Midwest Mod Squad no. 05: Nicole Cuffy’s “Steal Away”
(Read Midwest Mod Squad no. 04 here)
Nicole Cuffy is a New York based writer with a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the New School. Her story “Steal Away†takes place in the early twentieth-century sharecropping South.
If the focus of the essence of Arp’s story “Gormley†is on an individual at an individual moment, one might say the essence of Nicole Cuffy’s story “Steal Awayâ€[1] is much wider in scope. Instead of the individual, the essence of “Steal Away†focuses on things like political economy and multiple individuals, family dynamics and cross-cultural relations between whites and blacks, as well as between Southerners and Northerners, as we see below:
The North was a different country, one that would demand Irving’s assimilation. The North would ruin him for the South, so that on the rare occasion Irving made it down to visit his parents—and they would only very rarely get to see him, their son, their only child—he’d be a stranger, an outsider….
To hold your children down to keep them near, to hold them down because they needed a good measure of get down in them to survive, was slavery. But to send her only baby upriver knowing she’d hardly ever see him again was also slavery.[2]
Compare this to a passage from Faulkner. Compare how both Cuffy and Faulkner both use the words assimilation and slavery:
What he [Houston] did not comprehend was that until now he had not known what true slavery was—that single constant despotic undeviating will of the enslaved not only for possession, complete assimilation, but to coerce and reshape the enslaver into the seemliness of his victimization.[3]
But now to the political economy and cross-cultural relations in “Steal Away,†for that is the essence of Cuffy’s story:
And Lysee [the landlord], harangued as Reggie said he looked, must be making a profit somewhere. He must be, or else he wouldn’t let their debt go, a debt built on joint notes, on poor crops, on overpriced fertilizer and seed, on seventeen percent interest rates, on crooked mortgages. It fired Hester up. She’d counted Lysee as a good one—never spoke an impolite word to any of them, never forced them to sign anything they couldn’t read, never tried to cut in on them on how to live their lives outside their work. Yes, he overcharged for supplies in his store, set up interest rates on their advances and rations money that kept them in debt, mortgaged their animals and wagons so they couldn’t sell them, but Hester had never held any of that against him. That was just how business was done in this country.[4]
It’s as if Cuffy’s narrator is saying Hester was fine with the landlord Lysee stealing from them here in there––if the reader interprets stealing to mean skimming off the top, and fine to mean that such skimming was to be expected in that particular time and place.
But now the unexpected intrudes into Hester’s life: Lysee says the banks have stolen the land out from under him (even though the loans he took out were likely legitimate). Because Lysee has lost the land, he expects the banks to replace Hester and her people with tractors and other advances in agro-technology. In the meantime, Lysee will confiscate their cattle and chickens, constituting a new form of plunder for the sharecroppers.[5]
So first Hester’s home and food supplies are taken from her and her family, then, while they’re consoling themselves by singing some blues to one another,[6] they get interrupted by the arrival of a neighboring wealthy planter, Mr. Simon Russell and an out-of-towner named Mr. Ashbury.[7] Hester’s family and friends are then asked to perform their music for the whites instead of for themselves. Their music––that is, their art, their spirit––is appropriated under the guise of it being appreciated.
And the white men’s appetite for that appropriation is insatiable. They ask for one song after another. But when Russell and Ashbury ask for a blues song, they are denied by Hester’s people, with the excuse given that it’s inappropriate to sing blues on Sunday.[8] Yet that denial also indicates that the blues they were singing before whitey arrived were something precious, sacrosanct. Despite having many things stolen from them, over the years and at that moment, Hester and her folk will keep certain treasures to themselves. They will not submit.
(Read Midwest Mod Squad no. 6 here.)
NOTES
[1] Nicole Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, selected by Roxane Gay, eds. Kim Winterheimer and Sadye Teiser, (Bend, OR: The Masters Review, 2017) 171–86.
[2] Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, 177–78.
[3] William Faulkner, The Hamlet, (New York: Random House, 1940) III, ii, 1, p. 210.
[4] Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, 180.
[5] Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, 179–80. On the use of the word “plunder,†see Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015) 9, 11–12, 20, 119.
[6] Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, 181.
[7] Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, 181–82.
[8] Cuffy, “Steal Away,†The Masters Review Volume VI, 184–85.
