The Rock Cried Out by Ellen Douglas

First published: 1979

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The 1960’s and the 1970’s

Locale: Homochitto County, Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• Alan McLaurin, the protagonist, a young white man returning home to Mississippi after spending time in the North
• Miriam West, Alan’s Northern girlfriend who is visiting him in Mississippi
• Phoebe Chipman, Alan’s cousin who was killed in an automobile accident when they were teenagers and who was the only true love of Alan’s life
• Dallas Boykin, a friend of Alan from childhood who has remained in Mississippi working as a laborer and who resents Alan’s not having fought in Vietnam
• Sam Daniels, a black man and a good friend of Alan; he oversees the family’s country place
• Leila McLaurin, Alan’s free-spirited aunt; she has had an affair with Sam

The Novel

Ellen Douglas tells the story of the emergence of a new South. She also tells about a local Mississippi boy who comes home to discover that new South and to discover the truth about the past. The novel opens with Alan McLaurin making his way back home to Mississippi after having spent a number of years in the Northeast. Hitchhiking, he is picked up by a carload of blacks. Marveling at the changes, he explains that he has been away from Homochitto County, Mississippi, for a number of years, but that now he is home to settle down on his family’s land in the country. Having quit his job in a sugar refinery and separated from his live-in girlfriend, Miriam West, Alan has left Boston to “live on the land” and write poetry. A conscientious objector who did not serve in the Vietnam War, Alan had left home to go to school in the North. He had left behind a South in racial and social turmoil and now has returned home to discover what is left of the land that he abandoned.

The discovery process provides a framework for the novel’s action. Told as a recollection by Alan, the writer, several years after the events in the novel have taken place, the novel moves as a first-person account from the narrator’s present back to the events in the novel and even back to the 1960’s. The novel is also a discovery process for the reader, for not until the book’s end do the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

After arriving at the family place, Alan becomes reacquainted with Sam Daniels, the black caretaker of the family land, and catches up on events in the community. As each character is introduced, there are flashbacks to past events that put the characters in perspective. In Sam’s case, she describes him as a stubborn man, living right on the edge of danger during the turbulent 1960’s. Sam has been integral to the McLaurin family for years; he has tended the family land, has had a love affair with Alan’s Aunt Leila McLaurin, and has driven the car in which Alan’s cousin, Phoebe Chipman, was killed. Douglas then goes on to describe Phoebe’s accident. Her death haunts Alan throughout the novel and ultimately leads to his own violent action. Furthermore, his present girlfriend, Miriam, bears a striking resemblance to Phoebe. The reader learns at this point in the novel that Phoebe was killed in an accident in which Sam drove with her down a gravel road not far from home. Sam vaguely recollects rocks striking the windshield, temporarily blinding him, and making him run off the road. This one incident sends out tendrils to nearly every other event in the novel. In one sense, the entire book is about Alan’s search for the true nature of this accident.

With Sam’s help, Alan sets about fixing up an old house on the family place. He plans to live there alone; his parents live in the city and come out to the country only during the summers. Gradually, old friends from the past appear to help Alan with his project. Dallas Boykin, a boyhood friend, shows up one day to help with the house. The reader learns that Boykin served a tour of duty in Vietnam, returned home to settle down, and married a Fundamentalist wife. They live in a house trailer, and Dallas earns his living hauling pulpwood from the pine forests.

After several months of celibacy, Alan invites Miriam, who is in Boston, for a visit, and his liberal, artistic Aunt Leila comes to “chaperone” the couple. At a party, Alan learns from a drunken Leila about her affair with Sam. Also at the party is Lindsey Lee, a local boy turned hippie whom they had met earlier at a general store. Miriam becomes attracted to Lindsey Lee and they form a sort of trio. The three of them, Miriam, Alan, and Lindsey, set out to discover the truth about the new South by interviewing locals, including Sam’s eighty-five-year-old father, Noah Daniels. Their tape recordings allow Douglas to unearth another layer of past history, but the precious truth remains elusive.

Meanwhile, Sam and Leila rekindle their romance, while Lindsey Lee and Miriam also become lovers. Tension builds among the trio as Alan, almost an outsider, tries to reconcile his relationship with Miriam. They had promised that they would not possess each other, but Alan cannot give up his claim to her sole affections.

The novel’s climax comes in a twenty-five-page monologue in which a distraught Dallas drives wildly all over the county in his truck, talking nonstop on his CB radio. Thinking that he is talking to his wife, Dallas confesses to her—and also to Alan, who is listening on another radio—that he, too, once loved Phoebe. Dallas also tells the real story of her death. Phoebe’s death occurred during the most violent time of the civil rights struggle. Several churches were burned down in Homochitto County, including one near the McLaurin family place. Naturally, whites—including members of the Ku Klux Klan—were trying to stop black civil rights progress in this rural Mississippi community. On the day of Phoebe’s death, Sam was driving her in the car down a country road. Dallas and some of his friends (including Lindsey Lee) were watching a meeting at a black church through the scopes on their high-powered rifles. They saw Sam’s car coming down the road, and for some reason, Dallas explains in his monologue, he fired. That was the shot (Sam thought it was gravel) which made him wreck the car.

Furious that Dallas had killed his beloved cousin, Alan sets out across the county to find him, finally catching the man near a small dam which is about to overflow. As Alan and Dallas fight, the escaping water knocks them down a ravine and Dallas is killed. “I knew he was dead,” Alan says. “A horrible pain, unassuageable grief, seized me, worse than any kick in the balls, worse than any ice pick in my liver. I had killed him.”

By the end of the novel, Douglas brings the reader full circle to the present Alan McLaurin, who talks about finally settling down to write the truth about the past and about the new South—a truth the reader experiences as The Rock Cried Out.

The Characters

Much of Douglas’s strength lies in her characterization. She does well writing a first-person account from a male point of view and her skillfully crafted Alan McLaurin grows from a naive, idealistic youth into a cynical, worldly man. He becomes a metaphor, in some ways, for so many in his generation whose idealism was fueled by a protest against a war in which they did not believe and a struggle to correct a region’s racial attitudes, which were clearly oppressive. Then his generation grew up to find a morally ambiguous world. He grows up by searching for the real story of the past and matures as he puts together some of the unpleasant aspects of that painful reality. In the final chapter, Alan McLaurin displays a certain confidence and peacefulness—much like the confidence displayed in his new South as it, too, emerges from a trial by baptism and fire.

Douglas’s other characters all exhibit originality. She avoids cliched Southern characters but still represents all aspects of the South about which she writes. For example, the free-spirited Aunt Leila puts love and compassion ahead of community mores, but she is still a Southerner. She loves Sam Daniels; his being black does not matter.

Dallas Boykin represents the confused, poor Southerner. After fighting for his country in Vietnam and against racial equality in the South, he emerges at the end of the 1970’s confused and quietly angry. Feeling guilty for his transgressions, he tries to make amends, yet the new South gives him little, save religion, to hang on to. His wife is the born-again, talking-in-tongues, Southern Fundamentalist who escapes the modern world by living in a religious cocoon. Dallas accepts her, but he does not really find peace in the life that she represents.

To her credit, Douglas takes the stereotypes and molds them into real human beings. Her blacks, for example, become genuine people in a racially confused South. Noah, born of a generation of shuffling old “Uncle Toms,” is a witty, spry, three-dimensional character. Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is Sam. He has fought all of his life. Refusing to succumb to the white man, he almost but not quite pushes his independence too far. For example, refusing to say “sir” to white men, Sam “talks around” those kinds of references. Also, he becomes a lover to a white woman. Sam, however, does spend some time in jail for attacking the navy’s satellite tracking station (SPASURSTA), which sits on a parcel of McLaurin property rented to the government. He simply got angry one day and crossed the fence with his cows to start destroying the equipment. Stoically, he accepted his punishment.

Other characters also evidence Douglas’s skill. There is Lindsey Lee, the local boy turned hippie who goes around the county taping “quaint old black men and local rednecks” for a story that he is going to write for a large East Coast paper. The naïve Miriam West also fits in with the patronizing Lindsey Lee. She comes from the North with her preconceived notions about the South and naturally has an affair with Lindsey.

Critical Context

Douglas’s reputation has grown steadily since the publication of her first novel, A Family’s Affairs (1962). In each succeeding novel, she has managed to transcend the banality of Faulknerian imitations to make fresh statements about the South and about the human condition.

Born in 1921, Douglas is one of a group of writers who, although influenced by the Southern Renaissance, have looked for new meanings in the Southern experience. In The Rock Cried Out, Douglas writes a novel for the contemporary reader. While this novel bears a likeness to her earlier work, it also shows that Douglas writes about the modern world; she is not mired in the past. The book also provides a bridge to her next work, A Lifetime Burning (1982), another well-received novel about contemporary times.

Bibliography

Douglas, Ellen. “Interview with Ellen Douglas: February 25, 1997.” Interview by Charline R. McCord. The Mississippi Quarterly 51 (Spring, 1998): 291-321. A revealing interview in which Douglas examines the nature and importance of identity in America’s rural South. She discusses her background growing up during the 1920s and notes that her characters embody the awareness that she gained from her experiences.

Jean Haskell Speer. “Ellen Douglas.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. A perceptive essay that traces Douglas’s career as a writer and offers some criticism of her works. An ideal introduction to Ellen Douglas.