(Reviewed by JD Jung)
“What was I thinking? The restaurant was a fishbowl full of floor-to-ceiling windows. Just beyond the parking lot Highway 18 looked like a runway, a straight shot, launching me anywhere…until my eyes settled on the across-the-street hamburger joint…making me forget that I was in the middle of my life, in the eye of it, and forcing me to see myself from the outside…”
In this particular story, “Highway 18”, a Jehovah’s Witness spends her weekdays working in a fast-food joint and weekends going door-to-door trying to convert people. However, she dreams of escaping her claustrophobic life and hometown.
In “Do You Remember the Summer of Love”, a young woman leaves North Carolina, and stops in Georgia on her way to California. Though the “Summer of Love” is decades past, she still dreams of white flower children dancing and taking drugs all day. She says to a bartender “I bet boredom has killed more people than all the wars put together.”
Though these accounts are different from each other, and take place from 1975 to the present, a common thread of all ten stories in We Are Taking Only What We Need is that these rural African-Americans from North Carolina dream of something more in life. Though the narrators are girls and women, the longing may be from another family member, like the mother who breaks up the family and takes her children to Raleigh. One story centers on a woman with a boring job taking phone calls for the Kennel Club but becomes intrigued by a certain caller. One young girl discovers that her white babysitter is carrying a terrible secret. In many of these stories, children are forced to learn of their parents’ shortcomings way too early in life.
Though I am not familiar with rural Southern culture, I still felt the emotion of these self-proclaimed “dirt-roaders” and the author successfully brings the rural setting and lifestyle to the reader.
I couldn’t pick a favorite story, as when I finished one, I couldn’t wait to read the next. There weren’t any that I didn’t like, as each was engaging in some way.
We Are Taking Only What We Need will appeal to readers who wish to discover a different facet of American culture, while still finding a universal thread and appeal.
