The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver

Long before Jordan Peele’s breakout movies “Get Out” and “Us,” a young writer in the 1960s named Diane Oliver wrote six short stories about the horrors of racism in Black communities in suburban America. But it wasn’t until last October that cultural critic and essayist Michael A. Gonzales discovered her writing.

Story by Michael A. Gonzales | Illustrations by Sam Watson

Guided by spirits, one overcast morning in October I picked up a copy of Right On! from the unread section of my bookshelf. A Black writing collection edited by Bradford Chambers and Rebecca Moon in 1970, it was a recent gift from a friend who knew well my weakness for African-American fiction anthologies, especially short stories. Right On! featured the usual suspects of respected scribes including Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, and Margaret Walker. But after opening the book to a random page, I stumbled onto Diane Oliver, a writer I’d never read or heard of, and her heartbreaking story “Neighbors.” 

I sat down to read Oliver’s story, originally published in 1966, and was blown away by the narrative power she demonstrated; later, I learned that she was still in her early 20s when the story was published, but her voice was already mature. In a short career that consisted of six published stories, Oliver wrote about race and the horrors of racism perpetrated on families in 1950s and 1960s America. Of course, Black folks have known the terror of racism since the days of being dragged to this country in chains, and long before Jordan Peele's freaky films “Get Out” and “Us.”

“Neighbors” is a beautifully crafted tale of a Black household dealing with the stress of the baby of the family, Tommy Mitchell, integrating the all-white grade school. It’s a story straight out of PBS’ “Eyes on the Prize” documentary, with the family torn between fighting for their rights or keeping young Tommy safe from the raging mobs ready to spit on, kick, or kill the kid. 

Oliver’s naturalistic prose feels as creepy as Shirley Jackson’s in her infamous tale of a small town and its annual rite in “The Lottery.” While Jackson’s story was fiction — yet still upset many readers — the Jim Crow racism depicted in Oliver’s stories was real. Her style is packed with complex ideas told simply, but never as simply as “protest fiction.” As a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1965, her writing goals were literary, not preachy agitprop. The people she wrote about dealt with hundreds of years of real-life traumas that included slavery, lynchings, beatings, harassment, and constant uncertainty.

First published in 1966 in The Sewanee Review, a literary magazine that still exists today, “Neighbors” is told from the point of view of Tommy’s older sister Ellie, who works as a maid on the other side of town, and set on the day before Tommy is to integrate the school. The tension and stress Ellie feels as she begins her bus ride home fuels the story. “Looking at the passengers at least kept her from thinking of tomorrow,” Oliver wrote. 

“Neighbors” is intense without being melodramatic. “Her writing style was simple, but with her prose, she gave us a window to observe this family and their complex life,” said Jake-Ann Jones, co-author of Sometimes Farmgirls Become Revolutionaries, the story of late Civil Rights activist Florence L. Tate. “Fear and horror [are] prominent, but so is the loving family that will get through yet another indignity. Everything about ‘Neighbors’ feels real. This isn’t Civil Rights as movie theatrics; these are real people acting in a real way.”

While the story is artfully told, there is a sense of social realism that is as straightforward as an essay on the regular folks behind the movement. Closing the book, I was mystified as to why Diane Oliver isn’t better known. Without a doubt, if the brilliant “Neighbors” is any indication, her literary voice should’ve been as inspiring to aspiring writers as Zora Neale Hurston’s or James Baldwin’s.

A decade before the powerful “Neighbors” was published, Oliver was growing up in the Jim Crow South when Brown v. Board of Education passed in 1954. Her father, William Robert Oliver, was a teacher and school administrator in his native Charlotte, North Carolina, while her mother, Blanche Rann Oliver, taught music in their beautiful home on Washington Avenue, a tree-lined suburban street. Though Oliver was only 10 when the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution, her parents’ roles as educators would have informed her views, and she may have based “Neighbors” on any number of people in her hometown.

Her path to becoming a writer began in her local library. “As a child, Oliver read voraciously, encouraged by her grandmother,” according to eNotes.com. “By the time she was in junior high school and had read all the volumes in the segregated branch library, she decided to become a writer so that there would always be something for children like herself to read.” A few years later, her favorite writers included James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, and James Agee. 

Looking at pictures of Oliver’s old house, I can imagine her in the back bedroom, sitting at a desk and discovering new worlds and people in the pages of her books. Glancing out the window, she might’ve thought about Hemingway’s fabulous Paris or Baldwin’s wild Harlem streets, and believed that she too would one day walk those boulevards.

Later, she was a student at West Charlotte High School, graduating in 1960, and was accepted at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina — now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Oliver excelled at the recently integrated school, where she soon became managing editor of the school paper, The Carolinian. 

She graduated in 1964 and won entry into the Mademoiselle Guest Editor program on the basis of her essay “The Corner,” about a Civil Rights battle to integrate shops near her school. The women’s magazine held that annual contest from 1939 to 1980, and participants included Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, who included the experience in The Bell Jar. Oliver published her first short story, “Key to the City,” a year later in the literary magazine Red Clay Reader II (1965), alongside Henry Roth and Clarence Major. Her story detailed the excitement and tribulations of a Southern family making its way to Chicago. 

The Red Clay Reader was launched by poet/professor Charleen Swansea as an outlet for writers and artists “rooted in Southern soil,” as Our State magazine described it in 2014. Like Oliver, Swansea was a North Carolina native from Charlotte, and she founded the journal soon after being fired from Queens College for being “too courageously creative,” as she put it. I don’t know how Oliver connected with Swansea, who was a decade older, but the publication of “Key to the City” must have helped the emerging writer when she applied to the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Her former teacher Peter Taylor, who The New York Times once described as “... the past century’s best American practitioner of the short story,” wrote a letter of recommendation. “He very much wished [Oliver] to go to Iowa so that ‘she not become preoccupied with the topical quarrels that completely dominate circles she might move in elsewhere,’” Taylor’s biographer, Hubert H. McAlexander, wrote. According to McAlexander, that meant the Civil Rights marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations, but, as we can read in her stories, she’d already been swayed.

A few Black women writers (Kristin Hunter, Lorraine Hansberry, J. J. Phillips, Rosa Guy) were making strides in the mid-’60s. But Oliver’s participation in the Iowa workshop, and the later publication of “Neighbors” in Prize Stories, 1967: The O. Henry Awards, was a rarity. During that period, the only other Black student writer at the workshop was John Edgar Wideman, who’d go on to impressive literary success. 

“There weren’t a lot of Black people or women at Iowa during that era,” Suzanne McConnell, a respected short story writer, recalled in a recent phone interview. Though the two weren’t close friends, they hung in the same circle of budding writers and academics. “Diane was a pretty and mannerable young woman who dressed immaculately,” said McConnell, who co-authored Pity the Reader: On Writing With Style with Kurt Vonnegut. “She was very thoughtful, not wild at all.

“Her story ‘Neighbors’ struck me,” McConnell continued. “I was part of the movement and had marched on Selma [in 1965], but I’d never thought about integration from the point of view of a family trying to protect their child. It made me pause and think.” 

While Oliver got along well with her fellow students, McConnell noticed, “Diane always seemed so cautious and careful, but I suppose, considering what she was surrounded by, she had to be that way.” It must’ve been very difficult to be the only Black person (or one of a few) in the elite literary circle of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, feeling as though you’re being constantly examined, talked about, or thought of negatively. 

Oliver touched on those feelings of “being the Experiment” and attempting to fit in with the white students in her story “The Closet on the Top Floor.” Published alongside work by Ernest J. Gaines, Andre Dubus, and Jesse Hill Ford in Southern Writing in the Sixties: Fiction (1966) and edited by John William Corrington and Miller Williams, the story opens with the first day of college for protagonist Winifred, the first Black student at her school. 

Though her oblivious parents don’t notice “those white faces pressed against the windowpanes,” Winifred walks on eggshells. She often hears girls talking about her (“You know colored people aren’t like us”) and witnesses them snooping through her things. 

Instead of questioning their motives, Winifred retreats from reality, figuratively and literally, in the same way Wright’s or Ellison’s characters disappear from society. “The Closet on the Top Floor” is surreal in a Kafkaesque way, but connected to the more naturalistic “Neighbors” by the issue of integration.

The year before “Neighbors” appeared, Oliver began a professional relationship with Negro Digest, a pioneering literary/political magazine owned by the publishers of Ebony and Jet, Johnson Publishing Company. The Digest featured “Health Service” (November 1965) and “Traffic Jam” (July 1966), stories about Libby Fredrick, a prideful but sorrowful Southern woman with too many children, an absent husband, and not enough money. 

“Health Service” is a stinging commentary on the inhumane treatment the medical community has inflicted on poor Black folks for decades. “Sometimes I wonder why more of us ain’t dead,” a patient in the waiting room with Libby says. “I could have had an appendix going loose inside me and it wouldn’t made no difference to them.”

In “Traffic Jam,” Libby returns in a bittersweet tale that shows her working as a maid for the annoying Mrs. Nelson, a white woman who doesn’t pay enough but loves asking intimate questions as though she has a right to the answers. 

“The poverty was so heavy in those stories, it felt like another character,” author Jake-Ann Jones said. “It was so painful, I could feel it in my bones.”

Still, there was a sense of community in most of Oliver’s short stories. We see it in the beginning of “Health Service” when Libby stops at the Esso station with her brood to take a break and is comforted by an old grade-school boyfriend, Matt, who is also her estranged husband’s former best friend. “If you need anything right now, you let me know … ” Matt says before he buys the kids Cokes. 

On May 21, 1966, a month before graduating with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and two months before her 23rd birthday, Oliver was killed in a motorcycle accident. She was on the back of another student’s bike when they rolled out of an alley and were hit by a Volkswagen. The other student escaped serious injury; Oliver died a few minutes after arriving at the hospital.

“It was a horrifying loss,” said Suzanne McConnell, who wrote about the “beautiful, circumspect … talented fiction writer” in a poignant essay published in the workshop’s 50th-anniversary commemorative booklet, “Seems Like Old Times, 1986.” The essay, titled “Black’s Gaslight Village,” was named after a student housing complex. 

Both Jet and Negro Digest published obituaries. Jet said the young writer had accepted an editorial position to begin upon graduation. Negro Digest called Oliver’s death “a premature climax to a short, but notable career in which it was our pleasure to publish some of the budding writer’s work. … Along with her writing, Miss Oliver was involved in many campus activities including Civil Rights and Vietnam protest demonstrations. Her last summer was spent as a teacher’s aide in Operation Head Start. … We were saddened by her death, but we choose to remember the warmth of her smile.” 

In March 1967, Negro Digest published Oliver’s last short story, “Mint Juleps Not Served Here,” a disturbing, gothic narrative about a Black couple living deep in the forest with their son Rabbit, who cannot speak. They dwell in a private paradise until white folks come snooping around, “looking with icy eyes, freezing everything, trying to make everybody in the world like them.” 

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop awarded Oliver’s degree posthumously. And “Neighbors” was reprinted in Prize Stories, 1967: The O. Henry Awards after Oliver’s death. 

In pop culture, there’s sometimes a weird romanticism attached to dying young. But the truth is, no death goes unmourned. The loss of Diane Oliver saddened so many — her parents, friends and, years later, strangers who discover her work by chance in a well-worn paperback. 

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