Work Like Any Other
In 1920s rural Alabama, most men had two choices when it came to making a living: farming or the coal mines. Roscoe T Martin detested both. His world changes when he sees electric streetlights in Birmingham, and electricity becomes his passion. Eventually, it becomes his doom.
“Work Like Any Other” (Scribner, 2016), Virginia Reeves’ first novel and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, plumbs themes of love, resentment, acceptance and forgiveness in writing that is beautifully evocative of the time and place in which the story is set. The reader can forgive Reeves for plot details that stretch the bounds of credibility in pre-Civil Rights-era South simply because her writing is so elegant. Work – the work one must do and the work one wants to do – serves as a lightning rod of sorts to explore the multi-layered internal and external conflicts. “We are born with some things in our veins,” Roscoe reflects, “coal for my father and farming for Marie’s (his wife) and a deep electrical current for me.”
When Roscoe rejects work in the mines – severing the bond with his family and most notably his miner father – and marries Marie, a schoolteacher, they find a brief happiness. They share a love of books – her father maintained a library in his farmhouse – and long walks along the river. But when Marie’s father dies and she inherits his failing farm, Roscoe is wrenched from the profession his loves for an occupation that is foreign and resented. Rural electrification still is years away, but he decides he can save the farm, his marriage and himself by siphoning electricity from power lines that run nearby. He enlists Wilson, the African-American hired hand, and once again feels invigorated and interested. Electrifying the farm makes the operation profitable, and restores a seeming blissfulness to family life. But one day an Alabama Power worker checking the lines discovers Roscoe’s handiwork and is electrocuted while investigating. Authorities charge Roscoe and Wilson with manslaughter. Roscoe goes to prison, but the state leases Wilson – as is the custom for black offenders – to the private mine owners, “a fate worse than slavery,” in the words of Marie’s father. For this and other reasons, Marie believes Roscoe’s crime is unforgivable, and she encourages their son to give him on him as well.
In Kilby Prison, “work” again assumes significance in the plot and in Roscoe’s growth. (He tries, early in his sentence, to leverage his electrical expertise for leniency from the parole board, but is rebuffed.) Called “Books” by his fellow, mostly illiterate inmates, he toils in the dairy, in the library, and finally becomes a “dog boy,” caring for and working with the search dogs. One job, he finds, is much like any other: something you’re told to do, and find whatever pleasure in it you can. “As much as I’d hating farming, I don’t so much mind the barn with its tug and pull of noise, calves mewling and heifers lowing and the soft-piston grunt of the milking machines. There are raking sounds and the pitch of hay and straw, boots in the mud and boots on the hard dirt, the murmurs of men with animals. …We’ve never had a runner from the dairy. Maybe it’s the animals that keep us here.” Reeves intertwines the main narrative of Roscoe’s prison term with his and Marie’s perspectives of current and past events, providing clues to their ill-fated marriage. “Marie missed her father,” Reeves writes. “She missed Roscoe, too, but only in isolated scenes…. When she thought of him whole, though, she cringed. As a whole man – full up of his past and his choices and his actions – she wanted nothing to do with him.”
When Roscoe is paroled nine years into his 20-year sentence, he is a different man – hardship, solitude, pain and alienation having stilled the “deep electrical current” in his veins. Work recedes and what remains are relationships: with Maggie, a retired bloodhound given to Roscoe; with Wilson and his family, whose compassion absolves Roscoe; and with Gerald, his son, who defies his mother by reconnecting with his father. A final meeting between Marie and Roscoe teeters on the edge of melodrama and mars the book’s ending. But the reader can forgive this bit of excess from a writer so attuned to the current of emotions coursing through us and among us.e Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
