BOOKS! (Homemade Love)

I initially wrote this as double review (as is my custom) featuring the two previously mentioned fiction books, about love, written by Black authors, that I read over the summer. But I had so much to say about You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty that I had to separate it into its own review. So this here review is solely dedicated to a 1986 short story collection by the great J. California Cooper. 

 

Homemade Love by J. California Cooper

 

I've been meaning to add more J. California Cooper to my life ever since I read Life Is Short but Wide, but I kept not getting around to it. I even bought a couple of her books in 2023, telling myself that it would be my year to finally delve back into her work, but not so. When I found a copy of Homemade Love at Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor in April 2025, I told my self that at the very least I would read this one, this year. And I made good on that! In 13 stories, Homemade Love covers various forms of love that are cultivated and manipulated, cherished and squandered, yearned for and mourned over, lost and found, by regular degular Black people in everyday life. Most of the lead characters learn to embrace the love they have (or had) in their lives, however imperfect or delayed it may be, because they recognize how that love comes without airs or pretense. Cooper describes it best in her Author's Note at the beginning of the book: 

I choose the name 'Homemade Love' because it is love that is not bought, not wrapped in fancy packaging with glib lines that often lie. Is not full of false preservatives that may kill us in one way or another. Is usually done from the bottom up, with care, forethought planning, and consideration for others. It is work done for the reward, that is the reward. Is usually solid, better and memorable. Is sought after. Do not think only of food either. Many more things, the best things, were all made at home, first... 
 
Homemade goes a long way. Usually lasts longer than we do.
 
So, I said, I would like some Homemade Love.
 
Have some.

"Funny Valentines" is one of my favorite stories in this collection, with the narrator fondly recounting her decades-long friendship with her country cousin Dearie B, an intellectually challenged woman 11 years her senior. The lessons Dearie B teaches the narrator about visiting the dead and stubbornly seeking one's own happiness in life, have left a profound impression on me. Additionally, Dearie B's secret aspiration to wear lacy black lingerie and have a fulfilling sex life (both of which she eventually attains) reminds me of a mobility-challenged newlywed in Cooper's Life Is Short But Wide, who has the most tender lovemaking scene with the man she's chosen to spend her life with. I'm impressed by Cooper's audacity to depict disabled people as desirous and sexually active just like anyone else.

 

Speaking of which, Cooper doesn't leave older or conventionally unattractive people (particularly women) out either. "At Long Last" depicts a widow finally experiencing affection and sexual satisfaction with a new beau in her late 60s, after a lifetime of thankless devotion to her recently-deceased husband and her grown children. It also features the unforgettable line uttered by the woman's best friend, "What you need is someone to tip your basket!" In a similar vein, "Down That Lonesome Road" is narrated by a woman who uses a few lies and some homemade wine to make a match between her amputee war veteran cousin and her 35 to 40-year-old widowed friend. This, after the widow has confided in the narrator about an unsuccessful attempt at using a dildo that she'd bought after not being touched for four years. "When Life Begins" is surprisingly charming despite its unfortunate beginnings; somewhere in the country, a 35-year-old man named Wally and a 28-year-old woman named Marriage, who each lost a parent and their two front teeth through a series of unfortunate events, find romance and kindness in each other when they cross paths one random day. And opening with the argument that there's magic in every life, "The Magic Strength of Need" follows Burlee, an "ugly" girl who becomes a beauty industry tycoon by tapping into her magic: a penchant for giving herself quiet time to think, a willingness to learn new skills and collaborate with others, and a determination to retire her mother and marry rich. Not only that, but the magic of her need for love enables her to earn a second chance with Winston, her childhood friend and longtime business partner, whom she spent decades spurning and only using for sex because she thought he wasn't rich enough for her to marry. 

But there are some characters who are beyond help, refusing to reconsider their perceptions of people and how life works. "The Watcher" starts off comically deranged, but reads like a horror story by the end. A church lady—presumably middle aged, presumably retired or a homemaker, thus having an excess of free time to be nosy— descends further and further into religious psychosis as she boasts about her duty as God's disciple to uphold her community. This self-appointed duty involves spying on her neighbors and meddling in their lives to expose their misdeeds of fornication, adultery, drinking too much, and being a marriageable woman who chooses to remain single and live alone. The church lady goes to extremes to instigate situations, and takes no accountability for the harm that results, including when she gets one woman beaten and another woman shot. Neighbors are constantly moving away from the neighborhood because of the turmoil she causes, meanwhile, she loses her entire family because she's too busy watching others to pay attention to her own household. (Her daughter almost dies from a DIY abortion before eventually running away for good, her son dies from a heroin overdose in his bedroom, and her husband leaves her for the aforementioned single woman across the street that she's made him help spy on.) "Swingers and Squares" is similar to "The Watcher" as it's also narrated by a woman who believes everyone else is misguided except her. After being abandoned by her cheating husband, and proceeding to fail herself and her children as a neglectful and emotionally immature single mother for the following decades, the narrator masks her envy toward her more secure neighbor Lana. By the narrator's logic, Lana is "dumb" and a "square" for entering into the "slavery" of marriage and creating a normal, stable life for her family.

 

As someone who believes most (if not all) texts are in conversation with each other so long as readers are willing to draw the connections, I was pleased to have Homemade Love bring other Black women authors' work to my mind. The story "Living" reminds me of the Nella Larsen story "Freedom," where a man similarly leaves his wife to explore solo life in a big city, only to horribly regret it later. Part of my motivation to buy Homemade Love in the first place was the fact that it felt thematically similar to Alice Walker's short story collection In Love & Trouble. And what do you know, Alice Walker was a mentor of J. California Cooper's, and Cooper's previous collection A Piece of Mine was the first book Walker published as co-founder of Wild Trees Press! So if you're a fan of Walker, are eager to read more of Cooper's writing like I am, or have a fondness for down home living and loving, then read this book! 

 

Favorite quotes: 

"Life is really something too, cause you can stand stark raving still and life will still happen to you. It's gonna spill over and touch you no matter where you are! Always full of lessons. Everywhere! All you got to do is look around you if you got sense enough to see!... My Aunt Ellen, who I'm going to tell you about, always said, 'Life is like tryin to swim to the top of the rain sometime!'" (1). 

 

"Life is more like the rain. The river and the lake lay down for you. All you got to do is learn how to swim before you go where they are and jump in. But life don't do that. You always gets the test fore you learn the swimming lesson, unexpected, like rain. You don't go to the rain, the rain comes to you. Anywhere, anytime. You got to prepare for it!... protect yourself! And if it keeps coming down on you, you got to learn to swim to the top through the dark clouds, where the sun is shining on that silver lining" (6). 

 

"I hear he is a strong man and I blive what you need is somebody to tip your basket!... Girl, you told me it ain't never been tipped!" (106).

"The world got a lot to pay for messing up a lotta people's minds with all that division stuff!... when they made ugly and pretty, they was messing with people's minds! Their lives!

 

I'ma tell you something! God didn't make no ugly people! Man did! Talking about what was pretty and what was ugly. It's somebody for everybody, then everybody is pretty to somebody! And it wasn't none of them people's business who started this ugly-pretty business to get in everybody's business like they did! You ever notice that somebody the world says is ugly, you might even agree, but when you get to know that person, you don't see ugly no more?! That goes to show you! God didn't make ugly people! Man did!" (118).   

"'I got some love I want to share! There ain't nothing... sweet... in my life anymore. All day, every day, all night, every night, all the same... just me.' She looked at me. 'Oh, not just sex, not just sex, Bertha" (152).