Family Happiness and Other Stories

Katherine Anne Porter drew small portraits of evolving awareness of how one fits into spaces and families, into history and region, and into categories such as race and gender, while attempting to grasp the meaning of memory and imagination. In "The Old Order," a sequence of stories in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), Porter depicts two old women, one black and the other white, who emerge from the period of slavery to survive husbands and children. The portrait of the elderly black woman Nannie in "The Last Leaf," a subsection of "The Old Order," is significant because in it Porter subverts sentimental views of the black mammy in the South: "The children, brought up in an out-of-date sentimental way of thinking, had always complacently believed that Nannie was a real member of the family, perfectly happy with them." While Nannie and Sophia Jane, the children's grandmother and Nannie's former owner, are both victims of patriarchal power and hegemony, Nannie is also delimited by her racial identity. Married to another slave for the purpose of producing marketable children, she performs her duties, but as soon as she is beyond childbearing years she dismisses her husband, Uncle Jimbilly, from her life ...»