Family by J. California Cooper

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: 1840’s through the early twentieth century

Locale: The rural South

Principal Characters:

• Clora, the narrator, who is born a slave to a woman who kills herself and her master
• Always, Clora’s daughter, a young girl who loved all natural life as a child only to become embittered by slavery
• Sun, Clora’s son, who is light-skinned enough to pass as white
• Peach, Clora’s other surviving daughter
• Doak Butler, a slave owner who buys Always and fathers her child
• Sue Butler, the wife of Doak Butler
• Loretta Butler, Doak’s second wife and the half sister of Always
• Doak, Jr., the son whom Always swaps with her master’s son

The Novel

Family is a story of the slave Clora’s children and how her blood flows from its African roots around the world, thus intermingling with that of other races, nationalities, and classes. In the years before the Civil War, Clora gives her master six children, three of whom survive to adulthood. Clora herself commits suicide but “lives” as the narrator of her family’s tale. She glides through time to watch over her favorite child, Always.

Always, sold to Doak Butler, learns misery and hatred from her first day as his slave. In short order, he rapes her and causes the death of her beloved sister Plum. By the time he brings home his new bride, Sue, Always has already made herself the real mistress of his small farm. She becomes indispensable to Sue and to Doak’s crippled brother, Jason.

Meanwhile, Clora’s other children have found freedom. Sun, her son, has fled north to become a successful businessman. He “passes” for white. Peach, her other daughter, is literally sold into freedom; bought by a man who falls in love with her, she moves to Scotland as the mistress of her own household.

Always swaps her son with her master’s. She rears the child whom she names Soon, who was in fact born to Doak and Sue. Her real son is reared as Doak, Jr. As youths, the boys are inseparable. Always watches over both of them but reserves her greatest love for the young master, Doak, Jr. She cares for Soon and loves him in a diffident fashion, molding him into a good son. She even acquiesces in his going to serve in the Civil War as servant to Doak, Jr., so that he can watch over her real son. In spite of her machinations, she is outmanipulated by the war, in which Doak, Sr., is killed.

Before the war, Sue died in childbirth and Doak married Always’s half sister Loretta, who as a girl had helped Sun escape from slavery. Because she had relied on Sun’s unfulfilled promise to rescue her from the boredom and poverty of the rural South, Loretta is angry. Her initial goodness of heart has been replaced by a mean-spirited bitterness.

As mistress of the plantation, Loretta also must rely on Always, particularly during the hard times of the Civil War, when food is scarce and the threat of violence from runaway slaves and former soldiers is a constant fear. One of those runaways is Sephus, Always’s son, who comes looking for his mother. In one of the most surprising plot twists in this action-packed short novel, Loretta takes him to her bed and conceives a child, Apple. Cooper purposefully makes the blood relationships of this child confusing in order to stress how Clora’s seed has taken root in strange and unforeseen ground: “My father was Loretta’s and Always’s grandfather. They had the same father. Always’s children was Loretta’s husband’s, so Sephus was Loretta’s stepchild and nephew and the father of her child, which was mine and Always’s grandchild and Loretta’s step-grandchild and child and, oh, it can go on and on.” The “yellow” child becomes a real bond between the black woman and the white woman; they settle into an uneasy truce.

Throughout the war, Always continues to hoard gold and silver and to dream of having her own place. When Doak, Jr., comes home, he demands that she tell him where his father’s money is buried. In a harrowing scene, Always barters the gold first for her life and then for her own land. In so doing, she gains the everlasting enmity of her son. Reared as a white man, he cannot adjust to his blackness. True to the author’s argument throughout the novel, the real corruptor of blood is money, the basis on which slavery as an institution existed.

Clora, whose time on earth is now fading, hurries the final parts of her narrative, in which she witnesses the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, and the pervasive racism that is the legacy of slavery. By this time, her family has spread to the far corners of the earth, and she has lost track of most of them: “All my family, my blood, is mixed up now. They don’t even all know each other. I just hope they don’t never hate or fight each other, not knowin who they are.”

The Characters

Cooper is an expansive storyteller, and she uses a narrative device in Family that is tricky and not entirely successful as the novel winds down. She asks her readers to suspend belief early in the story by making her narrator a spirit, one who is capable of describing not only events but also states of mind. Consequently, point of view tends to become skewed at times, even though Clora promises from the beginning that Always is her favorite child and the one to whom she will devote most of her narrative attention. Through this narrative device, a reader may be better able to appreciate the plight of Always as well as her motivation and character, but the other characters for whom the narrator also professes love become peripheral, tangential to the plot except as foils.

Cooper also tends to use dialect only when it is convenient, and the shifts from Standard English to argot are sometimes jarring. Spelling of words in dialect is also not standard; “y’all” in Clora’s mouth becomes “you’ll,” a decidedly unsouthern spelling and pronunciation. Dialogue, however, is limited. The longest exchanges are between Always and Tim on their wedding night and between Always and Doak, Jr., in her hut.

Clora, while still alive, seems to suggest that her fate of suicide is inevitable. What she fails to consider is that her children would survive her to continue their suffering. Clora’s spirit, then, is bound to earth so that she can “live” through Always. Unable to impart to her daughter the limited wisdom she gained from her earthbound experiences, she can only observe and cheer as Always takes control of her own fate.

None of the characters has psychological depth, barring Always and Loretta. Cooper’s technique eschews emotional subtlety. Her characters are victims or oppressors, enslaved or free, good or bad. In the case of Sue, however, goodness is characterized as essential weakness. White people, even the one “turned” white by his mother’s trickery, are tainted with power. Of the black characters, Always gains power through self-education and ambition, through hatred of her condition and an overweening desire to rise above it. The moment of her change from an ineffectual girl to a determined woman occurs after her rape by Doak Butler. She refuses to follow her mother’s example and kill herself: “I will live. I will live to destroy them like they’ve destroyed me and my mama and my family.”

The allegorical nature of the novel is best seen, perhaps, in the very names of the characters, most of whom are purposefully one-dimensional. Sun, Peach, Plum, Apple, Poon: their names come from the concrete, everyday world of antebellum life. “Always” and “Soon,” however, are abstractions, adverbial names meant to suggest the timelessness of the situations of their lives. Always is always hoping, scheming, plotting, and becoming; Soon is the embodiment of the promise of freedom. The former endures; the latter holds within his name the idea of hope. The characters themselves are symbolic and figurative, even as their lives are literally reduced to brief plot notes, for example, “under the invisible hand of Always and the crippled body of Masr Jason, the farm did better and better.” Always embodies the quiet, unnoticed force that makes the land prosper, while Jason, a broken white man tied to his horse, is the ostensible master, representative of the failed system that limped along until war’s end.

Language is rich and expressive in shaping plot and character. Sun becomes successful through necessity: “But hunger can see things when satisfied can’t.” Always and Jason “catch” money. An erstwhile suitor is defined by his profession: He is a freedman, the scissor-man.

Critical Context

Little has been written, aside from reviews, on Cooper’s fiction. She is better known, perhaps, as a playwright; some of the action in Family is theatrical, even melodramatic. Such a scene is the one in which Always reveals to Doak, Jr., his true birthright. In the soft, flickering light of her mean chicken shack turned into a home, he chokes her in an attempt to stop her from telling the truth. She is able to croak through the stranglehold a barter agreement with her son, who never forgives her. Always is not blameless; it is she who has created this monstrous, vengeful son. The author avoids dealing with the moral complexity of the situation of a loving mother allowing her son, passing as a white man, to go off and fight to preserve slavery.

Her other son, Soon, is also problematic in the context of the novel’s ostensible themes. The author certainly does not develop the character of Soon, who never knows that he is white. He is neglected by Always, his mother, and by J. California Cooper, his creator.

Cooper is an accomplished short-story writer, and her novel tends to read somewhat like a novella: dense with plot, short on character development, a “mopping-up” denouement. She tells her tale with a certain Rabelaisian gusto and depends on devices familiar to readers of eighteenth century French farce to advance the action. Certainly, Mark Twain is one of her literary antecedents.

Family is in the tradition of the slave narrative, as if an oral history project had been transcribed by a ghost. Its language is colorful, vibrant, and seething with outrage at times. It is also a sorrowful plaint against the indignities and unspeakable cruelties that people visit upon one another.

The writing also has more than an edge of feminism. Men, aside from Sun and Doak, Jr., are important as types, not as human beings. Whether symbolic, as in the depiction of crippled Jason, or literal, as in the portrait of brutal Doak Butler, masculine character development is limited to action. Always and Loretta are strong women, complex and multidimensional. Lest it be too subtle, Cooper allows Doak, Jr., to articulate the issue before he slaps his mother and dares her to repeat an insolence: “You are tryin to deal, to bargain with me! A white man!? You are a nigga slave tryin to be smart! And a woman, too!” In her quiet response lies the meaning of the novel: “Just tryin to live, suh.”

Bibliography

Farr, Moira. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. Quill Quire 56 (December, 1990): 24. Comments on Cooper’s dialogue, which reflects her experience and is believable.

Hoffman, Roy. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. The New York Times Book Review (December 30, 1990): 12. Describes the novel as being about survival. Even though Clora, the narrator, is a ghost, the book is a living woman’s monologue.

Library Journal. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. 115 (December, 1990): 160. A positive review of the novel. Notes that Cooper occasionally slips out of dialect into standard English.

Matuz, Roger, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 56. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. Contains excerpts from reviews of Cooper’s short stories and plays, although not from reviews of Family.

Publishers Weekly. Review of Family, by J. California Cooper. 237 (November 2, 1990): 64-65. A review of the novel, generally laudatory.