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Beetlecreek
After several years of silence and seclusion in Beetlecreek’s black quarter, a carnival worker named Bill Trapp befriends Johnny Johnson, a Pittsburgh teenager living with relatives in Beetlecreek. Bill is white. Johnny is black. Both are searching for acceptance, something that will give meaning to their lives. Bill tries to find it through good will in the community. Johnny finds it in the Nightriders, a local gang. David Diggs, the boy’s dispirited uncle, aspires to be an artist but has to settle for sign painting. David and Johnny’s new friendship with Bill kindles hope that their lives will get better. David’s marriage has failed; his wife’s shallow faith serves as her outlet from racial and financial oppression. David’s unhappy routine is broken by Edith Johnson’s return to Beetlecreek, but this relationship will be no better than his loveless marriage. Bill’s attempts to unify black and white children with a community picnic is a disaster. A rumor scapegoats him as a child molester, and Beetlecreek is titillated by the imagined crimes.
This novel portraying race relations in a remote West Virginia town has been termed an existential classic. “It would be hard,” said The New Yorker , “to give Mr. Demby too much praise for the skill with which he has maneuvered the relationships in this book.” During the 1960s Arna Bontemps wrote, “Demby’s troubled townsfolk of the West Virginia mining region foreshadow present dilemmas. The pressing and resisting social forces in this season of our discontent and the fatal paralysis of those of us unable or unwilling to act are clearly anticipated with the dependable second sight of a true artist.”
First published in 1950, Beetlecreek stands as a moving condemnation of provincialism and fundamentalism. Both a critique of racial hypocrisy and a new direction for the African American novel, it occupies fresh territory that is neither the ghetto realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison. Even after fifty years, more or less, William Demby said in 1998, “It still seems to me that Beetlecreek is about the absence of symmetry in human affairs, the imperfectability of justice the tragic inevitability of mankind’s inhumanity to mankind.”
This novel portraying race relations in a remote West Virginia town has been termed an existential classic. “It would be hard,” said The New Yorker , “to give Mr. Demby too much praise for the skill with which he has maneuvered the relationships in this book.” During the 1960s Arna Bontemps wrote, “Demby’s troubled townsfolk of the West Virginia mining region foreshadow present dilemmas. The pressing and resisting social forces in this season of our discontent and the fatal paralysis of those of us unable or unwilling to act are clearly anticipated with the dependable second sight of a true artist.”
First published in 1950, Beetlecreek stands as a moving condemnation of provincialism and fundamentalism. Both a critique of racial hypocrisy and a new direction for the African American novel, it occupies fresh territory that is neither the ghetto realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison. Even after fifty years, more or less, William Demby said in 1998, “It still seems to me that Beetlecreek is about the absence of symmetry in human affairs, the imperfectability of justice the tragic inevitability of mankind’s inhumanity to mankind.”
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
2 people are currently reading
192 people want to read
About the author
William Demby
17 books10 followersAfrican American novelist William Demby was born on December 25, 1922 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
In 1950 Demby published his first novel, Beetlecreek, which he situated in West Virginia. Fifteen years later he published his second novel, The Catacombs. His novels carry themes of race and national identity, and although he spent much of his life into Italy, his novels were focused on American experiences.
In 1950 Demby published his first novel, Beetlecreek, which he situated in West Virginia. Fifteen years later he published his second novel, The Catacombs. His novels carry themes of race and national identity, and although he spent much of his life into Italy, his novels were focused on American experiences.
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June 24, 2019
'Beetlecreek' is a first novel written by the late William Demby and published in 1950. It is one of those books that some readers are now looking back on and wondering why Mr. Demby did not receive more acclaim for his tale and overall writing talents. The novel shows flashes of greatness and the writing is clear and plain in a style similar to William Maxwell's, another clear and plain writer whose books are underappreciated. 'Beetlecreek' has many moments of philosophical beauty, where characters arrive at realizations about life, a frequent one being that life's workings can never be fully understood except in ephemeral glimpses into what seems to be "reality."
The story is about a retired white circus worker named Bill Trapp who makes his home on a farm situated on the margins of the town's black community. Trapp has led an isolated life for the past fifteen years but several encounters with a young black man and his uncle change all that and bring Trapp out of his shell. Trapp, enchanted by this newfound human contact, holds a party for the community's children, both white and black. The party is not quite the success Trapp was hoping for and when one of the children rips a page out of an anatomy book in Trapp's home, Trapp is scandalized and vilified by the community as a child molester and "sex fiend." This is especially so in the town's black community, where gossip and innuendo about Trapp's alleged moral turpitude runs rampant.
Demby's novel is complex and its overarching theme seems to be that one cannot get away with trying to override the prevailing social contract of the "place" black people have in Beetlecreek as apart from the town's white people. This is an unspoken contract but to breach it has punitive consequences. What sets this novel apart from some of the African-American literature of its era is that Demby focuses on the narrow-minded pettiness of the black community rather than that of the white.
But, as Gregsamsa noted in his fantastic review of this novel, the issues of the book surmount provincial racial matters and deal, instead, with universal human failings, such as the sort of pettiness of the black people in 'Beetlecreek.' It is not a "race" thing, but a human thing. As Demby himself said in an interview in 1971:
"I believed, as I still do, that a black writer has the same kind of mind that writers have had all through time. He can imagine any world he wants to imagine." (interview at The Writer's Forum in 1971, Brockport, New York: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/...)
It is a little easier to understand why a writer as talented as Demby did not achieve the acclaim that was undoubtedly due him. After finishing 'Beetlecreek,' he suffered from a fifteen-year stretch of writer's block and lived a great deal of that time in Italy. He published only three more novels, with the last one released posthumously. Demby seemed to realize he was misunderstood and even regarded by some black authors and reviewers with suspicion because he refused to march in lockstep by writing novels of the black plight, though various accounts indicate he cared deeply about black rights. In 1963, for example, he returned to America for the first time in years to attend the march on Washington. What he wanted, it seems, was to be seen as what he was, a human being whose humanness transcended race, culture and artificial strictures limiting his creative imagination.
The story is about a retired white circus worker named Bill Trapp who makes his home on a farm situated on the margins of the town's black community. Trapp has led an isolated life for the past fifteen years but several encounters with a young black man and his uncle change all that and bring Trapp out of his shell. Trapp, enchanted by this newfound human contact, holds a party for the community's children, both white and black. The party is not quite the success Trapp was hoping for and when one of the children rips a page out of an anatomy book in Trapp's home, Trapp is scandalized and vilified by the community as a child molester and "sex fiend." This is especially so in the town's black community, where gossip and innuendo about Trapp's alleged moral turpitude runs rampant.
Demby's novel is complex and its overarching theme seems to be that one cannot get away with trying to override the prevailing social contract of the "place" black people have in Beetlecreek as apart from the town's white people. This is an unspoken contract but to breach it has punitive consequences. What sets this novel apart from some of the African-American literature of its era is that Demby focuses on the narrow-minded pettiness of the black community rather than that of the white.
But, as Gregsamsa noted in his fantastic review of this novel, the issues of the book surmount provincial racial matters and deal, instead, with universal human failings, such as the sort of pettiness of the black people in 'Beetlecreek.' It is not a "race" thing, but a human thing. As Demby himself said in an interview in 1971:
"I believed, as I still do, that a black writer has the same kind of mind that writers have had all through time. He can imagine any world he wants to imagine." (interview at The Writer's Forum in 1971, Brockport, New York: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/...)
It is a little easier to understand why a writer as talented as Demby did not achieve the acclaim that was undoubtedly due him. After finishing 'Beetlecreek,' he suffered from a fifteen-year stretch of writer's block and lived a great deal of that time in Italy. He published only three more novels, with the last one released posthumously. Demby seemed to realize he was misunderstood and even regarded by some black authors and reviewers with suspicion because he refused to march in lockstep by writing novels of the black plight, though various accounts indicate he cared deeply about black rights. In 1963, for example, he returned to America for the first time in years to attend the march on Washington. What he wanted, it seems, was to be seen as what he was, a human being whose humanness transcended race, culture and artificial strictures limiting his creative imagination.
January 18, 2015
On Understanding the Bestowal of Literary Merit
(a how-to guide)
1) Ask yourself "Why do some impressive novels from clearly talented writers receive almost no attention, while mediocre work from less gifted authors gathers audience and acclaim?"
2) Using both hands, grab as much of your own hair as you can.
3) Pull until it is separated from the scalp.
Reading this book and puzzling over its microscopic readership was not like reviewing early modernist exercises in inaccessibility and being dismayed at their small audiences. It's more like coming across a To Kill a Mockingbird no one's heard of, a Gatsby everyone missed, or a Huck Finn that only gets a Huck who?
This is a High-School-Required-Books (in the U.S. anyway) -level book, and I don't mean that as the sort of burn I can understand mistaking it for if you've read other reviews of mine.
Being no stranger to the canon of African-American lit, when I came across this book (thanks to Ali and the Buried Books Club), my never having heard of William Demby was weird. I mean, my bachelor's degree in English is from an Historically Black College.
Since I can't solve this mystery I'll shut up about it and get on to the novel.
Although some of his other work is considered "experimental," his prose style here resides in the broad aisle between showy and minimalist, likely dead center on the Proust-to-Hemingway continuum, somewhere around Flannery O'Connor's neighborhood:
"There were still almost ten days left before the festival and ten days, she thought, would be enough time to show respect for the deceased. These calculations she made rapidly in just the time required to coordinate her face muscles into a sorrowful grimace. Secretly she was filled with relief that Mrs. Johnson's death had finally come. For years Mrs. Johnson had been on the point of dying and any real feeling Mary might have summoned had all been spent during the old woman's first strokes."
This is one of those novels where we spend the first third getting to know the characters' interior lives, all the deeply human and profoundly petty contours therein, before the actions motivated by these inner workings spring the town's clock into gear and they all take their part in the plot.
But my mechanistic metaphor is misleading, if not for the actual technique then certainly for the feeling of the reading.
This old white dude, a socially awkward invert retired from backstage circus life, takes up residence on the border between a small town's business district and its black neighborhood during the depression. He's long felt an affinity for other marginalized people so sets down stakes on their margin. His self-imposed solitude nurtures misunderstandings such that his is the house that stars in local child lore, thus they dare each other to steal apples from his tree.
But it is through one child, then the child's uncle, that connections are made and Bill Trapp the hermit is drawn out and into the community. Being liked is new for him, as he's always been short on charisma:
"His long, fleshy nose with its countless red pin pricks would expand and contract in time to his breathing and the gray-striped lips that refused to open over the severe outward slant of the front teeth would strain themselves into the subtlest kind of smile."
Sexy, no?
This is a very American novel, by which I mean it puts stress on that long taut tension between individual prerogative and communal obligation, myopia and the mob, inner morality and public mores, the prison of solipsism and the tyranny of appearance.
As we move leisurely from one character's perspective to another we not only get a feel for their fears, hopes, and motivations, but we see assembly of all the necessary ingredients for some unpleasant potential:
* The limits on women's options funelling all their ambition into competitive cooking, fundraising, and church involvement as cutthroat as any boardroom.
* The return of the smart bad girl who had split town as soon as she could, grown up into a chic big-city cynic with her eye on another's man.
* The gossippy men, processing scandal from its beer hall birth to barber shop certification.
* The unique malice of children, yet to fully develop empathy for others and all set to prove it.
* The festering boredom of a small depressed town primed for a problem, prepared with a scapegoat.
* The momentum which local lore, superstition, and piety lend to suspicion and speedy conclusions.
* Common table xenophobia.
Stir. Bake in the strange heat of an unexpected Indian summer.
A white writer would never have gotten away with this portrayal of a black community; it's unlikely any publisher would have been persuaded by the argument that all people can be petty, vindictive, and bigoted, so this just shows black people being people. In 1950 the sort of audience eager to read about small-town African-American life likely had little appetite for a white victim of black villains.
But this is too simple: victim/villain. Although the book's demographics make the issue of race unavoidable, Demby does not emphasize it; rather the real issue is difference, and how attractive the idea of being wronged can be to some personalities who'd use a perceived wound as a weapon. Irony is not the only effect when we see the oppressed take up the tactics of the oppressor, and Demby's sensitive emphasis on subjective experience makes it far more than mere cultural critique of the conditions within which the characters are trapped.
Entrapment is a theme, mirrors are a motif, and death--literal and figurative--is a casual presence throughout, standing for both entrapment and escape, as when a funeral gathers the people of Beetlecreek to gawk in awe at the shiny black spectacle that is the Baily Brother's dazzling new hearse. The characters are not only imprisoned in this provincial backwater of stifling social convention, but trapped within themselves, within who they are. However, this mid-century American existentialism never comes off heavy-handed or didactic thanks to Demby's use of the characters' points of view to relate the whole tale, through the slim grasp each manages, limited as they are by self-concern and misunderstanding.
A damn solid read from an unfairly overshadowed author.
(a how-to guide)
1) Ask yourself "Why do some impressive novels from clearly talented writers receive almost no attention, while mediocre work from less gifted authors gathers audience and acclaim?"
2) Using both hands, grab as much of your own hair as you can.
3) Pull until it is separated from the scalp.
Reading this book and puzzling over its microscopic readership was not like reviewing early modernist exercises in inaccessibility and being dismayed at their small audiences. It's more like coming across a To Kill a Mockingbird no one's heard of, a Gatsby everyone missed, or a Huck Finn that only gets a Huck who?
This is a High-School-Required-Books (in the U.S. anyway) -level book, and I don't mean that as the sort of burn I can understand mistaking it for if you've read other reviews of mine.
Being no stranger to the canon of African-American lit, when I came across this book (thanks to Ali and the Buried Books Club), my never having heard of William Demby was weird. I mean, my bachelor's degree in English is from an Historically Black College.
Since I can't solve this mystery I'll shut up about it and get on to the novel.
Although some of his other work is considered "experimental," his prose style here resides in the broad aisle between showy and minimalist, likely dead center on the Proust-to-Hemingway continuum, somewhere around Flannery O'Connor's neighborhood:
"There were still almost ten days left before the festival and ten days, she thought, would be enough time to show respect for the deceased. These calculations she made rapidly in just the time required to coordinate her face muscles into a sorrowful grimace. Secretly she was filled with relief that Mrs. Johnson's death had finally come. For years Mrs. Johnson had been on the point of dying and any real feeling Mary might have summoned had all been spent during the old woman's first strokes."
This is one of those novels where we spend the first third getting to know the characters' interior lives, all the deeply human and profoundly petty contours therein, before the actions motivated by these inner workings spring the town's clock into gear and they all take their part in the plot.
But my mechanistic metaphor is misleading, if not for the actual technique then certainly for the feeling of the reading.
This old white dude, a socially awkward invert retired from backstage circus life, takes up residence on the border between a small town's business district and its black neighborhood during the depression. He's long felt an affinity for other marginalized people so sets down stakes on their margin. His self-imposed solitude nurtures misunderstandings such that his is the house that stars in local child lore, thus they dare each other to steal apples from his tree.
But it is through one child, then the child's uncle, that connections are made and Bill Trapp the hermit is drawn out and into the community. Being liked is new for him, as he's always been short on charisma:
"His long, fleshy nose with its countless red pin pricks would expand and contract in time to his breathing and the gray-striped lips that refused to open over the severe outward slant of the front teeth would strain themselves into the subtlest kind of smile."
Sexy, no?
This is a very American novel, by which I mean it puts stress on that long taut tension between individual prerogative and communal obligation, myopia and the mob, inner morality and public mores, the prison of solipsism and the tyranny of appearance.
As we move leisurely from one character's perspective to another we not only get a feel for their fears, hopes, and motivations, but we see assembly of all the necessary ingredients for some unpleasant potential:
* The limits on women's options funelling all their ambition into competitive cooking, fundraising, and church involvement as cutthroat as any boardroom.
* The return of the smart bad girl who had split town as soon as she could, grown up into a chic big-city cynic with her eye on another's man.
* The gossippy men, processing scandal from its beer hall birth to barber shop certification.
* The unique malice of children, yet to fully develop empathy for others and all set to prove it.
* The festering boredom of a small depressed town primed for a problem, prepared with a scapegoat.
* The momentum which local lore, superstition, and piety lend to suspicion and speedy conclusions.
* Common table xenophobia.
Stir. Bake in the strange heat of an unexpected Indian summer.
A white writer would never have gotten away with this portrayal of a black community; it's unlikely any publisher would have been persuaded by the argument that all people can be petty, vindictive, and bigoted, so this just shows black people being people. In 1950 the sort of audience eager to read about small-town African-American life likely had little appetite for a white victim of black villains.
But this is too simple: victim/villain. Although the book's demographics make the issue of race unavoidable, Demby does not emphasize it; rather the real issue is difference, and how attractive the idea of being wronged can be to some personalities who'd use a perceived wound as a weapon. Irony is not the only effect when we see the oppressed take up the tactics of the oppressor, and Demby's sensitive emphasis on subjective experience makes it far more than mere cultural critique of the conditions within which the characters are trapped.
Entrapment is a theme, mirrors are a motif, and death--literal and figurative--is a casual presence throughout, standing for both entrapment and escape, as when a funeral gathers the people of Beetlecreek to gawk in awe at the shiny black spectacle that is the Baily Brother's dazzling new hearse. The characters are not only imprisoned in this provincial backwater of stifling social convention, but trapped within themselves, within who they are. However, this mid-century American existentialism never comes off heavy-handed or didactic thanks to Demby's use of the characters' points of view to relate the whole tale, through the slim grasp each manages, limited as they are by self-concern and misunderstanding.
A damn solid read from an unfairly overshadowed author.
January 31, 2015
Beetlecreek represents everything I love about an author's imperfect first novel without containing the things I hate. Demby's depiction of race relations in post-war America is written with velvet subtlety and nuanced characters that bring to life the realities of a time and place interlopers in 2015 can experience in lurid clarity. The white world exists outside the action like the tidal pull of a Jovian moon. We feel its presence on Beetlecreek's black community with only passing reference, but it is Wemby's brilliant inclusion of white man Bill Trapp in the narrative that drops the live wire into the pool.
Friend Gregsamsa is right to question what makes a book a classic. If not a classic by current measures, it is a Buried shame that this novel isn't at least read and discussed with some greater appreciation. There's this sentence that I have returned to several times since finishing the book:
Here, there isn't any change outside so you feel yourself changing inside too fast.
That is such a weighty piece of writing to touch upon what it meant/means to be an African-American. I want to learn more.
April 8, 2025
Superlatives would tax both you and I if I attempted to laud this novel with its due and proper. It is a very rare specimen of mid-century lit that exists in that same interstitial place as Blade of Light or Stoner (i.e. 'no big whoops,' casually elegant, small), the one where the parts shouldn't come anywhere near equaling the sum but do. Fuck, how they do. I would augur its closest literary touchstone would be earlyish Faulkner, but I say that lovingly (Bill and I are way past the 'not fucking' phase, having entered into total abstention of communication, and this on my demand; it's called a restraining order, you fucking weirdo).
Where was (the many) I? Oh, yeah, Bettlecreek came out in 1950: pre-Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and the whole graduating class that gave literary agents and publishers (not to mention critics) the too-neat and reductive 'New Negro' or 'the Negro novel' category. I'm of a mind that this was a phenomenon of brilliant and exploitative marketing (also just known as: marketing) device that promoted like works to be promulgated and provided an easy framing device for the white literati to ghettoize American fiction. That this fiction was written by Black women and men is, end of day, supernumerary at best. But the functionally literate cracker audience had the wool pulled by Madison Ave, buying into the narrative that there was some, er, overriding thematic narrative of the like-minded (read: Black) that unified both the work and its writers. Bullshit. Read for yourself: without that 'Black' frame, they're all just books. Neither bettered not lessened by the pigmentation of its creator, each deserve consideration outside internecine comparison. Or worse, competition. You know, books.
Within this false tableau, Beetlecreek is very much not a 'Black novel,' either in critical analysis or actual content. Yes, some characters are Black. Imagine that (hey, it is fiction). But some protagonists are white whom—shock! horror!—are neither the 'virtuous' or 'villainous' archetypes that riddle the lesser works found under the Negro novel's imprimatur, one its Black author-inheritors would riff on in their efforts to compose to a readied audience. (Or the many white writers that would exploit this same market, but be free of solving 'the Negro problem' for obvious reasons, a la Faulkner.) I can't fault these men and women for writing to type; first there's every argument to support that some weren't especially aware of their being exploited by their oh-so-gregarious and 'sympathetic' white publisher-benefactors; and second, and I am pretty positive it was Ishmael Reed in an intro to something (fuck me if I keep actual notes on these things) that summed up the whole scene presciently by observing 'they had shoes to buy for their kids.' Hey, fuck it, I get it. You and I, too.
Demby's debut, aka Bettlecreek, is being republished by Doublesday for its 75th anniversary in, I believe, December. That is the cover you see attached to this 'review.' I clearly didn't read this edition, but am simply trying to amplify any attention I can for what is, I believe, a novel that must be included in that impossibly large collection commonly regarded as 'The Great American Novel.' You can keep that 'Black' qualifier/determiner shit out of it.
Where was (the many) I? Oh, yeah, Bettlecreek came out in 1950: pre-Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and the whole graduating class that gave literary agents and publishers (not to mention critics) the too-neat and reductive 'New Negro' or 'the Negro novel' category. I'm of a mind that this was a phenomenon of brilliant and exploitative marketing (also just known as: marketing) device that promoted like works to be promulgated and provided an easy framing device for the white literati to ghettoize American fiction. That this fiction was written by Black women and men is, end of day, supernumerary at best. But the functionally literate cracker audience had the wool pulled by Madison Ave, buying into the narrative that there was some, er, overriding thematic narrative of the like-minded (read: Black) that unified both the work and its writers. Bullshit. Read for yourself: without that 'Black' frame, they're all just books. Neither bettered not lessened by the pigmentation of its creator, each deserve consideration outside internecine comparison. Or worse, competition. You know, books.
Within this false tableau, Beetlecreek is very much not a 'Black novel,' either in critical analysis or actual content. Yes, some characters are Black. Imagine that (hey, it is fiction). But some protagonists are white whom—shock! horror!—are neither the 'virtuous' or 'villainous' archetypes that riddle the lesser works found under the Negro novel's imprimatur, one its Black author-inheritors would riff on in their efforts to compose to a readied audience. (Or the many white writers that would exploit this same market, but be free of solving 'the Negro problem' for obvious reasons, a la Faulkner.) I can't fault these men and women for writing to type; first there's every argument to support that some weren't especially aware of their being exploited by their oh-so-gregarious and 'sympathetic' white publisher-benefactors; and second, and I am pretty positive it was Ishmael Reed in an intro to something (fuck me if I keep actual notes on these things) that summed up the whole scene presciently by observing 'they had shoes to buy for their kids.' Hey, fuck it, I get it. You and I, too.
Demby's debut, aka Bettlecreek, is being republished by Doublesday for its 75th anniversary in, I believe, December. That is the cover you see attached to this 'review.' I clearly didn't read this edition, but am simply trying to amplify any attention I can for what is, I believe, a novel that must be included in that impossibly large collection commonly regarded as 'The Great American Novel.' You can keep that 'Black' qualifier/determiner shit out of it.
June 8, 2020
Aspects of this 1950 novel are dated, its racial stereotypical language for example, but the themes it deals with are as relevant today as always.
It is an unusual view of what life was like in a black community in a small town in West Virginia, with its key characters all dealing with some type of isolation, feeling the need to belong to a group, and yet wanting to escape from the stifling bigotry of a small town. Beetlecreek is segregated on ethnic, racial, and class lines, and is a dead end for black youth and aspiring adults.
Retired circus worker Bill Trapp lives on the edge of the black community. Having not spoken to anyone for months he befriends a young black boy, enamoured by company, he holds a party for the community's children, both white and black, but in doing so, antagonizes the local community.
It is an unusual view of what life was like in a black community in a small town in West Virginia, with its key characters all dealing with some type of isolation, feeling the need to belong to a group, and yet wanting to escape from the stifling bigotry of a small town. Beetlecreek is segregated on ethnic, racial, and class lines, and is a dead end for black youth and aspiring adults.
Retired circus worker Bill Trapp lives on the edge of the black community. Having not spoken to anyone for months he befriends a young black boy, enamoured by company, he holds a party for the community's children, both white and black, but in doing so, antagonizes the local community.
February 5, 2025
In my ongoing quest to identify and read as many unjustly forgotten great novels as possible, particularly ones by Black authors, I stumbled upon this little gem. Published in 1950, at its core it's the story of the titular town, a small West Virginia dead end where nothing of note tends to happen, but something big is about to go down. The story is told from the perspectives of four main characters whose lives intersect in a disastrous way one autumn during the Depression. The characters are Bill Trapp, a retired carny who lives a recluse's life on the outskirts of the Black side of town; David Diggs, a talented artist who would've left Beetlecreek years ago and might still; Mary Diggs, David's wife and a Beetlecreek native who, unlike her husband, aspires to nothing more than the peak of the town's petty local politics and church socials; and Johnny Johnson, the Diggs's teenaged nephew who comes from Pittsburgh to stay with his aunt and uncle when his mother becomes gravely ill. Notably, Trapp is a white man, and the other main characters (and most of the book's characters, period) are Black. Beetlecreek is itself the "Black side of the tracks," and Trapp's awkward attempts to navigate this universe are what drive the book's story forward. Demby clearly put a lot of thought and care into developing each of his four characters (from what I've read of his life, the Johnny character could be semiautobiographical), and does a masterful job of both subverting the typical racial dynamics for a novel of the time (which usually goes like this: Black man commits bad act in white town, and disaster ensues) and illustrating the small-mindedness and hypocrisy that prevail among the locals in such a place regardless of race or ethnicity. Trapp is an outsider who makes the mistake of looking in and thinking he can fit there. Johnny and his uncle David are also outsiders, both washed into Beetlecreek under less-than-ideal circumstances, and their respective relationships with Trapp are also, in a way, indicative of their feelings about the town itself and their places in it.
"Beetlecreek" doesn't read like most Black novels of the time, and maybe that's why you don't see Demby's name on many lists of Black authors you need to read. This is a dark, sad, existentialist little book that is less about racism than about loneliness and angst in a small rural town. Having grown up in a small rural town where I didn't fit in, and having often been lonely and angst-ridden there myself, I felt "Beetlecreek" speaking to me. It made me want to read more of Demby's work. Which is currently a challenge: "Beetlecreek" is his only novel still in print, and is available only through the University of Mississippi Press. However, Penguin is reissuing it, along with "The Catacombs," his second and better-known (at least back in the day) novel, later this year. Hopefully that'll put it in more readers' hands; it certainly deserves a wider audience, and Demby certainly deserves to be rediscovered.
"Beetlecreek" doesn't read like most Black novels of the time, and maybe that's why you don't see Demby's name on many lists of Black authors you need to read. This is a dark, sad, existentialist little book that is less about racism than about loneliness and angst in a small rural town. Having grown up in a small rural town where I didn't fit in, and having often been lonely and angst-ridden there myself, I felt "Beetlecreek" speaking to me. It made me want to read more of Demby's work. Which is currently a challenge: "Beetlecreek" is his only novel still in print, and is available only through the University of Mississippi Press. However, Penguin is reissuing it, along with "The Catacombs," his second and better-known (at least back in the day) novel, later this year. Hopefully that'll put it in more readers' hands; it certainly deserves a wider audience, and Demby certainly deserves to be rediscovered.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 16, 2025
this feels like it belongs to the previous century - mostly in the sense that anytime an emotion is felt by a character the prose gives itself a hernia making sure the reader is aware of it. willing to accept that this was ahead of its time but then i think its time came and then passed and now its just sort of an antique. a book of note but not my cup of tea for you know, reading
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July 28, 2021As seen in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
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December 31, 2010Who the hell put that comma in William Demby's name?
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