IN WEST MILLS

By De’Shawn Charles Winslow

THE GONE DEAD

By Chanelle Benz

De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s “In West Mills” and Chanelle Benz’s “The Gone Dead” both ponder secrets: what drives some people to guard them with their lives and others to risk everything to uncover them.

“In West Mills” explores the textured inner world of a fictionalized black community in North Carolina between 1941 and 1987. The story circles around Azalea Centre, or Knot, a teacher who finds comfort in corn liquor, men, and friends like Otis Lee and Valley, who care for her even as her decisions beget pain.

From the first page, Winslow establishes an uncanny authority and profound tone that belie the book’s debut status. The precision and charm of his language lure us in and soothe us, as in his description of a “hot biscuit that looked like it could be melted down and used to make a necklace and a pair of matching ear bobs.” Or when he compares the full moon above Knot’s head as she walks a lover home to “an usher leading the way down an aisle.”

He paints a community so tightknit and thorough it becomes easy to forget the people in it don’t exist, that no one will be playing music later tonight at Miss Goldie’s barnhouse juke joint, or traveling upbridge to Manning’s General Store for candy. Knot is as complex and endearing a protagonist as Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie. And Winslow is capable of retreating into the quiet of all of his characters’ minds and hearts and sharing the contents with us, as when Knot decides to create for herself a sense of safety, “the only kind of safe Knot felt all right with. Safe by not having to worry about hurting a child’s feelings, the way her mother had hurt hers. Safe by not becoming someone’s wife just to figure out, years later, that she didn’t want him. Safe to get a bit of joy from the moonshine — something that couldn’t hurt her or be hurt by her.”