Summer seems
to be a good time for reading B novels. I mentioned Off Course as an example of "Loser Lit" in the previous
post (English Lit Newly Lit). Quaker Cafe by Brenda Bevan Remmes is a less
painful read, at least in terms of content. Off
Course is stylistically superior, but Quaker
Cafe is definitely more fun to read.
For one
thing, there are lots of hilariously entertaining scenes involving family and
social dynamics in a small Southern town, which was founded by Quakers, but is
now dominated by mainstream Christian denominations, both black and white. The white population is largely conservative;
the few liberals in town stick together and represent both Quakers and
Methodists. The differences make for
good humor, but the core of the story is very serious, involving family
secrets, racial injustice, and a community with deep divisions.
Liz Hoole is
from St. Paul, MN, but married a Quaker and has lived for decades in her
husband's North Carolina hometown.
Husband Chase runs the family pharmacy, and Liz works for the Red Cross,
where she discovers some medical information about a friend, which she must
keep confidential.
Without
revealing too much, let's just say Liz gets tangled up in her friend, Maggie’s,
medical situation, which has implications, not only for Maggie, but also for Liz’s
family and the whole community. As history that has been covered up for years
gradually unravels, Liz struggles to help Maggie, support her own family, and
maintain her professional confidentiality.
The truth
opens up old wounds of racial injustice, threatens the fabric of relationships,
and calls for confession and penance. At
this point we see a process of restorative justice work its way through
families, churches, and community, a process based in Quaker and African
American church traditions, as well as shared human experience.
What makes
it a B novel? Well, there is nothing really noteworthy about the style, the
plot, or the characters, not that there's anything terribly bad about them
either. The dialogue sounded a bit artificial to me in places, though
occasionally, having grown up in the South, I thought I heard a Southern style
and cadence that sounded very authentic. A structural masterstroke is telling
the story from the point of view of a quasi-outsider. Though Liz has lived in
the South for many years, she's not a native and is more removed from the
town's history than the other characters. As such, she invites the
non-Southerner into the narrative and provides a more distanced, balanced
perspective. So, a good novel, not a great one, but a good one.
Even a B
novel, though, can verge on greatness. Read at face value, it doesn't rise to
that level, but if one takes a slight imaginative leap and reads it
allegorically, it takes on measurably more significance.
What if we
read it as, not merely the redemptive narrative of one individual and one
community, but as a kind of call for restorative justice in the whole South? Of
course, the racial injustice in the history of the South is no secret, but we
have only to reflect on the recent defense of the Confederate flag as a symbol
of "heritage" and "regional pride" to consider the depth of
Southern denial about its own history.
Could the individual story of injustice and redemption in Quaker Cafe represent a call for
regional assumption of historical responsibility, confession, and
atonement? Does the model of restorative
justice represented in the novel offer the vision for a path by which the stark
divisions of the American South might be healed?
Perhaps that
is a stretch, but surely no more so than acknowledging the human universality
of the redemptive story and the shared human yearning for healing and
wholeness.
We should
also acknowledge that at the end of Quaker
Cafe, not all are redeemed; the dead are still dead, and they died without
learning the truth. Not all justice can
be restored, but the novel holds out hope for the human capacity of accepting
responsibility, making amends, and achieving some measure of peace.
