Black Cherries

by Grace Stone Coates, Mary Clearman Blew

In this series of linked stories the child narrator, Veve, cannot fathom all the mysteries of her family’s life together, but by watching and listening she pieces together a painful past. Played out against the backdrop of rural hardship and deprivation on the family’s Kansas farm, the secret in her father’s previous life eventually explains his harsh treatment of the three older children and her mother’s bitterness over his countless misunderstandings and slights.

 

When originally published in 1931, a reviewer of Black Cherries commented that there is “a sharpness about all impressions in the book, a keenness of sensuous and spiritual apprehension that leaves brilliant after-images with the reader.” Another described the series of sketches as “exquisite in texture and so faithful to the childish mind that one derives a warm impression of the imagined young narrator.”

 

Grace Stone Coates (1881–1976) spent most of her life in the tiny ranching community of Martinsdale in southwestern Montana. During a seven-year period, twenty of Coates’s short stories were cited in the annual Best American Short Stories as Distinctive or Honor Roll stories, and John Updike chose Coates’s “Wild Plums” for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of the Century. Coates also published two collections of poetry.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

99 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

Reviews

[Sharon Huether · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Cherries By Grace Stone Coates A Story told through the eyes of a child;Veve. As a child she saw manythings happen in her family. She had so many "why's", never getting an answer. She saw some abuse,but it didn't touch her. She was her fathers favorite daughter, listening to his stories and poems. She learned a lesson in sharing and all fairy tales are not true. The author had such a gift for writing.

[Lauren Krummel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful storytelling and writing. I’ve recently read a few other novels about this era in rural America and was thus primed well to envision the landscape that the narrator, Veve, used as the backdrop to her childhood. The depth and profundity of childhood ruminations made me love this short story compilation so much and I hope to remember the complexity that a child’s mind has and feels with so early on as I approach my own motherhood years. I don’t often reread books but this may be one I revisit every few years.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Long after the rest of the household were in bed, father held me in his arms in the empty kitchen. He gave my grief a name and made it less. He said that the human spirit clung to symbols. Only the wise saw the reality behind the sign. By degrees he made me bigger than my loss."

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 1931 collection of linked stories—including "Wild Plums," long one of my favorite stories, which I encountered in the Best American Stories of the Century—seems a precursor of some of Alice Munro's work. There's the same observant narration by a young female protagonist who's more imaginative than most of those around her. In this case, the young Veve is drawn to her father, who is intelligent, arrogant, and at times cruel but also enamored of his youngest daughter, whom he sees as a kindred spirit. The stories here, told from Veve's perspective, often work by implication, as we understand more than Veve does; yet her intuitive and almost mystical impressions of the world are themselves often delightful and illuminating.

I would give this book five stars since there's nothing I didn't like about it, but somehow at only 99 pages it doesn't seem quite substantial enough to be ranked with the other books I've given five stars to. I would strongly recommend it, nonetheless.