Neighbours and Other Stories
A look at the life, work, and untimely death of Diane Oliver
Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.
I recently came across the release of a collection of short stories by American writer Diane Oliver. If that’s a name that is unfamiliar to you, don’t be surprised. Diane Oliver appears to have gone unnoticed by many readers and literary scholars alike.
The Guardian describes the newly released Neighbours and Other Stories - which features a handful of stories published in the 1960s, as well as some previously unpublished - as ‘pointed tales of Black America’. The Black female experience in 1960s America predominantly - though not exclusively - features within this collection. These stories are set in a time where, though racial segregation was no longer legal, inherent racial prejudice still proliferated American culture.
In the title story, Neighbours, a young Black student prepares to be bussed into a newly integrated school, with the associated threats and police protection. The narrative is told from the point of view of the boy’s sister, Ellie, a maid who is travelling home from her job on the other side of town at the opening of the story, thinking about the next day, when her younger brother Tommy is due to start at the white school. Oliver manages to express the fear and horror of the family’s decision, as well as showing their closeness, which ultimately provides the stability to face yet another indignity.
The story appears to question whether it is morally acceptable to send a child to an institution in which he is not wanted. “Hope he don’t mind being spit on, though,” a neighbour tells the family, who have already received threatening letters. The mother of the boy wonders at the enormity of parenting decisions, telling the father after a sleepless night: “He’s our child. Whatever we do, we’re going to be the cause,” a poignant moment in the story which transcends race, culture, and time, and instead puts every single parent reading in the parents’ shoes, faced with an impossible decision about their child’s future.
But Oliver’s protagonists within these stories are not activists fighting for justice. They are mostly just ordinary families, living in what was a turbulent time.
Oliver also infuses her writing with a good dose of dry humour. In one story, ‘The Closet on the Top Floor’, Winifred, a college freshman at a predominantly white college, refuses to join the drama society as her mother suggests, stating that she “didn’t see how she could play the maid’s part for four years”.
“Her father had worked hard, petitioning the trustees and threatening a court suit to get her into this college, and she had felt ashamed for not wanting to go.”
‘The Closet on the Top Floor’
Winfred tells us she is “tired of being the Experiment”, which feels like a full circle from the title story of the little boy in Neighbours, whose parents are struggling with the decision to send their son to an integrated school. It really brings home the idea that, just because legislation changed the law on segregation, the reality of the choice to integrate was far from straight forward.
Whilst Oliver’s collection skirts the political issues of the day, she explores the changes in American society as well as celebrating the culture of Black Americans living in the South.
There are stories in the collection which show less affluent families than that of Winifred’s. In ‘Traffic Jam’, young mother Libby worries about her own child, left at 6.30 am on the babysitters porch in a laundry basket, as she makes breakfast for the white Nelson family for whom she must work. The baby’s father is not around, and Libby frets about feeding her own children.
Oliver’s collection also features elements of the white experience. In ‘Spiders Cry Without Tears’, she explores the idea of interracial romance through central character Meg, who, divorced, falls in love with a wealthy Black doctor whose wife is terminally ill. This causes alienation for Meg, who later marries her doctor lover, only to find that she enjoyed being his mistress far more than his wife.
“He owned her exactly as he did the house, the cars, and those poor people who thought their hearts would collapse if her husband retreated from medicine.”
What is interesting in this story however is that Oliver does not make the disappointment of their marriage about race: instead, the story shows Meg’s disillusionment at the institution of marriage itself, with gender becoming the defining factor. What is more remarkable when reading this and many of the other stories is the age at which Oliver was writing them.
Diane Oliver was born in 1943 in Charlotte, North Carolina. After graduating high school in 1960, she attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, (then known as The Women’s College of the University of North Carolina), where she became the Managing Editor of the student newspaper, The Carolinian. She graduated in 1964 and, like other famous literary alumni such as Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, Oliver won entry into the Mademoiselle Guest Editor Programme after submitting ‘The Corner’, an essay featuring a Civil Rights battle to integrate some local shops close to her school. Oliver’s first short story, ‘Key to the City’, appeared a year later in literary magazine Red Clay Reader II; a story featuring a Southern family making its way to Chicago.
Next, Oliver began her graduate work at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was one of only two Black writers. This likely influenced her characterisation of Winifred in ‘The Closet on the Top Floor’, who feels isolated within her own college experience.
Growing up under the Jim Crow laws of the South, Oliver was ten years old at the time of the ruling of Brown v. Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution. Both of Oliver’s parents were educators; her father William being a school teacher and administrator, and her mother Blanche, teaching music from their suburban home.
Although perhaps too young to fully appreciate the ruling, it is easy to assume that Oliver’s parents’ views and roles within education may have contributed to her later story Neighbours. Like many writers, Oliver was said to be a voracious reader, consuming all the titles in her local segregated library, and desiring to write her own books so that children like herself would have more to read.1
In her lifetime, she published four short stories, with two more appearing posthumously. Her short story ‘Neighbours’ appeared in The Sewanee Review in 1966 and was awarded a prestigious O. Henry Award in 1967.
Tragically, Diane Oliver died in a motorcycle accident in May 1966, aged just 22. She had begun her graduate work at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, being awarded her MFA posthumously just days after her death.
In March 1967, Negro Digest, with whom she had begun a professional relationship, published Oliver’s last story, ‘Mint Juleps Not Served Here’. ‘Neighbours’, meanwhile, was posthumously published in Prize Stories 1967: The O. Henry Awards.
In their obituary to Oliver, Negro Digest acknowledged their pleasure at publishing some of the young writer’s early stories. Stating that whilst they were ‘saddened by her death’, they also chose to ‘remember the warmth of her smile.2
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I’ve never heard of Diane Oliver, thank you for shining a light on her work! It’s so sad that she died before she had chance to share more stories. Thank you for sharing :)
Just bought her book. Fascinating article.