NEIGHBORS

A remarkable collection of Jim Crow–era stories from a major talent.

If Oliver’s name isn’t well known now, there’s a reason: She died at 22 in 1966, leaving only four published stories in her wake. Two more stories were published posthumously, but Oliver’s career, for all intents and purposes, ended before it had a chance to begin. A new collection of Oliver’s published and unpublished work testifies both to her immense raw talent as a young writer and to the major figure she might have become if she’d had the chance to develop. Her stories deal with the everyday lives of Black families of all classes as they contend with issues such as segregation, poverty, and prejudice and their own hopes for the future. In the title story, a family prepares itself, emotionally as well as physically, for the next day, when their youngest member is set to integrate his school. Their fear is as palpable as their ambivalence: “We’re doing what we have to do, I guess,” his mother reasons, and his older sister says, “But it seems so unfair…sending him there all by himself like that.” In story after story, Oliver demonstrates nuance, sensitivity, and a profound understanding for characters of varying ages, races, and classes. In “The Closet on the Top Floor,” a young Black woman is, again, the first person of color at her school—a college this time—and her sense of otherness is immediately made clear. “They were all wearing white raincoats,” Oliver writes of the woman’s classmates, “but hers was a kind of pale blue, making her stand out from the rest.” Like the other stories in this collection, it is exquisitely observed.

With a crystalline clarity and finely attuned ear, Oliver depicts her subjects with elegance and profound understanding.