedly stolen a woman's undergarments from her laundry line. Knowing any tall, black man was in for trouble given that vague description, Jeb's father and his brother Abe left. 

Jeb's father was abusive, and Jeb later passed on this abuse to his wife, Bertha. He would have passed it on to Faye, the woman he moved in with after his informal divorce from Bertha, but Faye simply wouldn't allow it. (I learned while studying the book The Color Purple as an undergraduate that "black folks' divorce" is a term known to Black Americans of a certain generation, and that there were many informal divorces in the first half of the 20th century.) Jeb has mostly bad memories of his father, and he then had a contentious relationship with the mother until she died. 

Abe was the one bright spot in Jeb's life, and Jeb has often wondered what would have happened if, after his father's death, he'd have gone back down south with Abe. So it's really Abe Jeb is headed to find. Miraculously, he finds the 90-ish-year-old man, but Abe no longer recognizes anybody. Meanwhile, Jeb finds that post-segregation Florida (it's not clear exactly when the story takes place, but it's probably in the early 1970s) to be better than it once was, but still with a long way to go. Jeb decides to go home to Faye and finally be "the man of the house" he was charged with being when his father died, meaning be better to the people in his life than his father was. His epiphany comes when he is thinking of stealing a shirt from Abe's house, and he seems to realize the trap that objects and memories held onto too strongly can present. 

It's a sound and well-made story of the trauma a generation of Black Americans faced. Jeb could never advance in his job as a garbage collector, because the higher-paying job of driver never went to blacks. (If that sounds familiar, it's the central conflict in the play Fences, which was made into a movie a few years ago.) Jeb is something of a Black everyman for his generation, and the story is speaking to the people still touched by the lingering effects of that generation. 

It seems to settle on a middle ground between forgetting the past (like the parents in "A Ravishing Sun," the first story in BASS, wanted their daughter to do), and holding onto every memory like a hoarder holds onto Kleenex boxes. We can bury our memories the same way we can bury the dead, which allows us to move on without forgetting them. 

Other readings: Karen Carlson likes to be thorough, and she was very thorough about reading this story.