Neighbors and Other Stories

Starred review from October 23, 2023
This extraordinary posthumous debut collection from Oliver (1943–1966) astutely portrays the realities of African American life in the South during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. The author was born in North Carolina and enrolled in the University of Iowa’s MFA program, and though she was only 22 when she died in a motorcycle accident, she managed to publish four of these 14 stories in her lifetime. The title entry offers a complex view of a family on the eve of a boy’s first day as the only Black student at his newly integrated elementary school, as an onslaught of threatening letters gradually erodes his parents’ resolve to send him. In “The Closet on the Top Floor,” Oliver adds a surreal element to the theme of desegregation, as a Black college student whose parents advocated for her school to integrate begins to withdraw from her classmates and eventually spends much of her time in a closet. “Health Service,” “Traffic Jam,” and “Spiders Without Tears” delve into familial ties, romance, and interracial relationships, respectively. The author’s heartfelt and resplendent writing is loaded with an earthy complexity reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston—indeed, novelist Tayari Jones names Oliver along with Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ann Petry as “literary foremothers” in her introduction. Oliver’s brilliant stories belong in the American canon.