Reviewed by Cully Perlman
A FAMILY OF GOOD WOMEN
Teddy Jones
Stoney Creek Publishing
354 pages
Based loosely on the actual history of the Women’s Commonwealth of Belton, Texas, Teddy Jones’s new novel, A Family of Good Women, is a reimagining of their fascinating story—at least “sort of,” according to the author. The women of the Commonwealth of Belton belonged to “a commune based on the doctrines of religious perfectionism, celibacy, and Wesleyan sanctificationism … [women who] prayed about the trials in their everyday lives, especially for guidance to deal with authoritarian husbands sometimes given to unscrupulous business practices, intemperate drinking, and physical abuse. The wives increasingly sought personal, that is, religious and financial, autonomy,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. And much of that sentiment weaves its way in Jones’s novel.
Set in 1929 Borger, Texas, where wooden oil derricks are abundant as trees in a forest and the adobe walls where Comanches and buffalo hunters fought over five decades earlier, in Ms. Jones’s version, the “Good” women leave Austin in 1876, ridding themselves of their surnames and becoming a collective of independent women who decide their new surname will be “Good.”
The novel begins with Imogene Good, Jones’s narrator, admitting that she isn’t living up to her mother’s expectations, a mother whose passing Imogene remains mourning. Those expectations? That a woman should succeed on her own, without the help of men. Imogene Good lets us know that “no one in my family ever had a father.” This fact is prevalent throughout the novel, in more than a few ways. If this isn’t a setup for trouble, I don’t know what is.
Twenty-three-year-old Imogene, mature beyond her years, is up for the challenge, and as we begin with trouble, trouble is exactly what slithers through this pleasantly chivalrous novel like a breeze in the night. Of course, not everyone is either pleasant or chivalrous.
Imogene, working long hours and against the odds of the time, is host to roughnecks and gamblers at the one restaurant in town—hers. There’s money to be made in this male-dominated land and given her culinary prowess and an abundance of hungry men lacking the time or resources to feed themselves, Imogene and her business thrive. But Imogene is also well-aware of the trouble those type men bring with them. While she opens her doors to their type—criminals and blue-collar workers, mysterious strangers, hustlers and the occasional gentleman, she keeps one hand on a shotgun and the other on a blade. She’s a woman ready to take on whatever danger comes her way, and she does so without hesitation.
As Imogene maneuvers her way through the razor wire of men yearning for the company of women, a stranger comes knocking at her door, as strangers do. Carrying sunflowers and looking for work, Randall Barton Stone, or R.B. as we come to know him, is a man in need of a job. He’s also a charmer, as many strangers must be if they’re to survive in lands with few resources.
Benevolently, R.B. jumps in to help Imogene and Sue Ellen at her restaurant, as well as gets to setting up the women’s house, which, given the busy men around her, she finds endearing. “I didn’t say what I thought just then,” admits Imogene, “that he looked like he belonged right where he sat.” We get the sense that old R.B. may be particularly fond of our heroine, but everything isn’t as it seems, which we begin to find out.
Still, Imogene remains a tough one, a skeptical one, and more than anything a practical one, which also adds for a little comedic respite whenever the chance for romance, which Imogene, for the most part, pushes aside, enters the scene. When R.B. gives her a compliment, our narrator lets us know that she “didn’t say anything. Mother’s baseball bat stood ready in a spot on the other side of the icebox two steps away. I moved nearer,” she says, “just in case.” I couldn’t help but smile at Imogene’s always being on alert no matter the circumstance. But then R.B. disappears. He leaves without so much as cashing his first paycheck. Everything happens so smoothly and surprisingly that we wonder if we’ve missed something, and we have. But we won’t know it until later on.
Back to Sue Ellen. Imogene’s “cousin” has been accused of being a thief all her life. It’s a fact we learn later is not a fact at all but rather an injustice the poor woman’s had to live with for much too long. But Sue Ellen’s past is just that, the past. While Imogene pushes forth on the present and the future she envisions for her business and herself, the novel makes crystal clear that the past—hers, Sue Ellen’s, and everyone else’s involved in the Good women of yesteryear, remains present.
Imogene and Sue Ellen, curious about who they are and where they came from, dive into the journals and family trees of the six Good women that came before them, in particular Imogene’s grandmother Corrine’s diary. Like her mother, Imogene is building a woman’s group in much the same vein as her grandmother. Corrine’s diary provides much of the context and background of our two main female protagonists, and acts as a sort of guide to how and why Imogene and Sue Ellen are the strong women they are throughout the novel. Imogene has similar goals of improving the state of women’s rights and education as her grandmother did, and she acquires much of her knowledge from the passages she and Sue Ellen sneak into their busy days as we move further along in the narrative.
As the women read the diaries of her deceased relatives, a group of women living on their own and with intention, Imogene and her disgraced cousin Sue Ellen, who shows up one day out of the blue to help at the restaurant, come to understand who they are and why they’ve taken to the lives they live.
As Imogene and eventually Sue Ellen move forward with establishing Good’s Foods, often stressing Imogene’s mental stability, her physical well-being is, of course, also tested. Given the level of testosterone plaguing Borger, we know it’s only a matter of time before someone, namely one of the roughnecks, goes too far, even, eventually, with the Texas Rangers present. So when a driller pinches Imogene’s behind, and Imogene banishes him from her establishment, it’s no surprise that problems soon arise beyond the many already vexing the women’s lives.
The driller who Imogene banished from her restaurant just so happens to be the top driller of Phillips Petroleum, the largest petroleum concern around. The driller, Mr. John Pea, shows up with a rich investor, threatening Imogene that “not one hand from the Phillips Rig will be eating” at her establishment. It’s a threat he follows through with, and one that threatens to destroy everything Imogene has built up with all her hard work at the restaurant.
One morning a health inspector shows up out of the blue, most certainly sent her way by Mr. Pea and his investor. The inspector says he must shut her down for at least a day. But Imogene, being the savvy frontierswoman she is, works her magic and in the end convinces him that the restaurant should be closed for less than that. There’ll be more of Imogene’s smarts and the smarts of the relatives she reads about throughout the novel, but we very quickly come to understand that the Good women are different, and how.
There’s a quaintness to how the Good history unfolds, little by little, chronicling how Imogene became the woman she became. But she also doesn’t know much about her own mother, primarily because she never asked, because she knows the answers will probably be difficult to hear. One thing she does know, and which we come to find out, is that Sue Ellen’s mother was the actual shoplifter, a fact that’s ruined Sue Ellen’s life. Sue Ellen runs only because the sheriff in her town blamed her for the theft of clothing. It takes Sue Ellen time to admit everything to Imogene, who remains skeptical until she isn’t. It’s then that the team become one.
Just as we forget about R.B., the man returns. Borger police show up with a dog, looking for R.B. It’s also at this time that Imogene and Sue Ellen discover they aren’t really related. The Goods formed a family, both in actuality as well as in name. And soon afterwards, the romances grow from seeds into flowers.
Samuel Norton, a lawyer, invites Imogene to go out, a not-so-bad things given that she’s always thinking about protection—having a bat handy, a dog, perhaps, which she soon acquires. She knows Borger is dangerous, and these additions to her life ease her worries. It’s also around this time that Sue Ellen finds a beau named Ben. Sam and Ben buy the women a small radio, which becomes their date nights early on. On the low down, Imogene lets R.B. sleep in the back building, which brings her even more comfort, a fact she admits as she doesn’t put a chair under her doorknob that night.
As Imogene is later offered a teaching role, which she does consider, we learn that the Good women set out away from home to get pregnant without the men in their lives being involved. All of the Good women of the past end up having girls, an appropriate outcome given who they are and what they set out to accomplish (and perhaps escape). A fire breaks out at Good’s Foods, threatening Sue Ellen and Imogene. Imogene then shoots the driller with her shotgun, and when no police show, as R.B. had already warned her about the police, she feels guilty. In a twist, it turns out R.B. took a bullet that night as well, and on we go.
I’ve read all of Mrs. Jones’s novels. She’s carved out for herself a certain type of close, under-the-microscope Western novel where danger lurks amongst good-hearted people, in particular women working and living in what is, in essence, the harsh frontiers of Texas’s America. Yes, there’s danger. Yes, there are hard men and the women who really run things, especially Mrs. Jones’s narrators. But there’s a special sort of casual way in her prose that makes you feel warm inside. You feel as if everything will be okay in the end, no matter the outcome, that life is what it is, and sometimes it involves pain and anguish, but that that that pain and anguish is a natural part of life, something to be accepted along with the threads of good keeping it all together. Ms. Jones takes us to a lost time. A time of struggle different than the times we’re experiencing today, but not so different just the same. We get a sense of nostalgia in her work. It’s a West we’ve seen portrayed on the big screen but not in literature, at least not in her way of telling it. –Cully Perlman, author of The Losses