{"id":153122,"date":"2021-06-22T11:04:03","date_gmt":"2021-06-22T15:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153122"},"modified":"2021-06-22T11:04:03","modified_gmt":"2021-06-22T15:04:03","slug":"re-covered-cleo-overstreets-the-boar-hog-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/06\/22\/re-covered-cleo-overstreets-the-boar-hog-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: Cleo Overstreet\u2019s The Boar Hog Woman<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Lucy Scholes.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a literary landscape often obsessed with youth\u2014whether it\u2019s the buzz surrounding so-called hot new talent or those \u201c30 under 30\u201d and \u201cbest of young novelists\u201d lists\u2014stories of late-in-life success prove especially fascinating. I\u2019m talking about writers like Penelope Fitzgerald, who didn\u2019t publish her first book until she was in her late fifties, and won the Booker Prize at sixty-three. Or the British novelist Mary Wesley, who was seventy when the first of her ten best-selling novels for adults made it into print. Then we have the doyenne of them all, Diana Athill, who experienced unexpected literary celebrity in her nineties. As such, Cleo Overstreet\u2019s debut novel, The Boar Hog Woman<\/em>\u2014which was published in 1972, when its author was fifty-seven years old\u2014couldn\u2019t help but catch my attention. David Henderson\u2019s celebratory obituary for Overstreet, which ran in the Berkeley Barb<\/em> on the occasion of her death, only three years later, in the summer of 1975, opens with a description of the deceased as \u201ca grandmother and a novelist.\u201d She \u201ccame to writing late in life,\u201d Henderson explains, \u201cbut she had in her mind\u2019s eye many stories to tell. She dedicated the last 12 years of her life to putting them down on paper.\u201d Unlike Fitzgerald, Wesley, and Athill, however, Overstreet\u2019s late-in-life career was sadly short and sweet. Henderson mentions her \u201cunpublished novels,\u201d referring to the most recent by name: Hurricane<\/em>, the manuscript of which Overstreet\u2019s close friend Ishmael Reed was apparently asked to edit for posthumous publication by Random House. Yet as far as I can see, this never actually happened, which means that The Boar Hog Woman <\/em>remains the only one of Overstreet\u2019s books to have made it into print.<\/p>\n

Of all the books and authors I\u2019ve written about thus far in this column, The Boar Hog Woman <\/em>and Cleo Overstreet have to be those about which and whom I\u2019ve uncovered the least information. Bar the brief author bio on the dust jacket of my secondhand copy of The Boar Hog Woman<\/em>, Henderson\u2019s obituary is the only account of Overstreet\u2019s life that I\u2019ve found. There\u2019s a short Kirkus <\/em>review of the novel that describes it as \u201cweirdly engrossing,\u201d and a significantly longer write-up\u2014a rave, by the writer and film scholar Clyde Taylor\u2014in the June 1974 edition of Black World<\/em>. But what I learned from these pieces, combined with the novel\u2019s publication date, was enough to intrigue me. Two of the most exciting and experimental female-authored works to emerge from the Black Arts Movement were written during the early seventies\u2014Fran Ross\u2019s Oreo <\/em>(1974) and Carlene Hatcher Polite\u2019s Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play <\/em>(1975)\u2014so I was keen to see how The Boar Hog Woman <\/em>compared.<\/p>\n

Short answer: although not quite up there with Oreo<\/em>, Overstreet\u2019s entertaining and often moving account of the comings and goings of a close-knit Black community in mid-\u201960s Oakland, California, more than holds its own. But don\u2019t just take my word for it. \u201cCleo Overstreet has done to narrative what Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes did to Negro poetry, put it on a solid Black footing by tapping the folkroot,\u201d Taylor writes. \u201cShe gives a hip to the creaky machinery of the novel\u2014point of view, stream of consciousness, the objectivity of the narrator, the incessant analysis of motivation, jabber jabber\u2014then she leaves it hanging out to rust. She has up-fingered its tradition more successfully than any Black writer in North America.\u201d <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Overstreet\u2019s garrulous narrator\u2014a woman of late middle age who runs a beauty salon (as the author herself did) but whose name we never learn\u2014tells long-winded tales about her friends and neighbors, including the titular Boar Hog Woman, who runs the barbershop where the local men like to hang out, and whom the narrator\u2019s own husband, Hars, has recently left her for. The Kirkus <\/em>review sums it up well: the novel is \u201cabout nothing so much as its own energy, as it jumps dazzlingly from event to event, casually skipping years here and there in total indifference to causality, psychology, and symbolism\u2014all the conventional devices that over-imbue our ordinary novels with \u2018meaning.\u2019\u2009\u201d The narrator certainly doesn\u2019t mince words when it comes to her villainous rival\u2014or any other character, come to think about it\u2014thus, reading the novel is like listening to a gossipy friend. It\u2019s easy to imagine her accompanying side-eye, raised eyebrows, and pursed lips. One of the best jokes here is how often the narrator complains about everyone else\u2019s blathering and tattling, while she\u2019s clearly the worst of the lot! Fictional shenanigans aside\u2014a funeral that\u2019s a hotbed of fainting and fighting, an old man whose attempts to join the gang at the barbershop are thwarted by bands of flower children, even a search for buried treasure\u2014Overstreet paints a portrait of the kind of community that she clearly knows intimately, and she takes as her subjects the universal themes of love, loss, and ordinary, everyday jealousies and betrayals.<\/p>\n

So far, so authentic, but add to this an undercurrent of something decidedly strange. Were it not for the novel\u2019s prologue\u2014in which a Black man named Amos Sandblack gets a job rearing boar hogs in the middle of the Nevada desert, an experiment during which only one animal is ever born, a runt, which Amos\u2019s wife treats like a baby until it disappears one day after somehow having transformed into what the couple take, at a distance, to be \u201ca little black girl with her clothes almost torn off\u201d\u2014we\u2019d be forgiven for assuming that the jealous narrator is simply painting her adversary in a less than flattering light. But something much weirder is going on. \u201cThe Boar Hog Woman is a woman who is a hog which is a male hog,\u201d reads the opening line of the blurb on the dust jacket, which is about as clear as it gets! \u201cScience fiction? Surrealism? Poetic license gone mad in prose?\u201d the blurb continues. None of the above, we\u2019re told; rather, this is a novel that should be read as \u201ccontemporary myth<\/em>, touching us where myth ought to touch\u2014at the heart of our need to understand the forces molding our destinies.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this is exactly what Overstreet does so brilliantly. \u201cThe Boar Hog Woman <\/em>is not a novel,\u201d writes Taylor; \u201cit\u2019s a story, a long tale, a mythic narrative, an East Oakland shaggy-dog story.\u201d Beneath its more diverting, diaphanous exterior lies what Henderson describes as \u201can intensely moving tale of a woman who loses her man in middle-age to another woman, subsequently seeing the friends they had shared drifting away and sometimes dying.\u201d The narrator watches in dismay as the men in the neighborhood flock like moths to the Boar Hog Woman\u2019s flame. It doesn\u2019t matter that she\u2019s no great beauty, and it\u2019s not just Hars whom she entices away from his wife. The Boar Hog Woman employs a staff of \u201caged whores,\u201d well-practiced at handling their clientele. The men might all be so old they \u201ccould not have raised a hard if their life depended on it,\u201d but in the company of these women, they behave as though they\u2019re frisky young studs. And although distinctly unimpressed by these drooling lovesick \u201cfools,\u201d the narrator can\u2019t help pining after her lost husband. Such is life, though; his abandonment is presented as a horrible inevitability. She\u2019s not the first wife to be deserted, and she won\u2019t be the last. \u201cThe life of a wife is like the life of a maid,\u201d she reports, half in anger, half in resignation. \u201cShe can work the hell out of herself and try to make something comfortable or make ends meet. And that son-of-a-bitch will go and find his old worn-out whore and put her in front of his wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that this is a world without loyalty. The community is tethered together in large part by the steadfastness of friends, not to mention the kindness of strangers. In a particularly affecting episode, two children who embark on a long and perilous journey across the city one rainy night to visit their father\u2019s grave are thankfully taken under the wing of a passing benevolent truck driver. Then there\u2019s the man who usually keeps an eye out for them\u2014their dead father\u2019s best friend\u2014no matter how rude their widowed mother is to him. Or take the narrator\u2019s relationship with her old pal Katie Blue, a woman who \u201cwould do you a big favor and in the same breath would cut your throat with her tongue.\u201d Underneath this caustic exterior, the women are still there for each other.<\/p>\n

In spite of the rather pathetic predictability of the old men\u2019s conduct, there\u2019s more than an air of melancholy to their antics. Overstreet encourages us to laugh at them, but that doesn\u2019t stop her from also presenting them as victims of circumstances and structures beyond their control: \u201cAll of these men had hard jobs, and they worked hard on those jobs. They would work all the week working like a mule and misusing their home and thinking that they were enjoying themselves. This was a slow way of committing suicide by working all of the week and sitting up all of the weekends and drinking rotgut whiskey.\u201d As Taylor points out, although not \u201cde Text of revolutionary Black consciousness,\u201d it is a novel \u201cbrushed by that awareness.\u201d As Overstreet writes:<\/p>\n

The system for over four hundred years had had its eyes focused on the black man. This was worked on him and his manhood, trying to stand up like a man. He has all the qualities of a man, but the system won\u2019t let him perform like a man \u2026 The white man uses psychology on the black man in every way. He might call him \u201cBoy,\u201d that is the old way of working on the black man\u2019s mind. Now this theory has gotten old, now he has to think in terms of some other way of exploiting the black man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Systemic racism is nothing new, of course, but the nuance of Overstreet\u2019s observations\u2014the way she probes the intersections of race and gender to explore the emasculation of Black men and the knock-on effect this has on the way they treat the Black women in their lives\u2014seems pretty advanced for the time of the book\u2019s publication.<\/p>\n

As a case in point, perhaps the most stirring, not to mention shocking, episode here is when one of the gang, Ben, gets drunk with Hars and confesses\u2014for the first time ever, it seems\u2014that beginning when he was a child and on through his adolescence, he was sexually abused by a significantly older white woman. As he tells his story, we learn that it wasn\u2019t just that he couldn\u2019t say no; he had to contend with the knowledge that if his abuser\u2019s white husband ever walked in on them, she would have \u201chollered raped, and they would have killed me and she would have stood in line watching it.\u201d It was a good thing war broke out when it did, Ben says, drawing his tale to a close. \u201cMan, you are talking crazy,\u201d Hars tells him, confused as to how his friend could welcome something that amounted to so much death. \u201cBut look at all the lives that is lost in the black race in those Mississippi delta and hills, and nobody do anything about it,\u201d Ben counters. Earlier in the novel a joke is made of the fact that Ben can\u2019t tell the difference between the Civil War and World War II, but no one\u2019s laughing now: \u201cIn my book World War Two was the Civil War,\u201d he explains soberly, \u201cbecause where I lived it was still slavery, and many of those colored people was able to get away from their slave masters and they had a job waiting for them and a place to stay. Roosevelt did more for the colored people that way than Abraham did; at least he did what he promised them.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Since she herself was born, raised, and married in rural Mississippi, when her characters talk about pre\u2013World War II life in the South, we can only assume Overstreet\u2019s writing about a world she knew well. After living in Georgia, Washington, Oregon, and New York, she and her family settled in Berkeley in the early forties. She attended a variety of colleges, including real estate school, mortuary school, and beautician school. She also raised three children\u2014Harry Lee Overstreet, a Berkeley-based architect and politician; the abstract expressionist artist Joe Overstreet, who lived and worked in New York for most of his life; and her daughter, Laverta O. Allen, who worked in education\u2014and, at the time of The Boar Hog Woman<\/em>\u2019s publication, had eleven grandchildren. Overstreet was active in the civil rights movement from the early sixties to the time of her death, and Henderson\u2014who knew her personally\u2014describes her as \u201cone of the most dynamic women I have ever met,\u201d a combination of \u201cancient griot spirit of wisdom mixed with contemporary Americana.\u201d This is something that comes across in her work: Taylor describes The Boar Hog Woman <\/em>as \u201cooz[ing] the intuitive, self-comfortable Blackness of a holy-roller lady, without the self-consciousness of ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why The Boar Hog Woman <\/em>isn\u2019t better known today, I\u2019m really not sure. According to Henderson, Overstreet had more than a handful of notable admirers: Taylor and Reed, of course, but also the well-known feminist Kate Millett, the activist lawyer Flo Kennedy, as well as other academics in the Berkeley area. Taylor rates the novel \u201cin the front ranks of Black fiction \u2026 alongside of Ellison, Wright, Toni Morrison, Reed, Gaines, Himes, Toomer, Kelley, McKay, way up there.\u201d Henderson also argues that Overstreet\u2019s brilliant depiction of older women (and men) should have seen her more widely championed by the women\u2019s liberation movement: \u201cShe used an oral poetic tonality that gave her reader full entry into the main character\u2019s heart and mind. No, love is just not for teenagers, nor the jokes about the old folks doing it in the old folks home, love is eternal and the emotions Cleo Overstreet\u2019s protagonist feels over lost love is universal, is anyone\u2019s heartbreak.\u201d When he hails her use of language\u2014which he describes as \u201cstraight out of Mississippi, via Africa, she is not as eloquent as Doris Lessing or as poetic as Anais Nin, but if you go with just the power and energy of the works, then Cleo Overstreet ranks with the highest of the highest\u201d\u2014he\u2019s echoing Taylor\u2019s memorable summation of the novel: \u201cIt might hit you like white lightning when your taste runs to Scotch, but you have to give it dues for undiluted strength and character.\u201d To think that this was just the beginning of what she could have gone on to write feels like such a cruelly snatched-away opportunity\u2014stolen from both Overstreet herself, since she\u2019d waited so long to dedicate herself to her writing, and from us, her readers. Whatever string of circumstances arose that contributed to The Boar Hog Woman <\/em>fading away from view, Overstreet\u2019s tragically early death undoubtedly plays a large part. In the three years between its publication and her passing, the novel went from thrilling debut to poignant swan song.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucy Scholes on Cleo Overstreet\u2019s lone novel, \u2018The Boar Hog Woman,\u2019 whose admirers included Ishmael Reed, Kate Millett, and Flo Kennedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-153122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Covered: Cleo Overstreet\u2019s \u2018The Boar Hog Woman\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Lucy Scholes on Cleo Overstreet\u2019s lone novel, \u2018The Boar Hog Woman,\u2019 whose admirers included Ishmael Reed, Kate Millett, and Flo Kennedy.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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