Montgomery's Children by Richard Perry

First published: 1984

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: 1948-1980

Locale: Montgomery, New York

Principal Characters:

• Norman Fillis, a janitor, who is thirty-nine years old when the novel begins
• Gerald Fletcher, a boy enduring repeated beatings from his father
• Hosea Malone, a drug dealer who pronounces his name Hose-ee
• Josephine Moore, the victim of her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s complicit silence

The Novel

In 1948, about one hundred fifty black people live in Montgomery, a town located about two hours north of New York City. The first black people had begun arriving about thirty years earlier. Others had come during the Depression and World War II.

It is one of the oddities of the community that, as of 1948, no black person had ever died in Montgomery. That hint of immortality is but a part of what seems in many ways to be an idyllic existence. The novel picks up the story of Montgomery and its children just as the idyll is about to come to an end.

Construction has just begun on a racetrack about a mile and a half outside town. To make way for it, a forest in its first growth is leveled. Norman Fillis, a janitor who is thirty-nine years old at the time, sees the animals fleeing from the forest.

Soon after, the black community suffers its first death. In the thirty years that death has stayed away, the community has forgotten how to mourn. It must learn again the old lamentations and must reacquaint itself with sorrow.

People will have plenty of opportunity. Norman, for one, goes mad, although it is a madness that has its own kind of lucidity, even a kind of poetry. He communes with animals and birds and finds in trees a proof of the existence of God. One morning, Norman feels a strange weight on his head, but the weight lifts when he has his head shaved at the local barbershop. On this same day, Norman discovers that watching fire, whatever the source, lets him “see.” It also fills his heart with peace and his mouth with the taste of pomegranates. There is no harm in peace and pomegranates, and there is no real harm in Norman, but when he begins to appear naked in public, it is inevitable that he will occasionally find himself in an institution.

Norman’s madness carries with it a kind of power. His visions are basically true. He sees that troubles are coming, even if he can do nothing to prevent them, and he can fly. At first, he can fly only short distances, but his power increases with practice. He also can pass his power on, if he can find the one meant to receive it.

That one may well be Gerald Fletcher. To Norman, the circle in Gerald’s eye, in fact a congenital mole, is a sign. Gerald becomes aware as he grows that he is in some strange way the focus of Norman’s attention. In fact, Norman lets Gerald see him fly, but when Gerald finds that even his best friend, Iceman, will not believe that this really happened, Gerald lets himself be talked out of his own experience.

Other troubles visit Montgomery and its children. Hosea Malone deserts his wife Meredith and their seven children, the youngest of whom is blind and deformed. A desperate Meredith kills her youngest child. Norman, unobserved, witnesses her burial of the body. Hosea will learn of this twelve years later, when he returns in 1960 to Montgomery in the company of Alice Simineski, an enormously fat white woman with whom he is involved in dealing drugs. When Hosea confronts Meredith with his knowledge, she confides in the pastor, Melinda Mclain, who keeps the secret but who believes she now knows what brought death to Montgomery back in 1948. Twenty more years will pass before Meredith, now sixty-seven, will feel compelled to confess to the police. In the wake of this decision, one of Meredith and Hosea’s grown daughters, meaning to kill her father, shoots and kills Alice by mistake.

Gerald’s story is not limited to his significance to Norman. Repeatedly beaten by his father, Gerald falls in love with Josephine Moore, a newcomer to Montgomery. Josephine has been repeatedly raped by her father, while her mother, who must know what is going on, has remained silent. Gerald agrees to help Josephine kill her father, although he is never seriously committed to the plan. Josephine finally kills her father without Gerald’s help and is sent to prison for her action.

Others of Montgomery’s children also suffer afflictions. Twelve-year-old Jonah Washington drowns. Iceman, Gerald’s friend and confidant, is electrocuted while trying to liberate a cat from a tree. A boy named Soapsuds is killed in Mississippi; Jesus Mclain, the son of the pastor, is shot down by the police in Cincinnati, Ohio.

As the story approaches its end in 1980, there are few survivors, and their situation is far from untroubled. Gerald, now living in New York City, is involved in a halfhearted effort to save a crumbling marriage. He and Josephine, who has turned up at his apartment, pay one more visit to Montgomery.

Josephine confronts her mother. It is little surprise that the encounter proves unsatisfactory; it is too late for these two to connect. Josephine does learn that the man she killed was not her biological father. She sets out for Georgia in search of her real father.

Gerald sees Norman once more. Since Gerald has had the mole removed (to him, it was never anything more than an annoying minor disfigurement), Norman no longer recognizes him as the one to whom he should pass on his power. Whatever wisdom or madness Norman might have passed on dies with him as his last flight ends in a fatal crash on the courthouse steps. Nobody noticed Norman flying, and the general understanding is that he has committed suicide.

The Characters

Montgomery’s Children is a densely populated novel. Its episodic structure, covering an extended period of time, permits a number of its characters to act in effect as temporary protagonists. Moreover, the characters interact with one another, moving within one another’s stories in complex and unpredictable ways. Of the many characters who populate the novel, there are four who seem to assume central importance in determining its structure. These are Norman Fillis, Hosea Malone, Gerald Fletcher, and Josephine Moore.

In the eyes of the world, Norman Fillis is simply crazy, but the world does not see as Norman sees. He enjoys an intimacy with nature that is lost to the community when the forest is destroyed to make way for the racetrack. He has witnessed both of the actions that may have inaugurated Montgomery’s reign of suffering: the flight of the animals and the burial of Meredith and Hosea’s seventh child. He is a man of vision and power. He can fly, he can teach others how to fly, and he envisions a day when all black people will fly. He has a message to pass on to the right one. In the eyes of the world, he is crazy.

Hosea is not crazy. Hosea has seen into the heart of things and has determined that there is nothing there. Since there is no God, since life is meaningless, there are no standards. Hosea’s power is negative. He withholds himself. He abandons Meredith and their children, and he will not give Alice the love she craves. He deals drugs out of moral and emotional indifference. Once he learns that going without a hat cures the headaches that bother him for a while, he escapes pain. Those near him, those who permit themselves to feel his influence, such as Meredith and Alice, are not so lucky.

Gerald and Josephine are linked to each other by their age, by their love for each other, and by their victimization at the hands of brutal fathers. Their ultimate estrangement arises out of their differences. Josephine dares and acts, however destructive her actions turn out to be. Gerald holds back. He entertains the possibility of killing Josephine’s father, but he is never committed to the act. He is at one moment on the verge of flight, but he cannot commit himself to that action, either. In the face of his friend’s skepticism, he allows himself even to deny the experience itself and, thus, the sense of possibility the experience symbolizes. Growing up for him entails a gradual loss of direction. When he finally asks Norman to give him the message, it is too late.

Critical Context

The term Magical Realism gained currency in American criticism in the context of the rise of North American critical interest in Latin American fiction, but it has been pointed out that the essential elements of Magical Realism existed in African American and African culture long before American critics had a name for it. The easy relationship of realism and fantasy associated with the term is common in the black oral tradition, and a significant part of Perry’s accomplishment in Montgomery’s Children involves his suggesting in print some of the force of the storytelling tradition.

It is a quality of this kind of narrative that readers are encouraged to a more liberal notion of causality than associated with literary realism. Thus, it is here possible that the felling of a forest in Montgomery, New York, becomes part of a causal chain that leads to, say, the killing of a young black man in Cincinnati, Ohio. Readers may simply accept this without question, allowing the narrative the right to establish its own rules. They also may find in the departure from the literal an invitation to readings that emphasize the metaphorical and symbolic, thus perhaps seeing the felling of the forest as marking a rupture between the community and the natural environment, a rupture that must ultimately produce destructive consequences. A further possibility, since realism remains a component of Magical Realism, is to consider magical patterns of causality as one possible explanation while looking simultaneously for commonsense possibilities. Are the many failures in human relationships, especially in variations on the parent-child relationship, caused by phenomena such as the felling of the forest and the flight of the animals, or are these failures themselves the cause of the fragmentation of the community? It is in the nature of a novel such as Montgomery’s Children, when it succeeds, to invite readers to entertain such a multiplicity of possibilities. Brought to this state, readers are then ready to interrogate received notions of reality, part of what Magical Realism is all about.

Montgomery’s Children does succeed as a work of literary art, and it received enthusiastic reviews when it was published. Ironically, the review that could have contributed most powerfully to the book’s commercial success, the very favorable notice that appeared in the influential The New York Times Book Review, appeared too long after the publication date to have much effect, and the book turned up quickly on sale shelves in bookstores. This false start has to some extent limited the recognition Montgomery’s Children has received. A paperback edition that appeared in 1985 was allowed to go out of print in 1992, but this is the sort of book that delighted readers have a way of finding for themselves. It is likely to gain a permanent place in African American literature.

Bibliography

Bailliett, Whitney. “Upstate.” The New Yorker 59 (February 6, 1984): 124-125. The novel is concerned with evil and redemption and the ways in which black people weigh upon each other more than with how the white world weighs on the black.

Davis, Thulani. “Books.” Essence 14 (February, 1984). The town of Montgomery is itself a complex character, speaking in several voices. Perry can be compared to Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed and, for mastery of Magical Realism, to Gabriel García Márquez.

Kissell, John. “Montgomery’s Children.” Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 19, 1984, 7. The central theme is Gerald’s love for his father. Surrounding Gerald is an impressionistic history of African Americans since World War II.

Tate, Greg. “Montgomery’s Children.” The Village Voice 29 (April 17, 1984): 44. The novel is a morality tale about urban black America’s fall from the garden of racial quarantine into the dystopia of desegregation. Perry shares Toni Morrison’s gifts for psychological as well as pathological insights.

Watkins, Mel. “Montgomery’s Children.” The New York Times Book Review 89 (August 5, 1984): 18-19. The novel, in which comic and surreal are balanced, is about the evils of modernism and the redemptive powers of the spirit.