The Keepers of the House

This book, written in the mid-1960s, depicts southern culture in a way that is both endearing and despicable. The affection and attachment of the Howland family for their estate is shown in the description of the preparations for the big wedding, a once-in-a-generation event that calls for a complete makeover and renewal of the ancestral home. The issue of race, central to the novel, brings out the worst in the community, in a way that must have been even more accusatory during the height of the Civil Rights movement than it is today. The writing is wonderfully descriptive of the rural Deep South's rivers, ridges, and swamps, much of it is beautiful. I found the characters believable and interesting, people who I wanted to know more show more about. The plot moves right along to the climax, when it becomes hard to put down. I was disturbed by the ending, though, and it has taken me a couple days to process it. I may have to re-read the epilogue just to make sure I understand it. Overall, I think this is an engrossing and worthwhile novel. show less

I stumbled across this book and am so glad I did! Grau's prose is achingly beautiful, even as she is tackling some very painful subjects like racism and hatred in the South of the not-too-distant past. The characters are fully formed and have unique voices of their own. The plot weaves the story of a single family, the Howlands, who settled an area of Alabama and grow to prosperity over many generations through farming, cattle, forestry, and plain hard work. All along, their relationship to the local "negroes" is complex and often loving in unexpected ways. This book packs a lot to think about into its pages.

This 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning novel reads almost like historical fiction. It has a dreamy quality, but it's a nightmare for Margaret, a "freejack" woman of Native American and Black ancestry, who meets a much older wealthy white widower, Will Howland, in her hidden backwater community. Abandoned by her mother and seeing no life for herself in the crowded home of her grandfather, she moves in with Will and they build a life together with their four children. As Will is the wealthiest man in the area and has established most of the businesses that employ the residents, any objections to their relationship in the community are suppressed. Margaret insists on sending their children away to boarding schools in New Orleans at a young age, show more where they pass for white. Will's daughter from his first marriage leaves her husband and returns home with her daughter Abigail, who adores her grandfather and accepts Margaret as housekeeper/stepmother, admiring the deep love between them. She ends up marrying a man with political ambitions, and when he runs for office, the relationship between Will and Margaret, now both deceased, is exposed by Margaret’s son, and wrecks their his campaign and their marriage. The story is told from the viewpoints of Will, Abigail, and Margaret, though her voice is the quietest, and that is the only flaw I can see. I think this book bears comparison to Toni Morrison's Sula and to the novels of Carson McCullers. The haunted South and its deep seated legacy of inherited misery is here in all its swamps and screams and secrets.

Quote: "The inner workings of old people moved to the outside. Their muscles and sinews got hard and ropy and hung on the outside of their skins. Their veins rose up, like cords wrapping their way across the backs of hands and along legs." show less

Here's a funny thing. I'd been looking at this book for a couple of years harbouring the fear that I may find it boring. More fool me.
The theme of racial disharmony in the South is a well trodden path, but what Shirley Ann Grau delivers is fundamentally a love story. The writing is beautiful.
Set in Alabama, William Howland, a Southern gentleman of substance, does the unthinkable. He falls in love with a black woman (Margaret), has children with her and then marries her (in secret). Margaret is a fantastic character, dignified and intelligent. The sacrifice she makes for her children cannot be understated .
The majority of the book is seen through the eyes of Abigail, William's granddaughter. She's wonderfully phlegmatic and when word show more gets out about William and Margret's marriage things become quite hairy, but she deals with it magnificently.
It's a real shame that The Keepers of the House, it won the Pulitzer prize in 1965, has been somewhat forgotten. This should be taught on the school curriculum for the simple reason that the writing is clever and wise. show less

This is a sweeping tale of a Southern family, racial prejudice, and human integrity. The Howlands are those Southerners--the ones with lots of money, power and name. After the death of his first wife, Will Howland fathers three children with his black housekeeper, Margaret, a woman he loves. Everyone knows this, but no one acknowledges it. Even inside the Howland home, this is a visible secret.


We meet both Will and Margaret before they meet one another. Margaret is one of the most unique, believable and interesting characters that I have ever encountered. Will, a strong man, handles his situation in the most upstanding manner that he believes a man in that day and age can do. This is a tale of family; a tale of blood, and sometimes a show more tale of how little we know about the people that we know the best. Will’s granddaughter, Abigail, is left to handle the consequences of this legacy, and she draws on the strength of her grandfather’s blood in a way that leaves you cheering for her aloud.


The most shocking thing about this book is that it is not more widely known and appreciated. It received the Pulitzer prize in 1965, and I can imagine that it caused a bit of a stir in the South, a region in the throes of desegregation. Like Lamb in His Bosom, another Pulitzer that I only discovered this year, this book has just faded into obscurity, and that is hard to understand. Perhaps people feel it does not have any true relevance anymore, but I think it speaks to the humanity of every character in the most relevant of ways. Are we not still, and always, being encouraged to view our world through the most politically expedient optics? How many of us decide what we think and feel based on what we are told we ought to think and feel? How many of us have the courage to lead a life that is opposed to that norm?


Along the way, Grau scatters little bits of wisdom that are completely true, completely universal, and yet so seldom voiced:


We’ll remember him, she thought. For a time, a little time, before it starts slipping away from us, and we won’t remember hardly at all. Then we’ll be dead too, and that’ll be the end of him, for good. And isn’t it funny, she thought, that it takes two generations to kill off a man? ...First him, and then his memory…


I have often thought exactly this. Everyone who personally knew my grandparents is dead, excepting my generation of siblings and cousins. When we are gone, no one on earth will remember them and many of our children will probably not even be able to identify them in photographs. But we are made up of these people. Many of the things I have passed to the next generation have come directly from them, many of the most precious stories I know are their stories. In so many ways, that is what this book is really about, the passage of time and the passage of something unidentifiable, in the blood, that is about who we are and where we come from. show less

I read a lot of fiction as a young adult, but as a middle-aged adult I read mostly non-fiction. Most fiction I pick up today does not hold my attention. This book was riveting. It has been a long time since a novel has put me in another world like this one did. My heart was literally beating fast in the final scene, that never happens to me. The writing was gorgeous. My favorite scene is William in the swamp. My least favorite scenes are Abigail in her years of college and marriage; as I read, I felt the book really sagged there, but in retrospect I feel, maybe the book had to sag there to reflect the laziness and routine of her life at the time, and to make the ending that much more powerful. I would love to read a sequel that told me show more what happened with Margaret's children, and that had more written from Margaret's point of view. One issue I struggled with was, as a reviewer on Amazon I think put it, Abigail's lack of compassion for Margaret's children. It's not what we as modern-day readers expect. But I think there is an essential truth to it. How much was white privilege, a feeling that they should be grateful for what they had and not expect anymore? And how much of it is was, as another reviewer put it, family dysfunction?

He crossed the open marsh, and then a small lake. This one, now, seemed to be fed by sulphur springs, because the odor lay heavy over its almost still surface. With the last of the dusk the full moon rose, heavy and yellow, behind him. His shadow and the shadow of the skiff stretched out longer and longer like rubber on the water ahead. With the rising moon, cats began to prowl in the distance. He heard a couple of panthers yeowl, and a couple of screeches that he recognized as bobcats. As the water birds settled for the night gators began to prey on them, and he heard the loud snapping of their huge jaws. show less

I've been talking with some friends in an online space about what makes writing beautiful, and then I happened to read this book, which has truly beautiful writing. She sets the background in Alabama with descriptions of the scents and sounds of a farm, a journey by canoe in a swamp, the meaningful contents of a house. Other reviewers complain that the story dragged, but I loved these word pictures and see how they were needed to describe the Howland family's ties to the land.

It's not a spoiler to say that William Howland had a relationship with Margaret, his black housekeeper, and had children with her, though key details are revealed later. His granddaughter Abigail, the main character, seems to have no problem with this and show more understands why Margaret sends her children to school in the north, where they can pass as white. She grows up to marry John, a lawyer with political ambitions who runs for governor on a segregationist ticket.

What I didn't understand was (spoiler)
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why Margaret's son Robert returned to the south, or how his existence, and relationship to Abigail and John, became known so that it could be used against John. Did he mean to hurt the campaign? Why? Or was it simply dug up by John's rivals? I also didn't understand Abigail's anger towards Robert and his sister, and why she said cruel things to him at the end. show less