LaToya Watkins Explores the Sweat, Love, and Lies of Texas in “Holler, Child: Stories” https://ift.tt/e6hNgyL
LaToya Watkins follows up her 2022 debut novel, Perish, with Holler, Child: Stories, a stunning collection that addresses class, race, motherhood, marriage, infidelity, familial tensions, and human/animal relationships. Each short story is deeply anchored to home and place. Set across the state of Texas—from small West Texas towns to Dallas and Houston, to places unnamed but still distinctly Texas—Watkins draws readers into a world that is all dirt, sweat, love, angst, bittersweet relationships, despair, and hope.
In the opening story, “The Mother,” Watkins writes about the lies mothers tell to protect their children, and the lies children tell to protect their mothers, even in death. Readers are thrust into Ms. Hawkins’ home while she is being interviewed by a reporter. This reporter is asking questions about her son, Hawk, who claimed he was the new Messiah, and that Jesus was a false prophet. After Hawk’s recent death and subsequent disappearance from the morgue, a mirroring of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, reporters descended upon Ms. Hawkins’ home, asking about Hawk’s father.
As the reporter sits in the living room, Ms. Hawkins recalls the events that lead to the present. Being fourteen and pregnant out of wedlock with Hawk. And answering Hawk’s questions about who his father was – how she’d told him that “preachers shouted from the pulpit some Sundays,” but Ms. Hawkins had made her son the “star,” telling him that he “dropped right out the sun to my arms…You special. God your daddy.” Watkins reveals that Ms. Hawkins just wanted her son to “be normal” because she knew “folks would have judged him for what [she] was,” a sex worker. In the end, just like Ms. Hawkins wanted to make Hawk feel special and loved, Hawk did the same for his mother, making her “what [she] said [she] was”: the mother of the son of God.
Similarly, in the titular “Holler, Child,” the narrator, an unnamed single mother, is forced to reckon with the crimes her teenage son has committed, similar to those which she is also intimately familiar with. The story, which takes place almost entirely in the small kitchen of their family home, is interspersed with memories from the narrator’s girlhood and of the brutal sexual assault she endured which led to her pregnancy with her son, Quinten. After being told of her son’s misdeeds, and seeing the confusion and shame on his face after the confrontation, and then reflecting on her memories of raising the boy, she makes the seemingly impossible decision to protect her son the same way the mother of the man who had assaulted her had also protected him.
In “Cutting Horse,” my personal favorite of the collection, Watkins tells the story of West Texas cowboy and cutting horse trainer, Ridley Johnson. After meeting and falling in love with Cole while she was a student at Texas Tech, Ridley left West Texas and his horse training career behind to follow Cole to the suburbs. After years of losing himself in Cole and the city, Ridley has begun to realize what he has lost. The realization leads him to the present, in which he sits under a tarp in the backyard watching a national television program about another Black person being murdered by the police, and a report about how some horses were stolen from a local stable. The narrative toggles between Ridley’s past as a cowboy and horse trainer, and present day as he watched the television, fields calls from his wife, reflects on conflicts with their white neighbors and the local HOA, and around the quarter horse that wandered into Ridley’s yard. These interlocking stories reveal histories of racist and classist practices at both local and national levels, revealing that, despite his wife’s desire to live in a neighborhood that made her feel like she was up North, the prejudice which Black citizens face in the U.S. are not exclusive to Texas, or to the South. In addition to bucking the narrative of the North being void of racism, “Cutting Horse” also gestures toward the lesser-known history of Black cowboys, and their place in the annals of U.S. history.
Stories of humans and animals bonding and forging strong relationships is a theme throughout the collection, extending beyond the ways that Ridley understands and sees horses as autonomous beings. The heartbreaking tale of Chumley the dog in “Moving the Animal” considers how animals can work their way into our lives and hearts, sometimes without humans even realizing it’s happened. “Dog Person,” equally heartbreaking in its own right, shows how sometimes the animals we most trust, humans included, can betray us in the most unexpected and devastating ways.
Despite the deep and complex tragedies that percolate through each of these stories, they are also a healing balm. A thread of hope, love, and tragedy weaves through each of the short stories. From reckoning with the crimes of a son to the lies and love of a mother, from the deterioration of a romantic relationship to finding oneself in the death of a loved one, from the realization of hidden truths to the racism and sexism that undergird the lives of many Black Americans, and in the harbors of safety carved out of seemingly inhospitable places, Watkins’ collection is pitch perfect and bittersweet.
Holler, Child is a masterful and deeply heartful look into the lives of a diverse set of emotionally complicated characters. Many of the characters, unlikable and yet are relatable, exist because Watkins does not shy away from the darker inclinations, harder truths, or complex, often contradictory emotional valences of the human condition. The enduring cycle of violence and love that undergirds each of these stories is laid out on the page in all their complexity. Although sometimes difficult to read, these narratives lay bare the compelling, honest, and complex choices people are often forced to make.
FICTION Holler, Child: Stories
By Latoya Watkins
Tiny Reparations Books
Published August 29, 2023
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