'THE DARKEST CHILD' | A review Novel tells a dark story indeed

A riveting personal drama is surrounded by a bigger story about a racist town.
By CASSANDRA SPRATLING
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"The Darkest Child," by Delores Phillips (Soho Press, $26)
If ever there was a crazed mother who totally misconstrued her role as provider and nurturer of her children, it is Rozelle Quinn, the dominant and domineering force in this horrific and gripping novel.
The story takes place in a rural, segregated community in 1950s Georgia when skin color, even in the black community, determines a person's worth to others.
Rozelle Quinn is so color-conscious that she has categorized her 10 children by their shades of blackness: her white children (because, like her, they were so light-skinned, they could pass for white), her Indian children (whose skin was darker) and her darkest child, Tangy Mae, the person from whose point of view this story is told.
Tangy Mae's skin color isn't as much the focus of the story as her mother's lunacy and terribly abusive ways.
Battling demons
Rozelle Quinn has several internal and external demons she's battling: her fear and hatred of her own mother, extreme poverty that leads her into prostitution and the burden of trying to raise her children.
Quinn not only appreciates her lighter-skinned children more than her darker-skinned children, she values her sons more than her daughters, and she sees little value in a child going to school when he or she could be working and contributing to the household budget.
In many ways, Quinn's personal views reflect greater societal norms, but that's no excuse for her wickedness. She prostitutes herself and her children and seems to think nothing of it. She also belittles one of her daughters because the child cannot speak or hear.
But as the story unravels we come to love and admire most of the children as much as we come to hate the mother. Does a hateful mother get credit if she somehow raises children you love?
Bigger story
This family's riveting personal drama is couched in a bigger story about a racist town's turtle-slow crawl toward integration.
Phillips paints a familiar portrait of Pakersfield, Ga., and some of the people in a town clearly divided along racial lines.
Her gift is in her ability to somehow make readers care about this horrid witch of a woman. Rather than strangling Rozelle Quinn, readers search for clues to why she is the way she is.
This debut novel, from Phillips -- a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in Cleveland -- doesn't completely satisfy. But it does leave you feeling that through the darkest child, there is hope.