The Keepers of the House
by Shirley Ann Grau
Summary
Abigail Howland Tolliver sits in the house her family built and tells the story, and by the end she is not a sympathetic narrator, which is the point.
The land is in Wade County, Alabama, and the Howlands have held it for generations. The story Abigail has to tell is her grandfather's. William Howland, widowed and comfortable and past caring what the county thought, took Margaret Carmichael, a Black woman, into the house as his housekeeper, then lived with her for thirty years and had three children by her, and married her quietly in another state so that those children would be legitimate. He sent them north, where they could live as white people, and they did.
Abigail grew up in that house with Margaret raising her and understood only part of what she was looking at. Her husband John Tolliver is running for governor on a segregationist platform when one of Margaret's sons, who has his reasons, makes the marriage public. The campaign is finished inside a day. The county comes up the drive that night.
What Abigail does afterwards, with land and money and no interest at all in forgiveness, closes the book on a note much colder than the reader has been prepared for.
Grau writes the physical Alabama superbly, the woods and the weather and the work, and she gives William and Margaret long sections of their own rather than filtering them through Abigail.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want Southern fiction that declines to make anyone in it good, and a novel that treats a loving marriage and a monstrous social order as one story.
Historical Context & Significance
The Keepers of the House won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was published in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, and it cost its author something to publish.
Shirley Ann Grau was born in New Orleans in 1929 and was living in Metairie when the book appeared. The Ku Klux Klan attacked her publicly, she took threatening phone calls, and a cross was burned on her lawn, all for a novel in which a white landowner loves and marries his Black housekeeper.
Her first book, The Black Prince and Other Stories, had been a National Book Award finalist. She kept publishing fiction for another thirty years without repeating this book's reach, and she died in Louisiana in August 2020 at ninety one.
Reviewers reached for Faulkner, as they did with nearly every Southern novelist of her generation. The novel has stayed in print, and is now read as often for what it records about Alabama as for the prize.