In the Devil's House

...Yet like the great Nina Simone— who occasionally reminded her audience that she was a classically trained concert pianist—Phillips permits herself a few flourishes: "Anger is airborne...

...Mushy, Harvey, Sam, and Martha Jean were her white children...

...Though matters are not neatly tied up with a lace ribbon, Phillips manages that most difficult of narrative tricks: She gives the reader a sense of hope without belying her gothic vision...

...Nigger...

...Though she knows better, Tangy Mae feels an instinct to love and admire her mother: "I thought she was beautiful, despite my acquaintance with the demon that hibernated beneath her elegant surface...

...This Satan manifests itself in the form of child abuse: Rozelle stabs her deaf and mute daughter in the hand with an icepick...

...The verisimilitude of Phillips' rendering of Rozelle's pathology strikes with a death rattle...

...Halfway through, she hears the story of her mother's birth: Rozelle was the child of Miss Zadie's rape at the hands of white farmers...

...What ensues resembles a picaresque—Phillips weaves together several plotlines involving dozens of characters—centered around one family's domestic terror...

...Rozelle's wanton ways, her unpredictable anger, cruelty, sheer bile, and lack of love may well put her in a class by herself...

...intentionally breaks a child's finger...

...Rozelle can also play the victim...

...brands a child's leg for running away from a fight...

...Conveyed in Tangy Mae's beguiling voice, these brutal events command our unflinching attention even as they stir our revulsion...

...A vivid exception is Dorothy West's depiction of Cleo Jericho Judson in The Living is Easy (1948...

...That baby," Miss Zadie tells Tangy Mae, "come into this world white as one of God's clouds and with the devil's own gray eyes...

...A professional psychiatric nurse in her 50s, Delores Phillips writes with a no-nonsense elegance, as if she considers her subject too grave to accommodate lyricism...

...She further buttresses those harsh episodes with a depth of characterization worthy of Chekhov, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a profound knowledge of the segregated South in the late '50s...

...Tangy Mae is a kind of Cinderella, but the novel doesn't follow the traditional rags-toriches line...

...In Siila, Eva Peace loves her son enough to burn him alive...

...There are fairy godmothers—the earthy Miss Pearl, and the mysterious midwife, Miss Zadie—who at times seem the only ones keeping these poor children from oblivion...

...No doubt this novel will engender a storm of controversy, primarily among members of the black middle class who, still sore over decades of hurtful stereotypes, may smart at this hyperreal, sadistic, unflattering, and unbalanced portrait of black life in the 1950s...

...Edna and I were Negroes...

...Tangy Mae, a plucky 14-year-old, is a heroine familiar to readers versed in the AmericanBildungsroman—a young woman too intelligent for her own good...

...When her son is arrested for beating up a white man in her defense, she cries in shameless self-pity, "People trying to take my babies from me...

...literally beats a child's face in...

...Helpless and fearful, they cower before their mother as if before a firebreathing dragon...

...Though often powerless in a world controlled by white males, they reign supreme and unquestioned in their homes—troubled occasionally by a drunken, resentful or malignantly indifferent black daddy...

...Reviewed by Randall Kenan Author, "Walking on Water" Portrayals ofblack matriarchs in African American literature have overwhelmingly been positive...

...Seeing Rozelle in a context of racism, poverty, sexual violence, and de facto slavery in the segregated South raises a troubling philosophical question...

...Now Cleo has a chief rival in Rozelle Quinn, a stunning, light-skinned woman living in a small Georgia town in 1958, and a husbandless mother of nine children (a tenth is born by the novel's close), including Tangy Mae, the narrator of Delores Phillips' debut novel...

...Propelled forward at a blistering pace by constantly emerging secrets, The Darkest Childbegms as Rozelle prepares Tangy Mae to take over her job as a day maid for a white family...

...There a self-serving, malicious black mother despises her children, cares only for social status and money, and refers to her hard-working, dark-skinned husband as "Mr...

...As A vision of recent African American life, The Darkest Child is one of the harshest novels to arrive in many years...

...Convinced she is dying, Rozelle soon discovers she is merely pregnant...

...There have, to be sure, been notable deviations in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and perhaps most famously Toni Morrison...

...Thenovelis surprisingly classical in structure...

...The Darkest Child also possesses some elements of fairy tale...

...Rozelle comes on with a snake charmer's timing and a facade of sweetness, all honeysuckle and sugar water, drawing her children to her bosom, convincing them they are loved, wanted, necessary for her survival...

...Most often, when African American writers have mothers do bad things to their children, the deeds are attributed to an overabundance of affection...

...and Sethe's love for her daughter in Beloved drives her to kill the infant rather than allow it to be yanked back into a horrific life of slavery...

...Satan is not going to leave," the narrator thinks...

...There is no end to her hectoring andpsychological bullying, nor does apenny the children earn escape her grasp...

...It was born mocking me and I knew it...

...The blues tradition would seem the right place to find a metaphor for what this family, living beneath a roof so leaky it might as well be chicken wire, must endure—lynching, child prostitution, the malevolence of the town sheriff and his son—yet even the blues do not allow for iniquities this grotesque...

...Ruth Dead in Song of Solomon loves her son so much that she breastfeeds him well into boyhood...

...The only way to get him out is to invite God in, and God is not welcome in my mother's house...

...one marvels at how Phillips sets in motion, and sustains, a devastating series of revelations, confrontations and acts of violence...

...But balance is not a requirement of art...

...Is there redemption in The Darkest Child?Afterafashionthere is...

...Where the novel seems about to plunge into melodrama, Phillips invariably rescues her story with some gutbucket truth that clangs out of a not too distant past to announce: These things happened and continue to happen every day...

...Not even the vicious cruelty Celie suffered at the hands of Mister in The Color Purple approaches the pain Rozelle metes out to her own children...

...It can be inhaled, and once it enters a body it becomes a tenacious blob of blues and brown with tiny speckles of red...

...and commits infanticide...

...Returning to slay the beast—figuratively or literally—the eldest daughter, Mushy, who had fled to Cleveland where she worked in a hospital kitchen, winds up drinking to excess and watching one of her siblings die...

...Can her warped behavior be absolved—if not forgiven—when it is understood to be a product of such unjust societal conditions...

...She is also the darkest of the Quinn clan, a trait not lost on her mother, who "took pleasure in categorizing her children by race...

...Tarabelle, Wallace, and Laura were Indians—Cherokee, no less...

...Itsettles heavy in the lungs, making breathing ever so difficult...

...From the indomitable mama-on-a-couch in Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun to Elizabeth Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to Bigger Thomas' long-suffering mother in Richard Wright's Native Son, the heroic black mother has become a cultural archetype...

...A few strands of the narrative come loose, but it doesn't matter...

...Phillips casts Rozelle's evils in Biblical terms...

...But the consonant theme in each case is love...