Literature / Elbow Room

Elbow Room is a 1977 book by James Alan McPherson.

It is a collection of 12 short stories, all dealing with the lives of black Americans in the years immediately after desegregation. There is a running theme about the cultural differences between blacks raised in the North and blacks who grew up in the South and moved north with the Great Migration. The stories include:

• "Why I Like Country Music": A man reminisces about his schoolboy crush.
• "The Story of a Dead Man": A serious, scholarly man remembers his reckless criminal of a cousin.
• "The Silver Bullet": Two different criminal gangs fight over who will extort a local bar.
• "The Faithful": A barber refuses to cut Afros, and as a consequence his barbershop is failing.
• "Problems of Art": An older black woman, facing a license suspension after refusing a DUI test, insists that a white lawyer must represent her at her hearing.
• "The Story of a Scar": A man in a hospital waiting room can't resist asking the woman sitting with him how she got the ghastly scar on her face. The answer surprises him.
• "I Am an American": A black American on vacation in London gets mixed up with a robbery at his shabby hotel.
• "Widows and Orphans": A young college professor attends a charity event featuring a speech by his ex-girlfriend.
• "A Loaf of Bread": A racist grocer is caught overcharging the customers at his store in a black neighborhood.
• "Just Enough for the City": A man enjoys inviting missionaries into his home so he can stump them with theological questions.
• "A Sense of Story": A judge must decide the fate of a black man on trial in his courtroom for murder.
• "Elbow Room": An interracial couple (white husband, black wife) have a baby, while contemplating how they can fit into each other's worlds.

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Tropes:

• Brandishment Bluff: Willis, who would like to join a criminal gang but is too much of a bumbling coward, puts a fist in his coat pocket and pretends to be holding a gun while attempting to stick up a bar. The man behind the counter isn't fooled and blows him off. ("The Silver Bullet")
• Cultural Rebel: The narrator of "Why I Like Country Music", a black man who grew up in South Carolina, is a country music fan. His wife, born and raised in the North, is appalled by his taste. It turns out that his fondness for country music is wrapped up in fond memories of square dancing and a grade-school crush.
• Disco Dan: Butler from "The Faithful" simply refuses to cut or trim Afro hair and as a result his clients are abandoning him. He's pretty mean about it, too; when a small boy gives him a dollar to get his hair trimmed into an Afro he gives the boy a schoolboy cut anyway.
• Every Scar Has a Story: "The Story of a Scar" features a lady in a hospital waiting room telling someone else how she got the awful scar across her face. She was knifed by her lover, who was superficially educated and polite but turned out to be an extremely possessive and jealous man.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: Robert Charles's lawyer in "A Sense of Story" tries to suggest this, namely, that Charles shot his boss by accident while firing a gun to celebrate his son's graduation from high school. (The fact that Charles's boss was shot six times mitigates against this.)
• Framing Device: The narrator of "Why I Like Country Music" starts out by talking about how his wife is horrified by his fondness for white redneck music, but it's really just a framing device to introduce his memories of the girl he was in love with in elementary school.
• Funetik Aksent: The German missionaries that the narrator keeps sparring with in "Just Enough for the City." They say things like "Der simple problem is dat vee do not luff one anudder."
• Girlish Pigtails: Decades later, the narrator of "Why I Like Country Music" fondly remembers the "two long black braids" of his schoolboy crush Gwyneth and how they were "plaited across the top of her head."
• I Was Quite a Looker: "I was pretty once," says the woman in "The Story of a Scar", as she recalls the time before she suffered not just the disfiguring facial scar, but considerable weight gain.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: In "Elbow Room", Paul, a white guy from Kansas, marries Virginia, a black woman from Tennessee. Paul's racist father tries hard to talk him out of the marriage, and then refuses to see or speak to his daughter-in-law for quite some time.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Billy Renfro, the narrator's rascally cousin in "The Story of a Dead Man", gets stuck with child support as a teenager despite insisting that he's not the baby's father.
  Billy: Judge, that baby don't even look like me.
• Medium Awareness: Closing story "Elbow Room" is filled throughout with comments, mostly critical, from an "editor" who doesn't like the narrator's disregard for order and form in the story. That is then followed by dialogue exchanges between the narrator and the editor, in which the editor further criticizes the narrator's lack of clarity and recommends that some pieces be deleted, while the narrator defends his choices.
• Present Tense Narrative
  • "Why I Like Country Music" is told in present tense but only for the Framing Device, introducing the narrator's memories.
  • "The Faithful" is told in present tense throughout.
• Protection Racket: In "The Silver Bullet" R.V. Felton tries to shake down a local bar, pretending all the while that it's for community development.
• Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: The narrator of "The Story of a Scar" talks like this: "I would expect the man to have been destroyed by the pressures placed on him. And, although you are my sister and a woman who has already suffered greatly, I must condemn you and your roughneck friends for this destruction of a man's ambitions." This is done for comic effect, as the woman he is speaking to is uneducated and speaks with a much more lower-class dialect.
• The Reveal: "Problems of Art" ends with the lawyer, who had been carrying on throughout the DUI hearing in the belief that his client was an innocent teetotaler, being told she was drunk on whiskey.
• Second-Face Smoke: In "The Story of a Scar", when the narrator asks the woman he's talking to how she got her scar. She blows "a healthy stream of smoke" into his face in "a mean action, deliberately irreverent and cold," before asking the narrator why he's there in the doctor's office with a busted nose.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: R.V. Felton in "The Silver Bullet" dresses up his demands for protection money in the flowery language of a community organizer.
  Felton: What we need now is some unity. Think of the ramifications that would evolve from our working together. This here's a large community. The funds from this one joint is pure chicken shit compared to the total proceeds we could plow back into community organizations by combining our individual efforts into one dynamic and profound creative approach.
• Spell My Name with a Blank: The American tourist visiting London in "I Am an American" was sent to look up Mr. X, on the recommendation of his good friends Y and Z.
• Thematic Series: Twelve short stories that don't share continuity but are all about the lives of black Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Title Drop:
  • When Willis tries to hold up the bar in "The Silver Bullet", he asks what Jones the bartender has in the cash register and Jones says "a silver bullet." (It's a shotgun.)
  • The title drop for the whole collection comes in the final story "Elbow Room". Virginia, a black woman who has married a white man and is about to deliver a bi-racial baby, talks about making her way in white society as a black woman.
  "I'm black. I've accepted myself as that. But didn't I make some elbow room, though?" She tapped her temple with a forefinger. "I mean up here!"
• Totally Not a Criminal Front: In "The Silver Bullet", R.V. Felton's protection gang pretends to be a "non-profit community-based grassroots organization" that collects revenue from local businesses for community development. They're a protection gang.
• Year X: The setting of the murder trial in "A Sense of Story" is left vague, with the narration stating that Robert Charles shot Frank Johnson on June 12, 197—.