Southern Stories: Selected Stories, 1

John Walker is a professor of Spanish at Queen’s University.

Although he now resides in San Francisco, Clark Blaise spent a large
part of his academic and literary career in Canada. Most of the 13
stories in this collection deal with his early life in different parts
of impoverished rural Florida. As Fenton Johnson points out in his brief
introduction, these stories reflect the author’s fascination with the
dark side of life and the relation between time and memory. The stories
were taken from the collections A North American Education (1973),
Tribal Justice (1974), Resident Alien (1986), and Man and His World
(1992).

Most of the stories have to do with the life of the boy-narrator
Frankie, who lives in Florida with his Canadian parents and is subjected
to anti-Jewish, anti-black, and anti-Canadian sentiment. The most
successful stories—“Broward Dowdy,” “The Bridge,” “A North
American Education,” “The Salesman’s Son Grows Older,” “How I
Because a Jew,” and the novella Snow People—explore the poverty,
neglect, alienation, and loneliness Frankie faces as he develops
emotionally and sexually in a variety of settings—the street, the
playground, the baseball diamond, the swamps of backward Florida,
trailer parks, rooming houses, and cinemas. In these stories, Blaise
skilfully combines the narrator’s youthful innocence with the maturity
of adult hindsight.