Diane Oliver's Neighbours and Other Stories is heartbreaking

Faber, £9.99

If she hadn’t died so young, who might Diane Oliver have become? Today, we can ponder that sad notion. Nearly 60 years after her death, Oliver’s fiction has been brought to the public eye for what’s effectively the first time.

When she died, Oliver had published just a few short stories in little known American magazines. Since then, she’s languished forgotten, until those literary archeologists at Faber unearthed her writing.

Faber has been doing literature a marvellous service of late, with its series of ‘rediscovered’ works, bringing some of the greatest writers of the 20th century roaring back to life after their star long faded. Or in Oliver’s case before their star even began to burn at all.

When I put down Oliver’s collection, Neighbours and Other Stories, I realised that she would have burned as bright as Alice Walker or even Maya Angelou. She would have been one of the greatest African-American writers of our time. But she got on a motorcycle in 1966 as a graduate student and that was the end of her.

It’s a testimony to her talent that Oliver was able to secure an internship at Mademoiselle magazine in the racially-divided early 1960s. Her predecessors included Sylvia Plath.

Little Rock, AR: Nine Negro students attending central High School are shown leaving the school under protection of Federalized Arkansas National Guardsmen (Image: free)

There’s some of Plath in Oliver. She mines her own life for material. She’s her own muse. But there’s more of Raymond Carver - that master of the American short story who crafted heart-breaking truth from the folly of human existence. There’s even more of Shirley Jackson; not the taste for the macabre, but the sense of ever-present dread which curdles mundane, domestic moments.

Oliver gives us a window into a world we seldom glimpse: the lives of middle-class African-Americans in the segregated south. From North Carolina, Oliver’s father was a schoolteacher and her mother a piano instructor.

The African-American writer Tayari Jones says Oliver’s work “evokes the feeling of sorting through a time capsule sealed and buried in the yard of a Southern African Methodist Episcopal Church in the early 1960s”. We are lucky detectorists to find such lost gold.

Neighbours, the opening story, tells of the first black child sent to a white school. Sure, the child symbolises the coming of integration, yet what fear that child must feel walking alone into a school with white protestors jeering their hate.

We get a similar take in a tale which tells of the mental disintegration of a young black woman who’s the first to attend a white all-female university. When considering her major, she rejects drama as she “didn’t see how she could play the maid’s part for four years”. She can’t take any subject which involves field trips as not all hotels are integrated.

In Before Twilight, we’re with a young woman who’s setting up a branch of a civil rights organisation in her rural town. We hear that her friends and family “stopped talking about voting” after the discovery of a “charred body”.

Billie Holiday (Image: free)

It summons that line from Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday: “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

When the young woman and her friends try to sit at a whites-only lunch counter, they’re arrested, and the boys beaten. The town is slowly emptying of black people who can no longer stand it. Yet this young woman has the courage to stay and protest even though doing so will destroy her hopes of attending university.

This is a book filled with quiet terror and naked evil. White doctors simply turn black patients out onto the street. White nurses refer to “you people”. An ambulance takes so long to get to a hospital that will treat black people that the patient dies. Black servants mother the children of lazy white women while their own children go hungry. A baby is born “almost too afraid to breathe”.

A black family witness their son so abused that he goes mute. They take themselves off to live in isolation in the woods where their fear and rage fester until it ill-betides any white face which turns up at their cabin door.

Families are often in transit, as black parents rush north hoping to give their children a safer life far from racists cops, men in white hoods, and the bitter, cruel women who hire and fire domestic staff.

Oliver isn’t blind to faults in African-American society. She’s not writing a racial hagiography. But the failings of the downtrodden are motes in the eye, compared to the beams blinding white society.

Nor are all white people held up to opprobrium. There’s the old lady from a Confederate family who gives her grandfather’s watch to a young white pro-Civil Rights boy going to “fight for freedom” in Mississippi.

Another story features a white woman as the effective victim: she falls in love with a black doctor and finds herself excluded by both black and white society. Love makes her a non-person.

For Scottish readers, there’s an extra throb of unease. Scottish surnames proliferate throughout the book - Murrays and McAuleys. Those names, we know, were given to slaves bought by plantation owners of Scottish descent.

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Perhaps the most sophisticated story is The Visitor. It begins as a seemingly mini family soap opera. A handsome doctor has left his wife, married his new lover and built a second family. One day, the surly daughter from his first marriage arrives. It’s a classic domestic tale of parents, children and bitter divorce.

Yet here the shadow of race and discrimination cloaks these familiar tropes. The husband is the “only” black doctor “allowed” at the local hospital. His daughter arrives on a train where black people must travel in segregated carriages. This is family saga mediated through the prism of hate.

Oliver’s style is light and bouncing, yet her themes are of the hardest materials. To synthesise such elegance in writing, with such ugliness and cruelty, is the mark of a once-in-a-generation writer.

It’s to our loss that such a life was cut short before we could see what Diane Oliver was really capable of with her pen and mind. Still, the little she’s left to us should be cherished for its chastening of wickedness, and embrace of what collects us together as humans among whom there should be no boundaries or barriers.