Elbow Room
by James Alan McPherson
Summary
Twelve stories about Black Americans in the years just after the legal barriers came down, when the question stopped being whether you were allowed somewhere and became what it costs you once you are there.
The title story is a marriage. Paul Frost is white and from Kansas, Virginia Valentine is Black and from Tennessee, they meet, love each other, marry and have a child, and the narrator watching them keeps predicting the strain before it arrives. The worst of it comes from Paul's father, who will not have her, and McPherson gives that man his reasons without excusing him for a sentence.
Why I Like Country Music is the funniest thing in the book. A Black man raised in South Carolina explains to his Northern wife, who finds his record collection an embarrassment, that the reason has nothing to do with music and everything to do with a girl and a schoolroom dance.
In The Story of a Scar a woman in a doctor's waiting room tells a stranger how her face came to look like that, and how little he has understood by the time she is done. In A Loaf of Bread a grocer who charges more in one neighbourhood than another is confronted by a customer who wants an explanation and is entitled to one.
McPherson writes in ordinary speech, close to the ear, and usually leaves the moral question standing at the end rather than settling it.
Around two hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the American short story of the 1970s at full strength, and stories about race that argue with a reader instead of instructing one.
Historical Context & Significance
Elbow Room won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making James Alan McPherson the first Black writer to take that prize in fiction. Gwendolyn Brooks had won in poetry in 1950.
He was born in Savannah in 1943, the son of a master electrician and a maid, worked as a janitor to pay for Harvard Law School, and took a law degree before an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His story Gold Coast won an Atlantic Monthly competition, the magazine made him a contributing editor in 1969, and his first collection, Hue and Cry, appeared the same year.
In 1981 he was named in the first group of MacArthur Fellows and joined the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he taught for the rest of his life. He published little fiction afterwards, turning to essays and to the memoir Crabcakes and the collection A Region Not Home. He died in Iowa City in 2016 at seventy two, and the city named a park for him five years later.