The Hard Blue Sky (60 page)
Authors: Shirley Ann Grau
People stayed inside, behind the closed shutters and the barred doors. Some lit candles and fingered their beads. Others began to drink, carefully, knowing that their supply might have to last a long time, and careful too that they didn’t get drunk, but only felt warm and comfortable. Some people played cards and learned new tricks or practiced fancy dealing.
The lightning passed over too. In the silence the kids squinched their eyes up to the cracks around the doors to see what was going on outside. For a couple of hours there was nothing very much, not even rain. Nobody went out. They were waiting to see what would happen. …
The clouds shifted and swirled and darkened to a kind of dull greenish color. Under them the winds were very much higher.
Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.
Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.
Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly
The New Mexico Review
. Soon another was printed in
The New Yorker
. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection,
The Black Prince
, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.
That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel,
The Hard Blue Sky
(1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.
The House on
Coliseum Street
(1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel,
Keepers of the House
(1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.
Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history.
The Condor Passes
(1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families.
Roadwalkers
(1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.
In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.
Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.
A 1955 announcement for
The Black Prince
featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.
Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.
Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”
Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.
Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A portion of the material in Part VII appeared originally in the
New Yorker
in somewhat different form, and all portions of Part II and Part IV in
New World Writing
and
Mademoiselle
, respectively, in somewhat different form.
copyright © by 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958 by Shirley Ann Grau
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-4724-2
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
