Balls by Nancy Kincaid

On the jacket cover of Nancy Kincaid’s 1998 novel, Balls, the reader is told the book “should be required reading for any woman who’s ever been involved with a man who’s involved with sports,” and while that claim may be a bit exaggerated, this is an insightful, humorous and occasionally frightening look at college football. By my count, there are sixteen voices, narrators, in this book, all women. It is primarily the story of one of these woman, Dixie, who, at nineteen, marries an ex-football star who is too small to make it in the pros, but who cannot leave football behind. Instead, he becomes a coach who quite quickly rises to the position of head coach at Ham U. In Alabama, where football is a kind of religion, Coach Gibbs (Mac), begins his coaching career with a team that wins few games, but due to Mac’s ability to recruit players, especially black players, he puts together a solid winning team, and when an old respected coach retires, Mac ascends to the throne with his young wife and two young children in his wake.

Each chapter in the book allows a different woman to describe her relationship with football and either a husband who is obsessed with football, or a son who hopes to come to fame and fortune via ball.

It was not by accident that God created the world in the shape of a ball. I came to understand that early. All the men in my life imitated God in this way by making small worlds of their own out of balls.  

As a girl, when I watched men pass the pigskin, pitch the cuveball, perfect the jump shot, I understood that they were playing war. What I didn’t understand was that it wasn’t just a stupid ball they held in their hands, but the whole world being tossed about from man to man—like a game of keep away. 

From me.

While Kincaid obviously wants to describe the big business corruption in college football, and the toll football takes on the bodies and dreams of the players, she is sympathetic towards not only the mothers of the players and wives of the coaches, but also the players themselves who see football as their passport to the American dream.

Kincaid meticulously chronicles Coach Mac’s meteoric rise and sudden fall from grace and the parallel dissolution of the marriage of Dixie and Mac. I loved the stories of the coaches and players, but even more the subtext of the women and children who are essentially orphaned by their men’s obsession. Rose, Dixie’s mother, is one of the more intriguing voices of the many narrators. She understands long before her daughter does that women and children are secondary to balls, and that women who see or know too much are in peril.

Dixie is a pretty girl. I hope it doesn’t ruin her life. 

There are worse things than not getting chosen, like getting chosen too early. Or getting chosen too often. But you have to live awhile before you can know that. 

Dixie’s smart too, which if she isn’t careful can destroy her about as quick as anything else. I tell her, “Being smart can be a real detriment to a woman unless she knows how to go about it tactfully.

There are two other voices that recur throughout the book, Francis Delmar, the wife of an under-coach who never quite makes it to the big time, and Lilly, the mother of Jett, who played college ball with Mac and goes on to be a great star in the NFL. Lilly has given up on men as husbands or close friends, but is a fiercely protective mother. Both of these woman provide wonderfully wise and humorous commentary on the toll football takes on the lives of women.

Mac is not a bad man, and in fact is honestly dedicated to his players and their welfare. During the football season, he works from early morning till late at night allowing is wife and children to become afterthoughts. And the off-season, that is the recruiting season, is even worse. He travels around the country, wooing players and their parents, his at-home time seeming more like visits than really coming home.

When Mac comes home he seems delighted to have stumbled upon such a happy household where everything’s clean and pretty and he’s treated as if he were one of the family.
We make a home where Mac is a welcome visitor. “Drop by anytime,” we seem to say.

The story, itself, is an interesting and complex one, and I don’t intend to reveal many of the details. Suffice it to say that the storyline is very similar to Kincaid’s own life. Kincaid married at nineteen, raised two daughters, returned to college as her marriage deteriorated, and after her divorce, remarried the head coach at University of Arizona, so she knows intimately the lives she describes.
I first came across Kincaid in a wonderful novel about the south, Crossing Blood, in which she describes the lives of two families living side by side, one black, one white. The novel I’m talking about today shows the same sensitivity towards and understanding of race relations that caught my attention in the earlier novel.

While this is not a great book, it is a very good one, and it is indeed, “the novel every football widow will want to read.”

As Hot As It Was You Ought To Thank Me by Nancy Kincaid

A good reader friend of mine remarked to me once that I must read a lot of books, given that I review one or two a month, and supposing that I probably select from many. I was vague in my reply, but the truth is that though I start many books, maybe even dozens a month, I finish only a few of them. I almost never bother to stick with books anymore unless they hit me in the first hundred pages or so; there are just too many good books out there to use up my reading time on questionable ones. The book I am going to talk to you about today is one of the exceptions. Its title is As Hot As It Was You Ought To Thank Me, and although it starts rather charmingly, it seemed almost too cute to me, too much like a young adults’ novel, and the fact that some reviewers compared it to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird only increased my doubts. I loved To Kill A Mockingbird when it came out in the early sixties, but it is not a book that would warrant a sequel. However an author whom I much admire, Lee Smith, called the book compulsively readable, so after initially putting it aside, I decided to give it the few dozen more pages I usually would not. I’m glad I did.

The story is told through the eyes of a young girl, and one who seems naïve even for her age, but the further one gets into the novel, the more surprising the events and the more adult the themes. The story is set in rural Florida, and though we are never really told, it would seem to be about the fifties or early sixties. Kincaid is exceptionally good at staying in voice, and even when the insights seem a bit too precocious for such a young girl, they are delivered in a way that allows the reader to believe that the girl, herself, is unaware of the depth of the messages she is conveying. There is also a pleasing mixture of suspense and intrigue that keeps the book moving along, and events that I find quite surprising for such a small town.

The young girl’s name is Berry, and it is really her story. The descriptions of the other children, of their games, their interpretations of events, gives the book its shape, its content. The only adult character who is well developed is that of Berry’s mother, and that, too, is primarily through Berry’s eyes. Berry’s father, the stalwart and admired principal of the local school, remains a kind of shadow figure throughout, the suggestion being that the reader knows him about as well as Berry herself knows him, about as well as adult men let themselves be known.

This is not the sort of book where I can find particular quotes that sum up the story or the message it is meant to convey. There are no profound asides about the economics of small towns, no carefully constructed critiques about the smothering effects of religion in such places. But that is not to say that one does not sense a message in the book deeper than the surface events described. I find myself wanting to read other books by this author: I believe that she understands children and the culture of childhood in ways that I don’t and never will. I sense that she is gently trying to teach me.

Let me read one quote from the book that I hope will give you a flavor for the charm of the lead character, and also for the deceptively simple style of the writing.

Boys had all their lives to get used to penises. But girls—we had to spend years waiting for breasts, dreading them or longing for them. They were more interesting to me than any other body part. I didn’t know if they were beautiful or hideous. I didn’t know if I would be comforted by having them—or ashamed. I had never seen any breasts except Mother’s once, when she was getting into her bathing suit at Cherry Lake. She mostly ignored them. But in her bathing suit there they were, small, pointed and sharp, pressed into her suit like a couple of innocent prisoners under false arrest waiting to make their escape. I thought of them like things that wanted to be set free—like they had their own little brains or something, like they dreamed dreams.

Berry watches her mother very closely, and she watches the mothers of her friends as well. She watches what happens to, what is said about the older girls who are considered beautiful, as well as to the allegedly humorous asides about those not so pretty. She understands that all of this has a lot to tell her about her own future, and she is a quick study.

During the course of the novel there is a huge storm that changes the lives of the people in drastic ways, flattening the school, damaging houses and churches, and sometime during that storm, Berry’s glasses are dislodged, stepped on, and crushed. But she finds her not being able to see clearly as much a blessing as a curse. Not only does she look better without her glasses, but the world looks better too. Not so sharp, not so distinct, not so ugly. Perhaps she is a girl who sees too much, but we as readers are lucky to be able to see along with her.

This is not a great book, but it is a good one, and very pleasing to read. I think once you get really into it, you will be unable to put it down, and glad you didn’t.

Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

I want to talk to you this morning about an astoundingly good book entitled Autobiography of My Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid. Those of you who have heard me discussing other books over the years will realize that my tendency is simply to review what I am currently reading, and while I never bother to talk about books that I think are bad or mediocre (and, indeed, rarely bother to finish such books), I do talk about a lot of good first novels. I also mention many books that are good, seem really to have important social or political points, but are not great books or must reads. I say all of this in order to call your attention to this book, to put it in a category not simply of the good, or even the excellent. This book is simply superb.

Let me hasten to add that this is not a book you should read if you are depressed, nor is it one that you should read if your attention is scattered or distracted. You will need to be focused, and you will need to feel strong, for this is a book about oppression—layers of oppression, even a hierarchy of oppression. On the cover one reviewer says that this book is “Fierce, incantatory, lyrical, powerful and disturbing.” Yes, at least. It is also about a person who is fierce and disturbed.

Were I to try to compare this book or to find others of its kind, the first thought that would come to mind is Richard Wright’s Native Son. In Native Son Wright is trying to warn his readers what happens to people who are ruthlessly oppressed and exploited for too long, what the consequences of exploitation are. There is nothing sentimental or heartwarming about that book, and much the same can be said for this one. The entire book is told through the eyes of a woman who is thrown into the world without a mother and left to wonder what might have been had she had one. She is unloved as a baby, unloved as a girl, and incapable of love as an adult. But though the book is, at least on the surface, about this poor girl and woman, it is really about economic exploitation and about the racism and sexism that follow in its wake.

I would say that this is an ugly book were I to concentrate on the events described, on the life of this woman, but the writing is almost searingly beautiful. Indeed, it seems to me that in reviewing this, I could turn to almost any page and begin reading, and if you are a lover of good writing, you would be entranced by the lyricism of the words. Indeed, instead of even trying to overview the series of events this book describes or to encapsulate what I take to be the obvious political messages, I am in a moment simply going to read to you a few passages, trusting Kincaid to recommend herself to you in a way that I never could. In order to provide just a bit of context for the passages I read, let me say that Kincaid understands as well as Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and his other book The Wretched of the Earth what it means for oppressed people to inculcate the values of the oppressor. The woman in this story is not only motherless, but the daughter of a father who aspires to everything that his oppressors represent. Indeed, he is a jailer, a policeman for the oppressors, as proud of his light-dark skin as he is of his money and his power over those unfortunate enough to be beneath him, to be be subject to his reign. In Kincaid’s words: “... his presence as always was a sign of misfortune. Wherever he was, someone was bound to have less than they’d had before my father made an appearance.”

Almost from first breath, Xuela distrusts, even hates her father—hates who he is and what he stands for, hates what he sees as his strength and his superiority. If she allows him to represent what it is to be a man, it is no wonder; allows him to represent what it is to white, it is no wonder, allows him to represent what it is to be an owner, a ruler a person-in-power, it is no wonder. There is no doubt that Xuela is a person who is full to the brim with bitterness, a person who hates life, who distrusts the future, who is cynical and who preaches a kind of destructive nihilism. A kind of echo of Wright’s essay, “White Man Listen,” this book is a warning about what we can expect to reap from decades and generations of oppression.

And now, let me direct your attention to Kincaid, to her writing, her words, and then you can decide when you will choose to pick up this book.

“My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity, at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” Though the language of her peers, the language of Dominica, is French patois, her first words are in English. As she later reflects on this, she says: “That the first words I said were in the language of a people I would never like or love is not now a mystery to me; everything in my life, good or bad, to which I am inextricably bound is a source of pain.”

Dropped off by her father to be cared for by a woman who did his laundry, she in one bundle, the laundry in another, she is not surprised by the indifference of her keeper. When her proud, even supercilious father sends her to school (unlike the other girls around her), the first words she learns to read are at the top of a map; the words are, The British Empire. “My teacher was a woman who had been trained by Methodist missionaries; she was of the African people, that I could see, and she found this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantel, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us. She did not love us; we did not love her; we did not love one another, not then, not ever.” Xuela says of herself that she is partly of the Carib people, partly of the African. “The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden; the African people had been defeated but had survived.” Because Xuela can read so well and can remember every detail of what she reads, her teacher tells the other students that Xuela is possessed, that she is evil, and cites as evidence the fact that her mother is Carib. Everywhere there is distrust; her father tells her that “these people” cannot be trusted, though she quickly comes to see that “these people” were ourselves. “.... this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me. The people we should naturally have mistrusted were beyond our influence completely; what we needed to defeat them, to rid ourselves of them, was something far more powerful than mistrust. To mistrust each other was just one of the many feelings we had for each other, all of them the opposite of love, all of them standing in the place of love.”

When her father remarries, Xuela is (eventually) brought ‘home’. “Not long after I came to live with them, my father’s wife began to have her own children. She bore a boy first, then she had a girl. This had two predictable outcomes: she left me alone and she valued her son more than her daughter. That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature.”

That this book is beautifully, hauntingly written is undoubtedly true, and even more important is the substance, the ‘message’ of the book. It is a great book, and one that you should read.