41 pages • 1 hour read
De'Shawn Charles WinslowIn West Mills
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Balancing Acceptance and Influence in Personal Relationships
Many of the relationships depicted in the novel are marked by a tension between accepting another person as she or he is and desiring to help that person do or become something different. Winslow explores these tensions by examining the thoughts and motivations of Knot and Otis Lee, a hallmark technique of psychological realism. Early on, Otis Lee reflects on his efforts to guide Knot to make choices that he perceives as desirable: “Try to steer somebody from a harm they love, but seem like the more they get steered away, the more they want the harm” (29). Out of concern for Knot, he tries to get her to marry Pratt, to keep her children, and to give up drinking, with no success.
Viewing these events from his perspective allows readers to witness the sincerity of his motives, as when he finds himself unable to move due to surprise and happiness when, for a moment, he thinks that Knot is going to keep her second baby. Switching to Knot’s perspective reveals that she is no less sincere in her choices that deviate from what Otis Lee would have her do. After giving her daughter away for adoption over Otis Lee’s objections, she comes to feel that it “was the most grown-person thing she’d ever done” (87). And the later outcomes for her daughters, who enjoy upbringings that Knot could not have provided for them, bear out the wisdom of her decision. Otis Lee’s attempts to influence Knot, however good his intentions, may not have been sound.
Elsewhere, instances of pressure and correction leave room for the possibility of meaningful intervention. When Pep scolds Knot for trying to manage her daughters’ lives after entrusting them to others, and for her excessive drinking and reading, Knot takes her words to heart, though she finds it difficult to act on them. Later, when Valley tells her to let her daughters sort out their own troubles, Knot remains silent, “knowing Valley was right” (225). The difference between these instances and Otis Lee’s attempts at influencing Knot is a subtle one: In these cases, Knot finds that her friends’ corrective words point out a difference between the way she acts and who she is—or, in other words, what she feels and what she believes. As Knot reflects, “Valley had never asked her to be anyone other than who she was” (245). Otis Lee, on the other hand, “would force her to take the hug she needed, but he’d lecture her the second he released her from his embrace” (224). Taken together, these interactions suggest that, while there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence others for good, the primary task in any relationship is to support the other in authentic action, rather than impose external influences.
Keeping Secrets Versus Taking Responsibility
Throughout In West Mills, multiple characters keep secrets from others and offer various justifications for doing so. In each case, the person keeping the secret offers rationalizations that claim to consider the person from whom the secret is kept, even as the secret keeper benefits in some way. For example, Noni hides the fact that Essie, not Rose, is Otis Lee’s mother. Doing so allows her to gloss over choices she may be ashamed of, including the decision to send Essie away at a young age. Knot keeps the knowledge that she is Fran and Eunice’s mother from them for as long as she can, claiming that she doesn’t want to disrupt their lives. Yet she does so even as she fears the weight of responsibility that would settle on her if she was known as their mother: “That shit ain’t my fault. Ain’t my fault at all!” (135), she thinks to herself after Otis Lee comes to discuss Knot’s daughters’ problematic relationships with Breezy. For Knot, keeping secrets is an avoidance strategy and a form of protection.
Not everyone is happy to see Knot keep secrets. As a midwife, Pep devotes her life to helping mothers bring children into the world and adjust to their new reality. Seeing Knot hide her motherhood from both her parents and her children, Pep believes that Knot must face the consequences of her choices on both fronts. This is why she sends a note to Knot’s parents and informs Fran and Eunice that they are Knot’s daughters. However, with the passage of time, Pep comes to regret the consequences of her actions. In 1975, more than 30 years after sending the note to Knot’s parents, Pep admits to Otis Lee that “her people shun her ‘cause of me” (203).
In anonymously revealing Knot’s secret to her family, Pep creates a secret of her own, one that she can only resolve by admitting her culpability. Her earlier insistence that “Knot needs to hurt” (176) is replaced by an awareness that Knot has suffered enough, and that she played a role in that suffering. While Pep’s revelation to Fran and Eunice that Knot is their mother has a more positive impact, her willingness to be involved in keeping or telling secrets notably diminishes: “I ain’t goin’ back down this road wit’ you again ‘bout her secrets. I just ain’t,” she tells Otis Lee (202). Pep’s sentiment foreshadows the question Pratt asks Otis Lee upon his return to West Mills: “Don’t y’all get tired of secrets?” (227). In the end, even Knot appears to tire of secrets, as she reveals to Pep the secret of Otis Lee’s parentage, which she carried for decades. If keeping secrets is a form of avoidance, bringing them into the open constitutes a courageous assumption of responsibility.
The Long, Slow March of Progress Toward Civil Rights
Critics have credited Winslow for not pandering to the so-called “white gaze,” which involves making the assumption that a text is to be examined by a primarily White audience (Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson. “The Legacy of Slavery in Two Novels of the American South.” The New York Times, 20 June 2019. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/books/review/deshawn-charles-winslow-west-mills-chanelle-benz-gone-dead.html). Instead, Winslow foregrounds the interactions between Black people living in an insular community. Limited as they are, however, interactions between Black and White characters over the nearly half a century in which the novel’s action takes place are telling in their demonstration of subtle change over time.
Though the novel opens in 1941, earlier events are discussed that provide an initial reference point for noting racial oppression. When Essie explains why Noni sent her away as a teenager, she references the year of her birth, asking Otis Lee to “imagine what it was like [for Noni] to see her daughter with a white-looking baby […] in 1891” (147). By the time Knot settles in West Mills, little has changed, with segregation in full swing. Her interaction with Jo, the White woman at the bus stop from whom Knot borrows a match, is significant in that Knot cannot tell which of the two benches is reserved for Black passengers and which is reserved for White passengers. In context, placed alongside Jo’s declaration of her family woes, this detail implies that Jo’s story, which mirrors and inverts Knot’s in various ways, could also be the story of a Black woman, as Knot and Jo both struggle to come to terms with parenthood as part of the human condition. This is not to suggest that experiences related to racial oppression would also be transferable.
Three incidents featuring members of the Pennington family offer snapshots of changing attitudes regarding the history of racial oppression in the United States. The first occurs in 1943 when an unnamed teenage boy who is a member of the Pennington family flirts with Ayra Manning, then is chastised by her husband. On his way out of the store, the boy uses the n-word and, moments later, he throws a bottle through the window of the Mannings’ shop. The White character is this scene is overtly hostile while performing destructive acts motivated by racism, while Brock shrugs off the damage as something to be expected. A second encounter takes place in 1960, this one between Otis Lee and Riley Pennington. In this scene, Pennington and Otis Lee discuss the town’s history, and Otis Lee corrects Pennington’s racist mischaracterization of certain events. In context, it is clear that Pennington, who is giving Otis Lee a ride home for his birthday at the time, does not deliberately make racist attacks but rather reveals his biases.
The third encounter takes place in 1966. Clara Pennington visits Knot’s home to purchase pies from her. While she is there, Clara comments on the small size of Knot’s house and expresses her hope that her grandfather, Riley, sold it to her at a low price. She comes back later with an offer to build an addition on the back of the house “for all [Knot’s] service” (190). Clara’s comments show a growing awareness that her ancestors exploited the Black residents of West Mills. Independent to the last, Knot refuses her help and hires Valley to build the room. Taken together, these incidents, the last two of which coincide with the height of the Civil Rights Movement, hint at larger changes and attitudes, at once highlighting progress and indicating how much remains to be done.
