Margaret T. McGehee, A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl; Southern Spaces

The imagined geography in Sibley's mysteries is primarily one of whiteness, and certain moments in these novels bring that whiteness into greater relief. In Ah, Sweet Mystery, set in the early 1990s, Kate accompanies the police on a drug raid in southwest Atlanta, specifically into the areas off of Interstate 20 around West End and the Atlanta University Center. This predominately African American area of Atlanta in Sibley's imagination is "dingy and dilapidated, growing more so as [Kate and the police] drew nearer to the expressway. Kate remembered when it was a respectable neighborhood, once grand, even, but gone now to seed." The area of southeast Atlanta, also primarily African American in terms of racial composition, is home to the federal penitentiary, "all around it poor, sad, neglected little houses with trash and garbage drifting over their yards" (ASM, 37).42 These spaces bring about a "sense of melancholy for what [Kate] knew was there, or used to be, rather than what she saw" (ASM, 38). "Melancholy" here implies the sadness and grief resulting from an irrevocable loss — in this case, the loss of an ideal urban (and specifically inner-city) neighborhood.

Techwood Homes, housing project in Atlanta, 1993.
Site of Sibley's descriptions of urban decay in Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991).

Troubled by what she finds in these areas (e.g., drug deals, trash lining the streets, children out alone after dark), Kate's thoughts drift to Atlanta's initial public housing projects built during the 1930s, Techwood Homes and University Homes, "virtual showplaces" that were the first of their kind in the nation. The present-day projects were "eyesores and hotbeds of drug traffic" that Kate feels should be dynamited, at the same time that she feels sympathy for the mothers and children who live within those areas (ASM, 49). In this moment, Sibley reveals the effects that earlier efforts of urban renewal have had on Atlanta's lower-income, African American populations who were pushed out of downtown from the 1960s forward in the name of progress.43 As Larry Keating describes in Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion (2001), these groups have continued to be neglected, resulting in the formation of an underclass subject to substandard living conditions, higher rates of violence and crime, and continued residential segregation. Keating writes:

Atlanta's aggressively expanding economy is increasing, not closing gaps in income. Partly because a large portion of the city's African American population is living in poverty, the city has a disturbingly high crime rate. The city also has an inferior public-school system, which is both a consequence and a cause of pervasive black poverty. Misdirected economic development and substandard schools are primary reasons that so much of the city's black population is under-trained and underemployed, and black unemployment, in turn, contributes to the high crime rate. Until very recently, city leaders have done little to improve city's school system. They have put little effort and very little money into social-welfare and job-training programs. They have made only minimal efforts to revitalize low-income African American neighborhoods. And they have actually made living conditions worse for African Americans by destroying and failing to replace low-income housing in the downtown area…. Because black elected officials rarely advocate the interests of poor blacks, and because middle-class blacks have prospered in Atlanta's expanding economy, poor blacks are increasingly left out, increasingly isolated, and increasingly alienated.44

Such spaces stand in contrast not only to the area around Kate's cabin but to other parts of white Atlanta as well. When Kate finds Jenny, her informant who lives in the housing project, beaten to death, the police take Jenny's clothes from Kate "without much interest." Earlier that day "a prominent northside woman had been throttled," and her case clearly took precedence in their minds. "Northside" here means the wealthy white area of town known as Buckhead. This woman "was the wife of an industrialist and had herself acquired a kind of reverential regard in town for her work with garden clubs and children's hospitals." In contrast, the narrator asks: "A little black woman whose claim to fame had been that she had been a wonder at doing fine laundry, what did her beating mean to them?" (ASM, 63).

Sibley's inclusion of Jenny's demise resonates with literary scholar Patricia Yaeger's commentary on "throwaway bodies." In studying southern women's writing, Yaeger observes, "we must pay attention to the difficult figure of the throwaway body — to women and men whose bodily harm does not matter enough to be registered or repressed — who are not symbolically central, who are looked over, looked through, who become a matter of public and private indifference — neither important enough to be disavowed nor part of white southern culture's dominant emotional economy."45 Sibley brings into relief Jenny's plight and the indifference shown by Atlanta's leaders to Atlanta's lower-income, African American populations, and this signals her sympathetic understanding of racial dynamics and the neglect of black bodies in what former Mayor William Hartsfield once referred to as the "city too busy to hate." Jenny and her story nevertheless remain outside of Kate's — and other white Atlantan suburbanites' — geographies. In Sibley's work, urban becomes equated with black, while suburban/rural becomes synonymous with white. That racial-spatial dichotomy parallels the racial demographics of Atlanta today, a division resulting in great part from the impact of civil rights-era white flight in which white urbanites flocked to outlying towns and suburbs in fear of integration's impact on the city's public schools (and the impact on the social norms of previously segregated southern society).46

In Sibley's imagined urban spaces, African Americans regularly appear as servants. Here again, white nostalgia infuses her conception of place, resulting in a reliance on stock characterization that suggests Sibley's allegiance to outmoded conceptions of southern blackness, including the mammy figure. When Kate goes to rescue a teenager from the Fulton County jail in Atlanta, she speaks to a black woman by the name of "Aunt Lucy." Aunt Lucy says to Kate, "'Mistis . . . Will you tell my peoples I'm here and ax 'em to come and get me?'" She then "recited a list of prominent Atlantans of another day, all of them dead now. 'Nussed their chillun,' she said softly. 'They come and get me'" (SS, 135). Her "peoples" here are white Atlantans, not her actual blood relatives (though given the history of interracial relationships in the South, who knows). Later, Aunt Lucy is referred to as "[a] black gentlewoman, the kind everybody in the South loved" (SS, 136). By relying on the mammy image and the figure of the "faithful slave" and by incorporating racialized dialect, Sibley pulls from an out-of-date, yet still all-too-familiar, cadre of black stereotypes and stock characters, including the gone-but-not-forgotten mammy.47

Black characters appear only in the heart of the city, not in the country where Kate resides.48 But Kate's paternalistic attitude towards the black women she encounters is quite different from her attitude towards certain poor white characters. The villains in Sibley's mysteries, as mentioned earlier, are not always the newly arrived subdivison residents but also poor white locals who have become traitors because of their desire for money. In A Plague of Kinfolks, for example, Charlene — a former Dairy Queen employee described as "a chubby little woman with improbable blue-black hair teased into a tepee and wearing a purple bikini holding an overflow of white thighs together" (PK, 46) — attempts to kill her uncle because he owns land worth millions to developers. She does kill Bets Dunn to secure her place in Bob Dunn's life and in his Shining Waters mansion. The desire to move up the social ladder corrupts, and she is cast as an unattractive, no-good character.

Charlene in fact emerges as an example of what writer Dorothy Allison has described as the "bad poor."49 Allison writes that the good poor are imagined to be "hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable," personified in Sibley's fiction by the character of Miss Willie. The bad poor, a category to which Allison understood her family belonged, consisted of "men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes."50 We have echoes here of Yaeger's throwaway bodies; if "bad poor" and "white trash" are to be understood as virtually synonymous, then the bad poor are indeed throwaway bodies. Sibley easily dispenses with Charlene as she has failed to show the qualities that might redeem her as a valuable member of the community. Miss Willie, on the other hand, emerges repeatedly as an honorable, hard-working, and generous neighbor. From this contrast and other such moments in Sibley's mysteries, described above, the "country" emerges as a place shaped by particular racial and class parameters defining who does and does not belong.