LaToya Watkins’ ‘Holler, Child’ deftly peers into the lives of ordinary people

In August 2022, LaToya Watkins’ gritty debut novel, Perish, made an enviable splash with its dark, compelling themes of incest and family dysfunction. Texas Monthly called it “spellbinding” and “buoyant” in a feature story titled: “Has Texas Finally Found Its William Faulkner?” The Millions termed it “exquisite,” and The New York Times praised it as “memorable … a brave triumph.” The Associated Press said: “Like Toni Morrison, Watkins handles her characters with deep respect and care, capturing voice down to minute details and trauma in its most distilled and digestible form without sacrificing impact.”

Now, just over a year later, the Rowlett resident has published a second book, a collection of 11 stories, titled Holler, Child. These tales might remind older readers of another Texas storyteller: J. California Cooper, who had a similar gift for expressing humanity’s pain and joyfulness through her deft use of African-American Vernacular English.

If a reader stumbles and pauses over this vernacular, Holler, Child may be a challenging read. But it rewards readers if they simply allow themselves to get caught up in the dynamic narrative rhythm and the visceral texture within these stories.

For unless you live a very privileged and circumscribed life, Watkins’ characters are people most of us know, or at least people we know about. They live right here in Texas, and they touch all of our lives in myriad ways, be it intimately or merely in passing.

Watkins opens doors and windows into their homes, lives, hopes and sorrows, and in so doing opens our minds and hearts to their humanity and brokenness. Often she ends the story on a hopeful note, perhaps with the discovery of an unknown grandchild or a long-lost brother.

In “Cutting Horse,” for example, there is Ridley Johnson, a cowboy from the east side of Lubbock who loves the horses on his little ranch. Ridley also deals drugs on the side — until he meets Nicole, a Texas Tech student who is way above his pay grade, and they fall in love.

“Them pretty brown eyes and that sugar-brown skin was everything to me.” Ridley stops selling drugs and gives up his cowboy gear and his gold teeth, all to make Nicole happy.

But then they move to Dallas and buy a split-level in an HOA neighborhood full of white folks. As the Black Lives Matter movement crests, Ridley retreats into a backyard tent to read books and watch TV channels that are about two things, “animals and black men dying.” The tent doesn’t sit well with either Nicole or the HOA.

When their neighbors report that a valuable runaway cutting horse has wandered into Ridley’s backyard and is quietly grazing there, he doesn’t do what he knows he should, which is to surrender the animal to authorities. Instead, with Nicole pleading and police sirens wailing, suddenly Ridley and the horse are off: “I’m on her back, looking to her, and she taking the street to the sky with a smile on her face, like this always was our plan.”

We don’t always find out what ultimately happens to these characters. But when they make their choices, we know they are doing what they need to do. It may not be the legal, sensible or ethical thing, but it is the thing that lets them keep going somehow. This is how they endure in a perilously unfair world where the past is, as William Faulkner once said, “never dead. It’s not even past.”

Holler, Child

By LaToya Watkins

(Tiny Reparations Books/Penguin Random House; 224 pages; $28)