Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver is populated with the people of the Jim Crow South after World War II. In Oliver’s stories, the reader tastes the wild peaches of Georgia and sits with a mother in a segregated waiting room, where she hopes that a doctor will see her sick child. Stories also feature a college-bound girl who knows that she will lose her scholarship if she is arrested for participating in a sit-in at a local restaurant. In the title story, Neighbors, a Black family ponders the cost to their young son, who will be walking alone into a white elementary school. A Black college student goes to Switzerland on a cultural exchange with two white friends, so that she can spend a summer away from protesting. She is a first in that Swiss community.
This beautifully realized collection of short stories has tales of young Black people being the first, multiple times, as Oliver herself was. She helped integrate a Charlotte high school and a college in North Carolina. A few days before graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1966, 22-year-old Oliver was killed in a motorcycle accident in Iowa City. Four of these stories were published before her death.
Maureen Millea Smith is a retired librarian and a Minnesota Book Award winning novelist.
