I once had an English professor who told our undergraduate class that it was best to sip strong whiskey while reading anything written by William Faulkner. Well, after reading The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers, I would imagine he would want to have an entire bottle on hand, preferably strong Sour Mash. The characters who inhabit her stories are an assortment of freaks, geeks, and lost souls that shake one to the core, and the worlds she creates are ones out of the foggy depths of nightmares.
If you look into the rather brief life of McCullers (1917-1967), you will see she came from the South, studied piano, spent time in New York City, had a troubled relationship with her spouse, battled alcoholism, tried to commit suicide, and was basically unhealthy for most of her days. One can look at her picture and see an infinite sadness in her face, sort of an external manifestation of all the twisted characters and strange stories she had brimming inside her. When she died much too soon of a brain hemorrhage, she left behind a staggeringly haunting, beautiful, and powerful literary legacy.
Having read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe in high school, I remember thinking that the novella was weird and not my cup of tea, but going back and revisiting the story now, I saw all the nuances my teenage mind missed, but perhaps it was best that I did not realize at the time the darkness that permeated the story, or maybe I understood it but reacted to it by purposely ignoring the ugly truths of the fragile humanity it depicted.
It is hard to find someone to like in the novella, with the protagonist, Miss Amelia Evans, being a cross between Dickens's Miss Havisham and Faulkner's Benjy Compson. This hulking woman is anything but ladylike, and yet she inhabits the story as the woman to please and to love in a town devoid of anything resembling romance or culture.
Having been supposedly jilted by her husband of ten days many years before, Miss Amelia becomes a tough businessperson, a medicine woman of sorts, maker of fine whiskey, and the closest thing to a mayor the town has ever known. She sells whiskey from her general store and lives a hard life in a place that has no gentility of which to speak.
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