Mary M. Slechta, Mulberry Street Stories

Mary M. Slechta’s brilliant new collection, Mulberry Street Stories (winner of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize), unfolds a puzzle box of treasures, pulling the reader in as if the book were an engrossing, fractured novel, visiting and revisiting characters from different viewpoints, offering up an intimate, inventive, sometimes hilarious, often heart-wrenching view of all of their secrets. The book starts as the story of a street and a neighborhood and then expands its perspective dramatically, without ever losing its focus on its particular people in their particular place. Characters (living, dead, and somewhere in between) appear, reappear, and disappear. Very human families love each other, fight, try to take care of their young and old, mourn their dead, and lose their possessions and sometimes their memories. They are, or become, or are pursued by, gods (maybe), ghosts, zombies, and vampires. Their children fall or leap off the edge of the world.

Each new story (many of them are flash fictions) changes the meaning of previous stories, rarely answering the deeply satisfying questions they raise. The stories are fantastical and realistic, tragic and hopeful, full of narrative surprises and deep resonance with our own world. From the first pages, I fell in love with Slechta’s chimerical voice(s) and outrageous and appealing characters and only became more obsessed as the book began to reveal its depths and reach. The stories filled me with horror and then almost immediately made me burst out laughing. One story is an extended tribute to Toni Morrison, and Slechta, though entirely original in her voice and ways of working, seems to carry on Morrison’s poetic, memorable storytelling that encompasses both injustice and delight.

The table of contents gives a sense of the range of Slechta’s range of projects: “A House on Mulberry Street,” “The Pickled Negro,” “Sparrow,” “White Flight,” “A Rare Old Bird,” “The Flat World,” “Squatter’s Rights,” “Gracie Brown,” “A Walk Down Mulberry Street,” “Patty-Cake and the Talking Belly,” “Negro Girl’s Ritual for a Miraculous Cure,” “Keeping Up,” “Ashe,” “The Magical Negro,” “Jenny,” “The Crossroads,” “ColoredMagic,” “A Bench on the Moon,” “Assembly Required,” “The Motivational Speaker,” “Weight,” “Troll Bridge,” “The Conductor,” “Mr. Brown,” “John and the Devil.”

Readers might see different shapes in the book’s changing landscapes, depending on our own obsessions or the tragedies and outrages happening in the world at the moment we’re reading. What the characters endure and survive. The ways they do and don’t believe in both the magic and the violence in their lives. The stories within stories. Slechta reinvents old tales and creates new ones, about chicanery of various kinds, about resilience, about family cruelty and loyalty. The book takes surprising turns as stories jump the tracks they’ve been racing along. Sometimes a story becomes about an entirely different character, or a monster turns out to be someone they, or we, love. Sometimes an apparently ordinary person reveals themselves as monstrous.

One thread that runs throughout is the persistence and necessity of hope, from a magical not-exactly-devil at various crossroads to the texture of the prose to the vision of reparations and some kind of restoration, even given all that’s been lost. A box that seems like a present may turn out to be a coffin, but Slechta’s coffins can be stuffed full of possibility and promise:

Stretched out in his best suit, he was his usual red- brown pretty but with his hands clasped over his chest, as still as a corpse. True to his promise to Mama, he had a sack of seeds for a pillow, and poked into every available space, sacks of soil filled with tubers, roots, and bulbs. Had he tried to mail himself like that desperate slave, Henry Box Brown? Or had a kindly friend fulfilled a dead man’s wish?

In another short passage from the same story, “Squatter’s Rights,” Felicia, whose older twin brother (she was a “fragile hitchhiker”) had all the luck, until he didn’t, meets Sparrow, a child digging in the yard of Felicia’s largely abandoned house. The story has up until this point been about the siblings, about terrible destructive losses, and then it turns a corner: 

“What you got there?” 

She didn’t mean to frighten the little girl, but she was curious. Unseen in her dark clothes, she had been studying the street. Waiting for that magical hour that comes to every neighborhood when twilight pauses human movement. Her attention had been focused on a crow picking apart a flattened squirrel, when she’d spotted a figure, too large for a dog and holding a shiny object. Whatever it was scurried along the sidewalk before darting into a narrow break in the hedges. Her hands poised to break a neck if threatened, she stealthily followed. 

The child was picking eggplants and stacking them in the bowl with the skill of a greengrocer. All the more astonishing because it was barely spring in the North. Another surprise: Confronted in the darkness falling around them, the girl’s round eyes, innocent in another face, did not indicate fear but only wariness as they met her gaze straight on. 

“I don’t talk to strangers.” 

Such nerve. “No? But you’ll sit in their yard and steal their vegetables?” 

The girl hissed like a cat. “This is my yard and my garden. Mama says so.” 

Twilight, which in other places in the book can be the most dangerous time for the emergence of monsters (though we love some of these monsters, who we knew before they took on their current forms), here transforms into a “magical hour” that “pauses human movement.” Every surviving child in this book is a miracle, and this one is able to fight for herself, for her right to this territory she’s made her own. She’s hope embodied. These very eggplants that she picks with such skill and determination are a legacy from a coffin that once seemed to hold only grief.

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Notes: You can find more about Mary Slechta and Kimbilio, including the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, here.