White Southerner crafted Black characters
Novelist was exploring race 50-plus years ago
Shirley Ann Grau, whose atmospheric, richly detailed writing explored issues of race, gender and power, notably in 1965’ s Pulitzer- winning novel The Keepers of the House, died Aug. 3 of a stroke, in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb. She was 91.
Grau examined the racial prejudice of white southerners, the limited opportunities afforded to women and the inexorable pull of the past in Louisiana, where she was born, and Alabama, where she spent much of her childhood.
“Her novels wade fearlessly into the complexities of racism,” said Alison Graham- Bertolini, a North Dakota State University professor of English, “and bring to life the South’s diversity — people, dialects, customs, food, architecture, along with the searing heat, pungent smells and the unbroken blue sky of Louisiana in midsummer.”
Book critics said her short stories, lyrical and unsentimental, evoked “the faint musty sweet odour of bourbon” or examined “the dustyeyed old people who want to be left alone.”
Grau rolled her eyes at suggestions she was a Southern author:
“A novel has to be set somewhere. I would like once in my life to have something I write taken as fiction, not as Southern sociology.”
Grau was 25 when her first book, The Black Prince and Other Stories (1955), became a National Book Award finalist. She was criticized for her use of Black characters; she said she was simply writing what she knew. “I’m interested in people, but not as representatives of a race. I see people first. I do stories first.”
With The Keepers of the House, Grau stirred up the hatred of “semi- literate gentlemen,” as she put it, who objected to her depiction of interracial marriage.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to burn a cross in her yard, but forgot a shovel. Unable to force the cross into the dirt, they left it burning flat in her yard.
“It scorched a few feet of grass and it scared the neighbours, but I was at Martha’s Vineyard,” she said. “It had kind of a Groucho Marx ending.”
Shirley Ann Grau was born in New Orleans on July 8, 1929. In 1955, she married James Feibleman, a Tulane philosophy professor and writer. He died in 1987. Her survivors include four children and six grandchildren.