Description
"In the Land of Ooh Blah Dee" is a collection of interrelated short stories that revolve around the coming of age of Nadine Hayden, youngest of Cooper and Veda Hayden's two daughters. The short stories follow the upwardly mobile Hayden family from the tidewater of Beaumont, Texas to Nashville, Tennessee and finally to the fictional town of Talos, Mississippi. Most of the stories are told in third-person omniscient; however, Nadine acts as the central consciousness of the text. In many ways, Coop and Veda are representative of the contradictions inherent in upwardly mobile post WWII black families of the fifties, particularly families in the South. On the one hand, having come of age during the forties, their attitudes toward religion, parenting, sex, and gender roles are conservative. On the other hand, having graduated from college around the same time as the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down, they are not willing to put up with some of the social and political inequities their parents did. Much of the action of the text takes place within the decade of the sixties, an era of social and poliitical turbulence and, significantly, the decade where youth gained its independence. However, despite social and economic advances for African Americans, the psychological and spiritual toll of social and political radicalism was heavy. These socio-historical reverberations are reflected in the manners and morals of the text, as Nadine responds to the chaos both within and outside of her household.
