INTRODUCTION

A Timeless American Treasure

Delores Phillips’s Literary Legacy

In the introduction to the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child (2004), novelist Tayari Jones pondered the enigma that was Delores Phillips. The Black writing world is small, she explained, and although she and Phillips were both Black women writers from Georgia, she was saddened that they never crossed paths, nor did anyone seem to know anything about the mysterious author. It seemed that Phillips had gifted the world her “one, brilliant novel . . . a timeless American treasure” and faded into a quiet existence until her death.¹ Filled with regret that she had not met Phillips, Jones “was also weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write.” But what Jones did not realize in 2018, however, was that Phillips’s writing career spanned more than just The Darkest Child and four chapters of its sequel, Stumbling Blocks, which were published at the end of the reissue. Instead, Phillips was an experienced and prolific writer who created multigenre literature throughout her entire lifetime. This volume paints a broader picture of Phillips, not just as a brilliant novelist, but as a skilled poet and short story writer as well, and consequently encourages readers to rethink her literary legacy.

CHILDHOOD AND FAMILY

Delores Faye Phillips was born on September 26, 1950, in Cartersville, Georgia, the second of four children of Lennie Miller and Annie Ruth Banks. Finding it difficult to obtain work in Georgia, Lennie, a bricklayer originally from Pine Log, Georgia, moved to Detroit to support his family from afar. Before her marriage to Lennie, Annie Ruth had worked around the United States, including in Florida, Boston, and Baltimore, laboring domestically in white households. With the birth of her eldest child, Linda Diane, and then Delores, Annie Ruth found work as a washerwoman back in her hometown of Cartersville so she could be a steadier presence for the two girls at the time. Lennie would visit as often as he could, sometimes bringing gifts, like bicycles, to the young girls’ excitement.

As a child, Delores was encouraged to read and write by her mother who, as an author in her own right, anonymously published a short story in True Romance magazine in the late 1950s.² Annie Ruth would read to her children every night, particularly nursery rhymes and Hazel Felleman’s The Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936). Delores’s affinity for poetry in general and rhyming in particular found its beginnings with her mother’s performances of the poems. Additionally, her curiosity was piqued once she learned to read: “[I] started with Dick and Jane first grade readers. I learned to write. I always wanted to play with words.”³ From age seven, she would write a few rhyming lines, motivated spontaneously by brief encounters she had in her childhood, be that an argument with a friend or even a teacher who inspired her.

The family lived in a shotgun house in an all-Black neighborhood on Beauregard Street. About eight years after Delores was born, they moved to a neighborhood called Summer Hill, another segregated space, but unlike the shotgun house on Beauregard Street, the new place had indoor toilets. Delores and Linda quickly learned the laws of Jim Crow Georgia. They knew never to venture to the white side of town, Granger Hill, lest violence ensue there. As Phillips later remembered, “We were taught to stay in our place. I knew that if I was in a line at the five and dime and a white person came up, I was to step aside. We couldn’t go to a restaurant. Period. There was not one in the whole town that we could go to and eat.”⁴ Although Brown v. Board of Education ruled the public education doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional, the Miller children did not feel its ripple effect while living in Georgia. Rather, they were reminded of educational inequalities on their walk to school every morning as they passed the brick school building for white children to attend classes in their dilapidated wooden building for Black children. Nevertheless, through her parents’ dedication and community support, Phillips and her siblings not only honed their math, reading, and writing skills, but they were also be exposed to public speaking, classical music, and even basic survivalist skills through camping.

As a youth, Delores was quite shy and often had difficulty making friends. Her older sister, Linda, however, stepped in and became her confidant and best friend. The pair, only thirteen months apart, were inseparable, and Phillips counted her sister as “one of the large pieces that completes my heart.”⁵ They made jokes, defended each other, and even shared a bed. When the two boys were born, Lennie “Skip” Miller in 1954 and Gregory “Greg” Green in 1961, both sisters “adopted” a younger brother counterpart—Delores embraced Greg and Linda, Skip. Each boy had a big sister to protect them, but also to correct them.

In the summer of 1959, before Greg’s birth, tragedy struck the Miller family when Annie Ruth received word that Lennie had been injured on the job. She immediately packed up the family and moved to Detroit to be with him. Lennie had suffered a severe leg injury and by October the leg had become gangrenous. The doctors concluded that Lennie—even though he was a hemophiliac—needed to have his leg amputated to fight the gangrene. Sadly, he bled to death during surgery. After Lennie’s death, Delores and Linda, who by October had already enrolled in school, remained in Detroit and lived with relatives, while Annie Ruth took Skip back to Cartersville to care for her bedridden mother, Hattie Banks. Several years later, in 1967, Annie Ruth suddenly died from pneumonia. Remembering that their mother had told her months before she died to keep the family together, Linda gathered all three of her siblings, ages 6–17, and together, after briefly living with relatives in Georgia, they relocated to Cleveland. There the siblings found themselves in an environment that would test the strength of their unity, but, as Phillips would later reveal when she nominated her sister for the Unsung Heroes award featured in the Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer, Linda’s resolve to uphold their mother’s charge would prove unyielding: “It is possible that we would never have known the strength of our sister had we not found ourselves motherless and homeless on the streets of Cleveland. . . . We scattered, dropped out of school, and became hostile and rebellious individuals. . . . She reeled us in, one by one, and encouraged us to reach out to each other long after we had forgotten how to touch or feel anything positive.”⁶ Around this time, Delores temporarily joined the army, but after about three months, disillusioned with the idea of war, she quit.

MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD

After leaving the army, Delores briefly moved back to Cartersville, where she married her first husband, Frederick “Butch” Knox, a childhood friend. Although she noticed many similarities between Georgia and Ohio, she concluded that Cleveland afforded her more opportunities than in the South. Phillips desperately refused to remain in the oppressive Georgia environment she was raised, so, as she put it, “I grabbed me a husband and moved on back” to Cleveland.⁷ Phillips would be among several Black women writers who called Ohio home, including Toni Morrison, folklorist and children’s book author Virginia Hamilton, and playwright Adrienne Kennedy, who, like Phillips, attended Cleveland public high schools. In December 1970, Knox and Phillips had their first child, Frederick “Ricky” Knox Jr. The pregnancy proved traumatic for Delores, who nearly bled out after giving birth. Knowing that hemophilia ran in her family, she implored doctors not to circumcise Ricky. The doctors performed the circumcision against Phillips’s will, and Ricky passed away less than a week after his birth. Even though her first pregnancy ended in tragedy, Delores wanted nothing more than to be a mother, so she prayed fervently to God for another child. Her prayers were soon answered, and she became pregnant with another child that same year. However, the pain and trauma of Ricky’s death, coupled with her increasingly tumultuous relationship with Butch, led Phillips to file for divorce in August 1973, one month before their daughter, Shalana, was born.

To support her family, Phillips, following in her sister’s footsteps, pursued a career in nursing, graduating from Cleveland’s Central School of Practical Nursing in 1979. She would work as a licensed practical nurse for more than forty years. Around the time she was in nursing school and also waitressing, between 1975 and 1976, Delores was introduced to Charles “Butch” Phillips, a friend of Linda’s boyfriend at the time. Delores and Butch Phillips fell in love and married in July 1980. The differences between the two Butches were glaring. While Frederick could be physically abusive, Charles was kind and loving. He was jovial, a hard worker, and loved Shalana. Even though Delores and Charles’s marriage was significantly more ideal than her previous one, the strength of their relationship was soon tested when the couple adopted a young boy around four years old from a local foster agency. Unaware at the time of the adoption that the child would need nearly twenty-four-hour support, Phillips eventually quit her job to provide her son with the care he needed.

Over time, struggling with her role as a caregiver and feeling unsupported by Charles, Delores began to question their decision. “She lost all of this weight,” Shalana remembers, “and it was a highly stressful situation for her.” As a result, she and Butch argued over the boy’s future in the home. However, the disagreements over the boy’s fate were overshadowed by Charles’s diagnosis of lymphoma in the spring of 1983. Although he had been ill for months, after the formal diagnosis, Charles’s health rapidly declined, and he succumbed to the disease in July of the same year. Shalana vividly remembers her mother’s fragile emotional state amid these circumstances: “So here’s my mom, now angry at Daddy and grieving over her husband, this kid who’s in limbo, this daughter that in hindsight, she’s like, ‘Did I give her enough attention?’ But I didn’t need it, I was okay. . . . I look back and say, ‘How did my mother handle all of that?’ I just want to scream for her that she had to deal with all of that.”⁸

Butch’s death would haunt Delores for decades, as she wrote in her journal in 2006, “Husband, if you can hear, I beg forgiveness in my loudest voice. I was there when you drew your last breath, but I could not watch you die—not day after day after day of watching you delirious with fever, stretched on a cooling blanket, burning from deep inside where I could not blow a cooling breath to soothe your suffering. I was there when you died.”⁹ After Charles’s death, Linda, who lived in Maryland at the time, rushed to Cleveland to comfort her grieving sister and niece, while the boy was placed with another family. Phillips never remarried but focused much of her energy providing for herself and her daughter.

LATER NURSING CAREER, CONTINUING EDUCATION, AND WRITING INFLUENCES

Although writing was her passion, Delores chiefly relied on her nursing career to support her family. Mental health work and geriatric nursing became her specialities. From 1985 to 1987, she worked at the Cleveland Psychological Institute, and in the aughts, she fulfilled many duties at Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare and Vantage Place, such as dispensing medications and facilitating group therapies. Delores worked at several long-term care facilities in Ohio, including Golden Age Nursing Home from 1987 to 1994 and Lorain County Golden Acres between 1999 and 2001 as a charge nurse on the Alzheimer’s unit. As a licensed practical nurse, she not only provided medication and restorative care to the residents but also supervised the nursing assistants, developed patient care plans, and facilitated and supervised individual and group activities.

Throughout her nursing career, she actively expanded her skills to treat chemical dependency, offer legal assistance, and became a women’s advocate. Across Ohio, she served as a guardian ad litem for Lorain County Children Services, an HIV/AIDS instructor for the American Red Cross, a chemical dependency counselor, and a women’s advocate at the Center for the Prevention of Domestic Violence. All of these varied experiences, often with vulnerable communities, shaped her writing, resulting in diverse characters and a multitude of themes including love, freedom, spirituality and religion, racism and racial violence, voodoo and rootwork, and psychosocial trauma and abuse.

Because of the flexibility of her nursing career, Phillips was able to return to school to obtain an English degree. Beginning at the age of thirty-three, she attended Cuyahoga Community College, where she registered in continuing education courses in mental health, child development, and psychology from 1983 to 1990. She also enrolled in several writing, mass communication, and English courses, including British literature, African American literature, creative writing, and news writing. She transferred to Cleveland State University in 1992 and received her bachelor of arts in 1994. During those years she enrolled in courses on Chaucer, poetry writing, Milton, African American theater, and mass media communication. Delores’s secondary schooling would prove to be a period of extraordinary creativity; she not only focused on fiction writing but honed her journalistic skills by crafting articles and several letters to the editor for Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer.¹⁰

Like her mother and sister, Phillips was a voracious reader. As she would later impart on aspiring writers at the local Cleveland public library where she offered workshops, “whether fiction or non-fiction, reading makes you aware of the rhythm and pace of stories, and it builds vocabulary . . . essential tools of good writing.”¹¹ She read a variety of genres including African American literature, mysteries, classics, and Greek tragedies. One of her favorite writers was Walter Mosley, and she also enjoyed Toni Morrison and Stephen King.¹² In her response to a set of unknown interview questions she received in 2007, she revealed that although “no book has ever changed my life,” there have been several that “inspired and motivated, made me laugh and cry.” For example, she found T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to be “brilliant,” “beautiful,” and skillful, while she named Emma Harte from Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance as one of her favorite heroines. Additionally, she recalled that as a child, she treasured Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses because “it was the first book I ever read where I realized that children could be cruel in books just as they were in real life.”¹³ Delores kept a running list of novels, plays, books of poetry, or anything else that piqued her interest, first on steno notebooks and eventually on her computer, some of which include Unoma Azuah’s Sky High Flames, Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil, and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.¹⁴ She enlisted the same routine for increasing her vocabulary, cataloging a list of intriguing words and practicing by writing them in a sentence.

Her writing process was consistent and disciplined. She wrote every day, with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Shalana jokingly remarked.¹⁵ In an interview, Phillips explained how she generated the ideas for her fiction: “Early morning with a cup of coffee sets the mood for me. I visualize the place and people I want to write about until I can see it all clearly. I imagine that I am walking the streets or roads of a fictional town, watching the characters, and taking note of their surroundings. These are the things that I jot down and work with as I begin a story.”¹⁶ Although her mode of writing followed the improvements of technology from typewriter to word processor to computer, Delores always used a steno notebook in some capacity. She then welcomed feedback from Linda, who recognized early on that her sister had a special gift: “As she started to write, I knew that she could write. I knew that you felt her words. I knew that when she read to you, those dimples would come out and she’d have fun. It was just a joy to her to share her work with you.”¹⁷ But their relationship was not merely one-sided; Delores also provided feedback for Linda, a writer herself, and encouraged her to nurture her gifts.¹⁸ Phillips also taught and mentored other aspiring writers by leading writing workshops at public libraries around Cleveland.

ILLNESS AND DEATH

During one spring day in 1998, at her home, Delores suddenly began feeling dizzy and experiencing double vision. She was rushed to the hospital where she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a nerve disease that causes a communication disruption between the brain and the spinal cord. Initially, the symptoms of multiple sclerosis not only affected her writing, but also inhibited her daily functioning. Linda became her constant caregiver, and she remembered how difficult those first few months were: “[Faye] could barely walk. She used a walker and a cane. She could not read but she still wanted me to read to her. She still wanted the word, so I would read to her.”¹⁹ In time, Delores eventually regained her ability to see, read, and walk, though, in the last years of her life, she had a noticeable limp. In 2002, less than three years after Delores was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she began feeling intense chest pain while she was mowing the lawn at her home. Because of her nursing skills, the symptoms signaled to her that she was experiencing a heart attack, but she did not panic. Instead, she calmly went inside her home, crawled up the steps to the bathroom, washed the grass off her feet, then drove herself to the hospital. She experienced a second heart attack less than four years later.

In March of 2014, while working on No Ordinary Rain and Stumbling Blocks, Phillips was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Months before her diagnosis, she had suffered from pancreatitis, feeling sharp pains daily. Understanding that the pain she was experiencing was not a symptom of her multiple sclerosis nor an indication of a heart attack, she visited the er several times, insisting to doctors that there had to be a more serious issue. Yet, despite her self-advocacy, she was continuously sent home with only bottles of pain pills. By the time she finally received further testing, the cancer had already ravaged much of her body. In a sharp decline, Delores was moved to hospice care in May of the same year. During this time, she wrote letters to family members, expressing her love and gratitude for them while encouraging them to live life to the fullest once she was gone. Her words to Linda were especially poignant, thanking her sister for her unconditional love: “I can cite more than one occasion when you put your life on hold for me. You did when my husband died and each time I became ill with one of my many medical conditions. This sister that you have has put you through the test, and you have passed with the highest possible grade. I thank God for you and for the time He gave us to express our love for each other.”²⁰ Delores succumbed to the disease at the age of sixty-three, on June 7, 2014, with her sister, daughter, and other loved ones by her side.

THE DARKEST CHILD

At the time of her death, Phillips was mostly remembered for the novel The Darkest Child. Throughout the 1990s, Phillips wrote a poem that eventually filled numerous steno notebooks, a five-hundred-page line-to-line rhyming poem she entitled “Gussie Mae Potts.” The poem, she explained, “explored what might have happened to battered children in the rural South before there were child protection laws.”²¹ Just as her own mother read to Delores during her childhood, Phillips would often recite bits of the poem to Shalana at bedtime. Although she insisted that the poem was not inspired by her time working at the Cleveland Psychological Institute, her family notes that it was by no coincidence that this poem emerged around the same time. A letter from Phillips to Linda suggests she had visions for a novel as early as 1997, but she did not transform the poem into The Darkest Child until the early 2000s. She would read the manuscript—originally more than eight hundred pages—aloud to her sister, who served as both a listening ear and a sharp editor. As Linda described, “She would write for hours and then she would call me and she would want to read all that she had written. This was every day during the writing process. I don’t remember one day that she did not call me when she was writing The Darkest Child. But I think hearing it herself, that helped to motivate her to continue. . . . She never got angry with any editing remarks that I would make.”²² Soon, by reading The Writer’s Market, Phillips began looking for publishing opportunities for first-time authors. In quite an incredible feat, after sending out only one letter of inquiry, she was offered a contract with Soho Press, which published the novel in 2004, upon editing it down to less than half the original length.

The Darkest Child follows a violent mother, Rozelle Quinn, and her ten children as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s. The story is told through the lens of Tangy Mae—Gussie Mae in the poem—the darkest of all Rozelle’s children, who values education as an avenue to flee her abusive household, poverty, and racial and sexual violence. Although the novel was not autobiographical in nature, Phillips’s experience growing up in segregated Georgia allowed her to paint her fictional town of Pakersfield with such a vivid, detailed, and engrossing realism. In fact, she admits: “The telling of the story might have been different had I not experienced firsthand the soil, the fields, the attitudes of the era, or the taste of Nehi soda.”²³

Due to the novel’s depiction of the harsh realities of Jim Crow Georgia coupled with a colorful cast of characters and a fast-paced plot, the novel was well-received by many critics. Caribbean Life called it a “brilliant, unnerving, memorable debut”; Publishers Weekly called it a “searing debut.”²⁴ The Black Book Review concluded that with Phillips’s “bold memorable characters and enough drama to keep you up all night . . . [the book] is a definite firm foundation for a long-lasting career as a great storyteller.”²⁵ Author Randall Kenan wrote in The New Leader that although The Darkest Child was “one of the harshest novels to arrive in many years,” somehow Phillips “gives the reader a sense of hope without belying her gothic vision.”²⁶ Faye Chadwell of Library Journal similarly commented on Phillips’s ability to depict white racism and violence without falling into spectacle, giving “this work a depth and dimension not often characteristic of a first novel.”²⁷ Yet that same attention to unadulterated scenes of lynching, child abuse, and rape proved alienating for some critics, like The Commercial Appeal’s Shirley Sykes, who concluded that although the novel “is compelling reading, for [her] the descriptions of violence were overwhelming.”²⁸ In a 1997 letter Phillips wrote to Linda, she anticipated some of the critics’ reactions to such heavy material: “I think I picked a bad subject for my first novel. Domestic violence and race issues are taboo in novels. That was the focus of the ‘hit list’ for books being removed from library shelves.”²⁹

Some critics praised her writing as so powerful and emotional that even “the minor characters are well drawn and humming with life,” but other reviewers were highly critical of her writing style and character development.³⁰ Lizzie Skurnick of the New York Times called her writing “faux-Dickensian prose,” arguing that “Phillips’s awkward renderings of accent and erudition make it difficult to concentrate both on the characters and the story.”³¹ Aligning with this critique, the Washington Post’s Lee Martin concluded that “Phillips never permits Tangy to use her promised powers of intellectual and emotional savvy to strip away layers of a complicated world of family abuse and racial tension.”³² The character Rozelle was particularly criticized. Kirkus Reviews argued that the novel’s fundamental weakness was that Phillips “offers no explanation for [Rozelle’s] cruelty,” and Martin reasoned that the children’s illogical desire to honor their mother despite her being “beyond redemption” was “a feeble, belated attempt to add dimension to the character of Rozelle.”³³ Phillips read and kept several copies of every review, yet she seemed to be unfazed by Martin’s and Skurnick’s reviews: “I knew from the beginning that everybody would not get it, that there were some people who would not understand what the book was about. I concentrate on the comments that let me know I succeeded in what I set out to do—comments like, ‘I laughed, I cried, I felt like I was there. I feel like I know these characters personally.’”³⁴

Despite some criticism, the novel garnered generous acclaim, winning the Black Caucus of the American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005. In the same year, she was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and nominated for the Female Author of the Year Award by the African American Literature Society. The novel also won the Poets and Writers League of Greater Cleveland Award. Phillips went on extensive book tours to visit colleges and universities, bookstores, libraries, and women’s groups across the United States. Linda was always by her side, and as Phillips’s agent on tour, she never ceased to be amazed at how her sister, who was naturally shy and had a fear of flying and elevators, would blossom in front of an audience, often laughing, making jokes, and inviting conversation.³⁵ Because the novel was so “vital and engrossing,” in 2018, Soho Press reissued The Darkest Child with a new introduction from Tayari Jones and an excerpt from Stumbling Blocks.³⁶

THEMES AND SIGNIFICANCE

The Darkest Child adopts many themes, from generational trauma, racism and colorism, and physical and sexual abuse to love, family, and motherhood.³⁷ Yet part of what makes Phillips’s novel unique is her ability to illuminate disability and mental health. Phillips employs disability in several ways. She uses it metaphorically, to describe, for example, the Quinn home as “old, crippled, and diseased—an emblem of poverty and neglect” or the children’s disabling fear of their mother as a “malignancy.”³⁸ She also used it to illustrate how physical violence produced permanent impairment, as experienced by characters like the Quinn’s neighbor Mrs. Long, who was left with “a lazy left eye” after being severely beaten by her husband, and even Tangy Mae, whose knuckles are permanently disfigured after Rozelle breaks her finger.³⁹ Third, and perhaps most notable, is her development of characters with mental and physical differences, specifically Rozelle and Martha Jean. Rozelle, who sees ghosts, constantly swats at bugs she imagines are crawling on her face, and is ultimately committed to an asylum, labeled “mad” and a “lunatic.” There is no justification for Rozelle’s mental state, an out Phillips consciously resists throughout the novel. Back then, Black people did not have access to psychiatrists and therapy, Phillips explains: “I did not give her a diagnosis because back then you did not have a diagnosis to go on. . . . We just called people crazy.”⁴⁰ Phillips’s hesitancy in diagnosing Rozelle places more emphasis on the character’s individual experience than on objective diagnosis.

Through Martha Jean, Phillips features one of the few representations of literal deafness in African American literature. Phillips strove to imagine the experiences of various children in the Jim Crow South, and that included deaf children. She even enrolled in several sign language courses so “she could better communicate with Martha Jean.”⁴¹ Martha Jean’s presence in the novel challenges negative and surface-level conceptions of deaf people and deaf-related imagery, where in fiction they have “historically been used as generic symbols for something else rather than as fully realized expressions of their individual selves.”⁴² In African American literature, for example, both Adrienne Kennedy in her play She Talks to Beethoven (1992) and Toni Morrison in her short story “Recitatif” (1983) evoke deafness as a narrative prosthetic, which, coined by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, is a narrative device that characterizes how disability is often used in literature as a means of propelling the narrative forward. Yet Martha Jean’s deafness is not erased, nor is she a marginalized character. Rather, by redefining and reordering her relationship to literacy and education, as well as the labor dynamics of the novel, “Martha Jean constitutes a character of complex embodiment who complicates preconceived notions of Black and deaf people as ‘burdens’ on society.”⁴³

Phillips’s attention to the varied experiences of Black life, coupled with her vivid imagery and beautiful lyricism, make powerful the harsh realities of life for many Black people in 1950s Georgia. Phillips takes a southern setting in much of her work, providing a rich backdrop to explore issues of lynchings, violence, and anti-Black racism, but also space to privilege poor, Black, rural families as complex characters instead of stereotypes. Tayari Jones suggests that because The Darkest Child was released in the late twenty-first century, “Phillips [was] free from drawing characters that represent some fundamental truth about the African American female experience.”⁴⁴ As I hope this collection shows, Phillips’s creation of multidimensional Black characters was not just a staple of her novel work; rather, her attention to creative freedom and realism spanned across her varied literary forms.

CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME

Taken together, Delores Phillips’s poetry, novels, and short stories showcase the love, dedication, and pure talent she poured into her art. Stumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work is the result of years of extensive research, intimate collaboration, and frankly, I believe, providential guidance. I was introduced to the novel in 2016 by a friend, and, like Tayari Jones, I began searching for more information on Phillips—to little avail, other than a brief obituary and short biography. In 2018, armed with the names of Phillips’s surviving relatives, I reached out to Shalana on a whim through a Facebook message. To my surprise, she was thoroughly excited that someone was interested in “Ma,” as she calls her, and months later she invited me and my mother, Carolyn Steverson, to Cleveland, where I met her immediate family and Phillips’s two surviving siblings, Linda and Greg. As an invaluable research assistant, my mother aided me in conducting interviews with the family members as I learned more about the woman that I never had the pleasure of meeting. Over the years, we have developed and maintained an immense bond as both Linda and Shalana continued to open their homes and share their memories with me. Over coffee, tea, tuna sandwiches, and Linda’s homemade baked goods, we began to assemble what would become Phillips’s archive, comprising several hundred pages of typescript documents, magazine clippings, letters from Delores to Linda, artifacts, photographs, college transcripts, journal entries, medical documents, and, incredibly enough, Phillips’s computer hard drive, which included drafts of all three of her novels.

This collection, then, is organized strategically. Because Linda was Phillips’s sister, editor, and closest confidant, I believe it is only right that the volume opens with her memories of Faye, as she affectionately called her. I am sure Delores would have wanted it no other way. Thereafter, the volume is arranged by genre. Phillips’s first love was poetry, and because poetry was the form of her earliest publications, this section appears first.⁴⁵ Following the poetry are Phillips’s short stories. As she wrote these stories, she began to engage in more formal training and to experiment with plot, character development, and long-form prose. Her novel work ends the collection, because that was the form she was working with most closely at the time of her death. Trudier Harris’s afterword offers readers more insightful ruminations on Phillips’s repertoire and ongoing legacy. Before each part, I provide a brief essay contextualizing Phillips’s work in her larger literary journey and explaining my editorial choices.

Finally, this volume is not named in absolute terms—I refrained from calling it Phillips’s “complete works” or “all of Phillips’s work” because my research has indicated that there is a high probability that more of Phillips’s writings are yet to be recovered or even discovered. Following the paths paved by studies such as Maryemma Graham’s project on Margaret Walker and Alice Walker’s work on Zora Neale Hurston, this collection serves as a fundamental step in the process of recovery work to increase the visibility of Black women writers who may have fallen through the cracks of American history. It is a testament to the power and complexity of a Black artist whose legacy is, indeed, unfinished.

NOTES

1. Jones, Tayari. Introduction. The Darkest Child, by Delores Phillips, Soho Press, 2018.

2. Miller, Linda. Interview. 16 July 2020.

3. Writer in Residence Lecture: Delores Phillips. Department of English, Modern Languages, and Mass Communication, Albany State University, 2007. DVD.

4. Marchetti, Donna. “Clevelander Finds Quick Acceptance for Her First Novel.” Plain Dealer, 13 Feb. 2004, p. E1–E3.

5. Phillips, Delores. Letter to Linda Miller. 30 Nov. 1998.

6. “Linda Miller.” Plain Dealer, 15 Feb. 1995, p. 12. This piece is available in its entirety on the companion website.

7. Writer in Residence Lecture.

8. Harris, Shalana. Personal interview. 16 July 2020.

9. Phillips, Delores. “Husband.” 4 Feb. 2006. Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

10. You can read her articles and other journalistic endeavors on the companion website.

11. Lunn, Collier. Interview with Delores Phillips. Clutch Magazine, 1 Sept. 2007.

12. Phillips, Delores. “Unknown Interview Answers.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

13. Phillips, Delores. “Laura.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

14. Phillips, Delores. “Judging.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

15. Harris, Shalana. Personal interview. 12 June 2019.

16. Phillips, Delores. “Borders.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

17. Miller, Linda. Personal interview. 12 June 2019.

18. Phillips writes to Miller in a letter from August 25, 1994, “I’m deep into your novel Gone. It is a really good book . . .”

19. Miller, Linda. Personal interview. 12 June 2019.

20. Phillips, Delores. “Dear Sis.” Letter to Linda Miller, Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

21. Writer in Residence Lecture.

22. Miller, Linda. Personal interview. 12 June 2019.

23. Phillips, Delores. “Interview Questions.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

24. McKanic, Arlene. “Delores Quinn’s Darkest Child Is an Arresting First.” Caribbean Life, 10 Feb. 2004, 54. Review of The Darkest Child. Publisher’s Weekly, 26 Jan. 2004.

25. Moore, Jacquie B. “What Mama Has on Her Mind.” Black Book Review, April 2004.

26. Kenan, Randall. “In the Devil’s House.” The New Leader, Dec. 2003.

27. Chadwell, Faye A. Review of The Darkest Child. Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2003.

28. Sykes, Shirley. “Tale of Abusive Mother Abounds with Violence.” The Commercial Appeal, 18 Apr. 2004.

29. Phillips, Delores. Letter to Linda Miller. 11 Feb. 1997. Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

30. McKanic, “Delores Quinn’s Darkest Child.”

31. Skurnick, Lizzie. “Song of the South.” New York Times, 28 March 2004.

32. Martin, Lee. “Cruel and Unusual.” Washington Post, 11 Jan. 2004.

33. “Review of The Darkest Child.” Kirkus Review, 1 Oct. 2003. Martin, “Cruel and Unusual.”

34. Phillips, Delores. “Interview Questions.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.

35. Miller, Linda. Personal interview. 12 June 2019.

36. “Celebrating The Darkest Child.” SoHo Press, 2 Feb. 2021, sohopress.com/celebrating-the-darkest-child/.

37. To my knowledge there has been, sadly, only three secondary articles on the novel. One is Kaila Philo’s chapter in Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past and Present (2017), entitled “Agency, Activism, and the Black Domestic Worker in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Delores Phillips’ The Darkest Child.” Trudier Harris’s chapter “Image Shatterer: Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child” in Mothers Who Kill (2021) explores representations of motherhood in the novel. I wrote an article for the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on representations of deafness in the novel, entitled “‘Where’s the Dummy?’: Deafness, Race, and Labor in Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child.”

38. Phillips, The Darkest Child, pp. 7, 50.

39. Phillips, pp. 112, 189.

40. Writer in Residence Lecture. I recognize that Phillips’s language choice in this instance is troubling, but I have chosen to retain this reference to maintain the integrity of her voice.

41. Writer in Residence Lecture.

42. Mcdonald, Donna M. “Not Silent, Invisible: Literature’s Chance Encounters with Deaf Heroes and Heroines.” American Annals of the Deaf, vol. 154, no. 5, 2010, p. 465. She mentions Singer in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Wemmick in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

43. Steverson, Delia. “‘Where’s the Dummy?’: Deafness, Race, and Labor in Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2021, pp. 187–202.

44. Jones, Introduction.

45. Phillips, Delores. “Albany Trip.” Delores Phillips Digital Archive.