Review: Pain and sacrifice unite characters in 'Holler, Child' story collection

Through 11 powerful stories in "Holler, Child," LaToya Watkins leads readers into dark territory. Her characters, mostly Black and living in Texas, do what they can as they confront trauma and lives weighed down by layers of racism, abuse, betrayal and religion.

Readers familiar with "Perish," Watkins' debut novel published last year, know her willingness to thrust us into uncomfortable situations. She opens that book with an adolescent girl in an outhouse, trying to abort her second pregnancy by her own father.

Similarly, the discomfort is immediate in this collection's opening story, "The Mother." Narrated by a woman whose son called himself the Messiah and led a cult in a mass suicide, the story extends in bleak, unpredictable ways, unfolding the mother's history and the fierceness of her son's delusions.

The title story disturbs in other ways. It is narrated by the mother of a 15-year-old boy accused of raping his employer's 13-year-old daughter. There's a brutal description of her own rape by her Sunday school teacher when she was 17, a rape that left her blind in one eye and pregnant. As she questions her son and realizes he is guilty, she first wants to fight the truth, looking for a loophole, "some type of way for him to still be who he always been." Part of her is scared because she "ain't never seen this wildness in his eyes," but she also can't let go of the idea that "he always been the most beautiful boy in the world."

In "Cutting Horse," Ridley, a former drug dealer now uncomfortably lodged in the suburbs with his wife, repeatedly watches the latest video of a police officer shooting an unarmed Black man while the news also follows the search for an escaped horse, wandering through suburban yards. Reflecting on the way he "was peeling away the layers" of himself to become acceptable to his more educated wife and white neighbors, Ridley recognizes the futility of the effort. His wife may have "she thought she was helping make this world safe for us," but Ridley understands that he can never be safe when the police treat spooked horses with more caution than they afford to Black lives.

Part of what makes Watkins' collection so enveloping is her mastery of the slow reveal. She plunges readers into the middle of her characters' lives, and just about every story requires a few pages to feel oriented, to understand the guilt, rage and fear at the base of the lives delineated here.

The despair collected in "Holler, Child" might overwhelm if Watkins weren't so good at capturing the depth of her characters, sometimes finding redemptive moments amid all the pain. She has an acute eye for the resentments and betrayals that can accumulate over a long marriage and the untenable sacrifices others can demand of us, but she also captures how love can sometimes be enough to hold things together.

Vikas Turakhia is an English teacher in Ohio.

Holler, Child

By: LaToya Watkins.

Publisher: Tiny Reparations Books, 224 pages, $28.