Martha's Daughter
David Haynes’s complex short story collection Martha’s Daughter is about the everyday situations and relationships of working-class Black Americans.
Set in the metropolitan flatlands of Missouri, the stories are imbued with the latent density of quotidian life in bleak, in-between Breckenridge Hills. Neither the prototypical South nor the Midwest, though not far from St. Louis, Breckenridge Hills is depicted in terms of ever-changing façades. There are strip malls; there is a once-flourishing neighborhood now stifled by arterial byways and gentrification. The quiet deaths of a generation that lost its lineages to the Middle Passage are also explored.
Throughout, the characters move toward, or away from, lives of pathological consumerism. Most often employed as a superficial antidote to mask the pain of their strained relationships, personal struggles, and social expectations, their enduring perspectives are hopeful. Nowhere is that more apparent than in “Martha’s Daughter,” a novella-length story about the slow estrangement of Cynthia from her mother, Martha. Through structured scenes that oscillate from the present to the past and back again, the emotional turmoil and social pressures that shape their interactions are highlighted. Later, “The Weight of Things” picks up their narrative thread to reveal more about Martha through the eyes of her neighbor, Lou, in the wake of her husband’s death.
While the stories are founded on polarities, each one aims to locate epiphanies that are hiding in plain sight. However, difference isn’t employed as a clear-cut path to outward acceptance. Instead, the book reaches for optimism that is seldom apparent until it’s embodied.
Consistent in their inward foci, the short stories of Martha’s Daughter reveal that the slow climb toward acceptance occurs within.
Reviewed by
Xenia Dunford
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