All-Bright Court by Connie Porter

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: 1960’s-1970’s

Locale: Lackawanna, New York

Principal Characters:

• Samuel Taylor, an African American from Mississippi who goes north in search of personal freedom and economic betterment
• Mary Kate Bell Taylor, Samuel’s wife, a caring, dependable person whose love for her husband enables him to face his disappointments
• Michael (Mikey) Taylor, their eldest son, who is intelligent and compassionate
• Venita Reed, a young woman from Mississippi who is Mary Kate’s neighbor in All-Bright Court
• Moses Reed, Venita’s husband, a hard-working, decent man, who is unable to comprehend the depth of his wife’s unhappiness

The Novel

Connie Porter’s All-Bright Court consists of a number of stories about people, most of them African American, who live in the area of Lackawanna, New York, near the steel plant where many of the men work. Each chapter in the book is structured as a short story, focusing on a single point of view and moving inexorably through an episode or a series of related episodes to a well-thought-out conclusion. Unifying elements among the chapters, however, make All-Bright Court a novel, rather than a collection of short stories. The book is arranged chronologically to cover a period of about twenty years, during which Porter traces the life of Samuel Taylor and, later, the lives of his wife and his children—in particular of Michael (Mikey), who often appears even in the chapters that are told from the viewpoints of other characters.

Throughout her novel, Porter maintains a second narrative line, reminding her readers of events in the outside world and pointing out the effects they have on the lives of her characters. At times, these references come in the form of dialogue, as when plant workers discuss the probability that the expansion of European steel plants will cause layoffs in Lackawanna. It is usually television that brings the outside world into All-Bright Court. Mary Kate weeps when President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Dorene Taylor, Mikey’s younger sister, hides in terror, because she thinks that the war in Vietnam may come to her home. In addition to reinforcing the chronological structure of the novel, these references to outside events emphasize the sense of powerlessness felt by all Porter’s characters, eventually even by the determined Samuel Taylor.

Samuel Taylor’s story begins when, as an unwanted orphan in Tupelo, Mississippi, Samuel decides to go north after meeting Mary Kate Bell. As soon as he has established himself in Lackawanna with a job, a house, and furniture, he returns to Tupelo, marries Mary Kate, and takes her to her new home.

In the years that follow, Samuel and Mary Kate work hard. They are conscientious parents and responsible citizens. Samuel, however, is never free from worry. He is afraid of losing his income, of being laid off or fired, even of being forced to go on strike. Meanwhile, Mary Kate is burdened with almost continual pregnancy, physical and emotional exhaustion, and constant concern about her children, who grow up in an environment that promises them nothing.

Interspersed with the ongoing story of Samuel and Mary Kate Taylor—who, despite a truly heroic struggle, can never improve their lot—are vignettes that reveal far more desperate lives being lived all around them. Because so many of the adults portrayed have long since given up on life, these adults neglect and abandon their children. Perhaps feeling that those children represent their only secure hold on life, however, these characters remember their offspring whenever the mood strikes them. The alcoholic mother of Mikey’s friend Dennis nastily forbids the Taylors from cleaning him up. Dennis’s friendship with Mikey ends as a result. The indifferent, even hostile, mother of a little albino girl who was left alone in an empty house decides to take the child back just when she has found love and security with Venita.

Over the years, Samuel and Mary Kate Taylor come to see All-Bright Court, which once seemed to promise them freedom, as just another prison. The best Samuel can hope for is to continue in his dead-end job at Capital Steel, while Mary Kate can expect no better than to stay in her crumbling cement block house, enduring the noxious fumes, the ear-splitting noise, and the rain of steel particles that are produced by the plant on which their existence depends. The best they can do for their children is to send them away, like Mikey, to learn new social skills, new attitudes, and a new language. In the final chapter, on his way back to All-Bright Court for a visit, Mikey loses his way in a blizzard and is rescued by his father. This reunion in the snow symbolizes Mikey’s attachment to his parents. Even as they embrace, however, Mikey can no longer hear a word that his father is saying. The distance between their worlds has become too great.

The Characters

If, as A. C. Bradley once said, waste is the single most important characteristic of tragedy, then many of the characters in All-Bright Court must be considered tragic. Despite their own best efforts, these characters finally fail.

Samuel Taylor’s dream is to feel like a real man, respected by others and, even more important, by himself. In the South, he is treated as an inferior. In the North, he believes that things will be different. For years, Samuel continues to struggle, clinging to his sense of self-worth. With each threat to his income, however, Samuel becomes less confident, until at last he lives not with hope but with the bitter knowledge that his dream of equality will never be fulfilled. Courageously, he encourages his children to leave the African American community, where they will have no more opportunities than he has had, and to move into the white world, even though he realizes that as they do so, they will inevitably move away from their parents.

Mary Kate and Venita both suffer not only as African Americans but also as women. Because of their limited experience, they know no other route to success than to fulfill the conventional roles of wives and mothers. Because they have no source of information, they do not know that medical help exists that could alleviate the problems that afflict them both. Mary Kate, therefore, continues to bear one child after another, assuming that she has no choice; when Venita does not become pregnant, she feels that it is somehow her fault. Like Samuel, both Mary Kate and Venita are admirable and even heroic characters. They struggle, often vainly, to make things better for others, even though they themselves increasingly feel betrayed by life.

Mikey Taylor seems to be the only successful character in the novel. He is fortunate: He is intelligent, and he has parents who encourage him while systematically imbuing him with their own high moral and ethical standards. After he enters his new life in the white world, however, Mikey abandons not only his old neighborhood but also his own identity. Samuel recognizes a hollowness in his son, commenting that Mikey is merely running away from All-Bright Court rather than toward something. As he says, Mikey has no dreams. That, too, is a waste.

Mikey is fortunate, however, compared to other children in All-Bright Court. One of the characters treated at length by the novel is Dennis, who is seen through Mikey’s eyes first as a dirty, smelly classmate, then as an interesting new friend. Dennis’s alcoholic mother often leaves him alone in their house, without light or heat. He is pathetically happy to be taken in by Mary Kate, cleaned, given good food, and included in the activities of the Taylor family. His mother, however, has an attack of pride and refuses to let the Taylors do anything more for him.

Isaac, meanwhile, is the child of an elderly father who is not equipped to understand his precocious son. By tracing Isaac’s thoughts, Porter reveals clearly the reasons for his frequent rages. Isaac needs an outlet for his creative energies, but instead he is called a “crazy boy” by everyone around him—even by his father, who loves him but who is embarrassed by his actions. When he goes to school, he is too bright to hold himself back with his classmates; as a result, he is rebuked by his teachers for being disruptive. The final humiliation for this brilliant child comes when he is judged incapable of intellectual achievement and sent to trade school.

In the chapter “Hoodoo,” Porter enters the world of another child, the little albino girl Clotel, who is bewildered because she is shunned by everyone—even by her mother, who is convinced that Clotel’s whiteness is evidence of a spell placed on the child before her birth, perhaps by her grandmother, a conjure woman. After her mother walks out, Clotel goes to live with Venita, where she experiences the loving care that she has never known.

Sadly, all these stories have unhappy endings. Clotel is reclaimed by her indifferent mother; Isaac becomes a criminal and is sent to prison; and Dennis, who is always out foraging for food, is killed by a stray bullet during the riots that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

While there are unsympathetic characters in the novel, Porter focuses most of her attention on those whose tragedies are not, in Aristotelian terms, the result of flaws in their own character. What happens to them is not their own fault. Their lives illustrate the fact that during the two decades covered by Porter’s novel, even the most promising African Americans could not often surmount the obstacles placed in their way by a racist and indifferent society.

Critical Context

All-Bright Court has been considered an extraordinary first novel. In it, critics have found the same “clear ring of authenticity,” in Jonathan Yardley’s words, to be found in the best nonfiction works on the subject of housing projects. Reviewers admired Porter’s handling of tone, noting that she manages at the same time to be both sympathetic to her characters and uncompromisingly honest about their frailties.

The only major disagreement among reviewers involves a matter of form. Some critics argued that the use of vignettes diminished the effectiveness of the novel. Attributing this flaw to the author’s inexperience, they charitably predicted that her next novel would be more skillfully constructed. Other reviewers insisted that the format had great merit, in that it enabled Porter to explore a single locale thoroughly, as Gloria Naylor had in The Women of Brewster Place (1982).

Interestingly, several critics note that in All-Bright Court the author herself draws upon the very heritage that her character Mikey has so cavalierly rejected, memories of rural southern life, still-powerful superstitions, and the richness of colloquial African American speech. As Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, in this first novel Porter not only created a “rich fictional world,” but she also “distinguished herself as a writer blessed with a distinctive and magical voice.”

Bibliography

Catano, James V. Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Examination of the self-made-man narrative in American culture; includes discussion of Porter’s work in the context of the genre.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Black Dreams of 1950’s Turn to Rage.” The New York Times, September 10, 1991, p. C14. Argues that although Porter writes with the accuracy of a sociologist, she also has a profound sympathy for her characters. Of particular interest is Kakutani’s analysis of the complex feelings Porter’s African American characters have about whites, as well as about their own African American neighbors.

Krist, Gary. “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” The Hudson Review 45 (Spring, 1992): 141-142. Analysis claiming that Porter sometimes presents her characters on a superficial level, but that she does capture the spirit of a world that combines “Southern rural lore and urban ghetto realism.” Calls the book “the deftest kind of sociological commentary.”

The New Yorker. Review of All-Bright Court, by Connie Porter. 67 (September 9, 1991): 12. Briefly outlines the story, pointing out the parallel between Samuel’s escape from the South and Mikey’s escape from All-Bright Court. Finds a poetic quality in the old colloquialisms and superstitions.

Whitehouse, Anne. “Dreamless in Buffalo.” The New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1991, 12. Sees Porter’s “sorrowful and unsparing” account of dreams and defeat as helping explain the rage that exploded after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Comments on Mikey’s inability to see the magic in the world he has rejected.

Yardley, Jonathan. “Still Dreaming the American Dream.” Washington Post Book World, August 11, 1991, 3. Argues that Porter’s book has the authority of real knowledge of life in a housing project, but that it also has flaws in structure: Mikey should have taken a central place in the novel much earlier than he does, for example. Sees as Porter’s primary theme as the “strong system of mutual support and love” that enables the residents of All-Bright Court to survive.