Heathens - Hardcover

David Haynes

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0898231663 ISBN 13: 9780898231663

Publisher: New Rivers Press, 1996

Synopsis

Fiction. While LaDonna does a stint in the Shakopee Women's Detention Center and creates a line of cosmetics from her cell, Marcus pines away for her while caring for their teenage son and dodging his mother's attempts at finding him another woman.

About this title

About the Author

David Haynes earned a B.A. in literature from Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1977 and an M.A. from Hamline University, Minnesota, in 1989. A former fifth and sixth grade teacher, he served as a teacher in residence at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Haynes also served on the leadership team at the experimental Saturn School of Tomorrow. His book Right by My Side (New Rivers Press, 1993) was a winner in the 1992 Minnesota Voices Project and was selected by the American Library Association as one of 1994's best books for young adults. Two of Haynes's stories have been recorded for the National Public Radio series "Selected Shorts." In 1996 Granta magazine named Haynes as one of the best young American novelists. Haynes is currently an associate professor and the director of creative writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He teaches regularly in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and has taught in the MFA programs at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, and at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers' Garret in Dallas. His teaching interests include gender, class, race, and generational differences—all themes that he explores in great depth in A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY.

Reviews

Humor with a moral bite marks Haynes's commendable second novel of the season, as it did its his exemplary first, Live at Five (Forecasts, Mar. 4). Again, the action centers on African Americans in St. Paul. The narrative feels as much like a chain of linked short stories as a novel proper; each chapter has a title ("The Saving Place," "Sunday Dinner," etc.), and each focuses on one of several characters, through first- or third-person narrative. At the book's heart wobbles the Gabriel family, enduring assaults on their dignity, sanity and middle-class status. There's Marcus Gabriel, despairing of getting through to the sixth-graders he teaches, crazy over his "significant other," LaDonna Brown, who's serving time in a women's detention center for attempting to pull a fast real-estate deal. There's the couple's son, Ali, 12, trying to grow up right despite urban pressures. And there's the Gabriel matriarch, Verda, who despises LaDonna as a "heathen" and pulls other characters, including a white Pentecostal neighbor, into her orbit. The flow of events is choppy and episodic. Some chapters work better than others (the one in which Ali is suspected by a bigoted school official of a sex crime presents laughs mixed with righteous rage; the one featuring LaDonna's complaint letter to Ted Koppel about jailhouse conditions is sitcom pat). But Haynes demonstrates throughout that he knows these folk and their problems; that he has eyes that can see and a voice that can speak-with wit and even wisdom. (Apr.) FYI: Heathens, like many New Rivers books, was a winner of the Minnesota Voices Project. So was Haynes's first novel, Right by My Side, the publisher's bestselling title to date.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From "Heathens": Marcus tastes a spoonful of dump cookie batter. He makes Ali taste it too. They both shrug. It's hard to say with dump cookies. A raisin bite tastes sweet, a nut bite doesn't. Marcus dumps in more sugar. That's how you make dump cookies-dump in a little of this, dump in a little of that.

Dr. Ione Wilson Simpson comes clicking into the kitchen.

"Hi, neighbors," she chirps. Ione is the Pentecost lady who lives next door with her husband Mitch and their son Butchie. The Pentecosts have a lot of rules-no drinking, no smoking. No haircuts, at least not on the women. Marcus wonders how Ione stands up under all those rules. He wonders how Ione stands up under all that hair. The dump cookies recipe came from Ione.

"I was just preparing tomorrow's lesson when I saw you gentlemen come in. Thought I'd check up on you. Nothing naughty going on, I hope."

Ione teaches at Mid North Bible College. She taught Christian Married Life until the state cracked down and made them offer what at least sounded like real courses. Now she's teaching The Christian Tradition in English Literature. For weeks its been Percy Byshe Shelley this and Percy Byshe Shelley that. As if that was the first she'd heard of him. Marcus had asked, "Where'd you get your Ph.D., Ione? Kmart?" He'd warned her she'd better slow up on the Romantic poetry before she and Mitchell started hanging around in Como Park and seeking arousals and desires of the earthly kinds.

"Aren't you a caution," Ione had said.

Marcus always makes flirtatious, suggestive cracks around Ione. Ione thinks black men are supposed to do that around white women. She laughs and giggles, purses her lips. Marcus doesn't imagine there's too much action next door. Mitch is sort of a lump.

Ione gives Ali a pat on the head. Ali is wearing headphones, reading. His T-shirt says, "Afro, Mondo, Skateboard, Death."

"I see you're making dump cookies," Ione squeals. "Give Ione a taste."

"They're for my mother. She loves Ione's dump cookies."

"How is sister Gabriel?" Ione asks, concerned. Ione starts dumping more stuff from the pantries into the dough.

Marcus's mother is fine, except for the fact that she's not speaking to Marcus because of the big fight at last Sunday's dinner. Marcus and his mother and LaDonna fight every Sunday Dinner. Last week LaDonna was in prison, Marcus won the fight, and his mother stopped speaking to him. She calls him up every twenty minutes, sighs loudly into the phone and hangs up.

Marcus hopes Ione's dump cookies will make her feel better. Ione is spooning the dough onto the cookie sheets.

"I talked to LaDonna this morning," Ione says. "LaDonna tells me that Christ is by her side helping her through this ordeal."

Marcus knows that what LaDonna is really doing is setting up a pornographic tape distribution network for the girls in Shakopee.

"For a little pin money," LaDonna says. LaDonna is never long between schemes. She fully expects Marcus to smuggle tapes into the prison inside bowls of Jello salad. LaDonna hopes her association with Ione makes her respectable. She asks Ione to pray for her, presents Ione to Marcus's mother as the sort of upstanding friends she merits.

Verda Gabriel says LaDonna is a heathen, as is everyone LaDonna knows.

Ione places the first batch of cookies into the oven. She is rehearsing a lecture called "The Good Woman of the English Novel."

"You know," Ione says, "those Bront' heroines were often upstanding models of Christian love."

Marcus thinks Ione is crazy. Ione is wearing a long chocolate brown skirt with a slit up the back and also a pink knit top. She has a great figure.

"Ione, did anyone ever tell you you dress like a waitress at a Mexican cock fight?"

Ione cackles hysterically. "I've got those cookies started," she says. "Switch pans every twenty minutes and ya'll will be ready just in time for Mother Gabriel's dinner. Four P.M., right?"

Marcus's mother has had dinner at four o'clock every Sunday probably for forty years. Roast meat, baked potatoes, green beans, rolls. Last week she made a leg of lamb in honor of LaDonna's imprisonment.

"I best see to my own dinner," Ione says. She opens the headphones away from Ali's ears. "You haven't been over to play with my Butchie lately."

"Been busy," Ali says, snapping the phones back into place.

Butchie is nine. Ali says he is sadistic, bizarre and retarded. Says Butchie claims his G.I. Joes are "bad boys" and gives them swirly shampoos in the toilet. Ali says that all their little uniforms have blue rings around the collar.

"So, Ione, what fabulous meal are you making for the little man today?" Marcus asks.

"Lipton orange chicken," Ione says. "It's a whole fryer, two packages of onion soup mix, and a can of frozen orange juice concentrate."

Ione will write that down for Marcus and put it in the three-by-five card box on the counter. It is a yellow box with orange daisies on it and it says "Ione's recipes" in Kroy type.

Ione will probably also make a dump cake. That's a can of fruit cocktail dumped over a package of yellow cake mix. Much easier than dump cookies, but Marcus's mother won't eat fruit cocktail because maraschino cherries change the color of her stool.

"My best to your momma," Ione says.

"One more thing," Marcus stalls her. "Why is it you Pentecostal gals have such nice behinds?"

Ione giggles, says, "Have a nice supper," and goes running out the back door.

"That whole family is retarded," Ali says, not bothering to either look up from the magazine or switch off the Walkman.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Rivers Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0898231663
• ISBN 13: 9780898231663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182