Southern Without Gothic

CLARA (286 pp.)--Lonnie Coleman--Dutfon ($3).

Sitting on the front porch that bright October morning, Lilian Sayre wondered for the hundredth time who little Petie's daddy might be. Big, black Clara, Petie's unmarried mother and the Sayres' woman of all work, was raking leaves; her brown-skinned youngster was cleaning the bird bath. Then the truth hit Lilian like a cosmic shock: Petie's father was Lilian's own husband, Carl. Clara did not even try to deny it. Neither, later, did Carl Sayre. But though Lilian kicked Clara out that very day and burned down the backyard shack she slept in, she soon took her and Petie back. It was not only that Clara was a fine servant; over the years she had become a necessary complement to the warped lives of the Sayres.

In Clara, Southern Novelist Lonnie Coleman has handled a potentially messy theme with uncommon dignity. His story, in other hands, might have become a staring-eyed study of miscegenation. Author Coleman uses it to show that the color line in the South can sometimes follow a route as uncertain as the wanderings of human emotion.

To the people of Bloomingdale, Ala., Lilian Sayre must have seemed a lucky girl. Conventionally pretty and completely ordinary, she had come from a farm village in the middle of the state and married handsome Carl Sayre. He was only a grocer, to be sure, but by Bloomingdale standards he was well-to-do and a good catch. Their failure in marriage began on the wedding night, when Carl got raving drunk. Lilian had neither the intelligence nor the maturity to try to understand Carl, a decent enough fellow when he was not drinking. As time went on, he came to think of her as a chip off the block his cold, superior mother had been hacked from; then his benders became heroic. Big Clara, lusty and human, was all the things the two women in his life had denied him. Whenever he sneaked into her shack in the backyard, he was hitting back at both his wife and mother. Before Clara ends, Carl Sayre dies from his debauches and Petie, suspected of killing a white man, is shot from ambush. But by that time, Lilian Sayre has grown up enough to know why Carl behaved as he did, and how much she had to do with it. She has also crossed the color line, bearing a full quota of sympathy for Clara. Author Coleman has told his story with a simplicity that only occasionally slips into naivete. Clara is no major work of fiction, but it is an honest book on a ticklish subject, and it has the virtue of being about ordinary people, well understood.

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