Serendipity--Kaye Gibbons

I've never been interested in Kaye Gibbons--not because I haven't been interested in her, but because she was one of a myriad of names my eye would speed past when looking for something to read--nothing in the packaging or titles of her books made me want to pick them up and sample.  As I explained in my "Library Gambit" post, I was looking for short books and stumbled upon one of Ms. Gibbons's.  I noted that many of them seemed short and the one I had in hand led me to her first novel--a taste of which I offer below.

from Ellen Foster
Kaye Gibbons

Oh but I do remember when I was scared. Everything was so wrong like somebody had knocked something loose and my family was shaking itself to death. Some wild ride broke and the one in charge strolled off and let us spin and shake and fly off the rail. And they both died tired of the wild crazy spinning and wore out and sick. Now tell me if that is not a fine style to die in. She sick and he drunk with the moving. They finally gave in to the motion and let the wind take them from here to there.

Even my mama's skin looked tired of holding in her weak self. She would prop herself up by the refrigerator and watch my daddy go round the table searing at all who did him wrong. She looked all sad in her face like it was all her fault.

"And let the wind take them from here to there."  Wow, another line I want to write.  Perhaps I will. I was/am stunned that I have so long missed out on such magical, beautiful, evocative prose.  I read this and I know the person speaking.  I know the rhythm of her speech, and even if I never see this person, I see her in a way that requires no real sight.  Such language is powerful--the poetry implicit, and the humor and sensibility bubbling just below the surface.  The latter is difficult to see in the passage above (just the phrase "the one in charge strolled off" hits exactly the right note of nonchalant in the midst of chaos--anomalous activity that suggests slapstick) , so let me quote from the very beginning of the book.

When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.

The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock and just don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over.

But I did not kill my daddy. . . .

All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then.

Read it aloud to get the sense of it, the swinging of the words, the rhythm of the lines--the joy just below the surface darkness.  Here is a person who has good reason to hate but who has gotten over that and not let it stopped her from becoming a real person--nor does she allow herself to gloss over the evil she and her mother experienced.  If the remainder of this book lives up to the promise of these short passages, I'm in for a real ride and a real pleasure.