The next story in this collection is A Friend and Protector and while Taylor’s skill still shines in the area of character development and subtlety, this particular story didn’t wow me quite to the state that a couple of the other stories have.
Taylor likes to show the relationship between blacks and whites of the south at a time between the abhorrence of slavery and the true rights and freedom that was not achieved for the century following the civil war. While many whites may still have harbored prejudice, many others tried to offer some sense of justice though by an overcompensation in ways that only made the difference more prominent. There is an ignorance that pervades even those who appear to be free of bias, and perhaps it is this that makes the characters more real.
Another story called A Walled Garden is an example of one of Taylor’s other favored themes, that being the relationship between parent and child. There is an oddness about the way the first person narrator, a mother, describes her daughter to a young man. Just in the manner of its telling, the reader tends to take a closer look at the narrator rather than the character she is speaking of. There is a glossing over, a sense that the teller of the story knows something is wrong and is making excuses for her (or his) own actions in explaining the outcome.
Maybe these two don’t quite measure up to the some of the other short stories here, but they are still well done. Taylor’s use of language is elaborate, not depending upon imagery or drama as much as detail and full accounting of events in which his characters move. Since he often uses the first person narrator to tell the story, we realize that the perception will be skewed and this is where Taylor is brilliant; in showing us the character of the narrator as she or he tells the story.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology