PORGY and FAIR AND TENDER LADIES

Thank you for encouraging me to ventures outside my normal genres - British detective stories and nonfiction history. I started this book club very late, but I had time to read both PORGY and FAIR AND TENDER LADIES on a trip to see my family in Indianapolis in November. It took me a chapter or so to get used to the dialect in PORGY and the spelling, syntax, and jumble of ideas in Ivy’s early letters. But both stories drew me in, and I was sorry when the tales ended.

Reading them one after the other made me think of several common elements: the importance of weather and terrain, the characters’ mixed reactions to religion, the prevalence of disease and sudden death, and the main characters’ attachment to their homes – Ivy’s mountain and Porgy’s Catfish Row – while their friends and loved ones often moved around.

PORGY reminded me a bit of a silent movie because the author emphasized the visual aspects of the story – Porgy begging, the fight between Crown and Robbins, the funeral procession and ceremony, the hustle and bustle along the cotton wharves, the hurricane, Maria wielding her butcher knife, and Porgy awaiting Crown’s attack. I really enjoyed the hurricane and its extended consequences. The brevity of the story appealed to me – like my two weekend trips to Charleston, it makes me want to go back again and see how things look at another point in time. It was interesting that most of the blacks in the story casually used “nigger” to refer to each other. I wonder how the black people of that time who read this story felt about that.

I don’t know if I always sympathized with Ivy Rowe, but I was really drawn in by her portrayal of the people and world around her. I very much admired her openness to new experiences, without worrying what people would say. She also responded to people as individuals. She might be angry or frustrated with someone but she didn’t stand in judgment on them or classify them.

What impressed me most was that the people who lived on the mountain were by choice and by situation very independent, though not completely. They fed, clothed, sheltered, and even entertained themselves. They didn’t have access to much outside information, so they thought for themselves too. They didn’t dream of looking in a book or TV or an opinion poll to decide what to do. It makes the attitude type of independence expressed in “I did it my way” seem pretty shallow. However, the flip side of the coin is that they almost starved when the crops dried up, people died from lack of medical attention, and most of the young people left to find education and jobs elsewhere. However, in a modern world dominated by the possibility of total, constant connectivity, the peace and quiet of Ivy’s cabin seem very special.