In “Holler, Child: Stories,” LaToya Watkins’ narratives center the humanity and complexities of Black people — particularly their most intimate relationships.
Watkins invites us to see Black Texans tested by infidelity, aging, incest, and poverty, and the redemptive power of love over hatred. Though some of the stories fall into repetitive themes and uneven arcs, overall, “Holler, Child” is a tender, honest, and riveting collection.
The collection opens with “The Mother,” about the narrator’s deceased son, Hawk. Wayward and delusional, Hawk used to lead a cult and called himself Messiah. Watkins’ potent gift for lyrical language shines through in such lines as: “Sat at my table and tossed words I ain’t understand around, like a empty grocery bag blowing in a dust storm.” Such phrasing richly captures the deliberate, colorful way Southern Black folk often speak.
Vivid voices are matched by jarring self-awareness in Watkins’ characters, especially as they unravel. In “Cutting Horse,” Ridley Johnson, a former rancher and hustler, has relocated into a nice suburban home with his wife, Cole. But partly because of the growing unease between them, he moves into their backyard under a bright orange tarp tent. It’s not entirely clear why Ridley buys a waterproof TV and covers their loveseat in plastic before moving them into the backyard, except that he is prompted by the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. “That’s when I started trying to find myself. Trying to see myself without her. Without thinking about how anybody outside of me see me. Trying to go back to before I was born and be who I was fore any of this.”
The story takes a turn when a recently escaped horse joins him in his backyard. The police suspect a Black man of stealing the horse, which makes Ridley nervous. After seeing a constant barrage of Black people dying at the hands of police on the news and hearing the sirens blaring as they look for the horse, Ridley feels like they’re looking for him — even though he hasn’t stolen the horse. “Now I’m sitting here,” Ridley says, “watching this news and this beast, waiting for the sirens to reach me, and trying to figure out how to make this world work for me.”
Watkins also views her characters through a lens of love and accountability. The women are impenetrable and vulnerable, fierce and broken. Above all, they are loyal to the men in their lives, even when that loyalty is not reciprocated. But occasionally the stories would hit the same emotional notes of the burden of obligation and the shame of feeling that weight.
In “Moving the Animal,” most of the action is centered around the narrator’s husband, Nate, who had a stroke that left him unable to do much for himself and his wife to care for him and a dog named Chumley. Similarly, “Tipping” is about a widow mourning her unfaithful husband and her inability to confront him about his infidelity. The simmering resentment that each character carries throughout the collection is evident, but not much distinguishes the emotional arcs of these stories from each other.
Though Watkins’ skills make stories without a traditional story arc entertaining, her repetitive use of the bitter spouse trope is repetitive, over and over again, just with a different name. She also revisits the exploration of familial and marital wounds as a core source of emotion and catalytic plot device.
At the heart of the titular story, “Holler, Child,” a young man named Quinten, who is, himself, the product of rape, is accused of the same heinous act. This forces his mother to revisit her sexual assault at the hands of a Sunday school teacher when she was a teenager. The crux of the story is whether her son understands consent. “I ain’t never imagined that I was raising somebody that would hear the no’s and ignore them. That would hear the pain and hold hell in his eyes.” Further complicating her reflection is if she was allowed to give consent, her son might not have been born.
Such revealing, sharply drawn vignettes capture the humanity of Black folk and mirror it back to us in one transcendent story after another. The result: an unforgettable short story collection that should not be missed.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
