Recovering a Literary Legacy: The Life of Delores Phillips

Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, "Man, I should've died." But Shalana rebuffed, "No, there's a reason why you didn't die. You still have more life to live."1 Less than two years later, in 2004, Shalana's prophetic utterances appeared to be fulfilled when Phillips published The Darkest Child, the only novel she would publish in her lifetime. The story takes place in the fictional town of Pakersfield, Georgia, in 1958, and follows Rozelle Quinn—a resourceful yet cruel and manipulative mother—and her ten children as they attempt to reconcile generational trauma and escape racism and poverty in the Jim Crow south. The narrative is told through the lens of Tangy Mae, the titular "darkest" of all Rozelle's children, who believes that her education is the quickest pathway for fleeing her abusive household. The novel won the Black Caucus American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award that same year. With the reception of The Darkest Child, Phillips appeared to have a promising literary future. But after a short and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, Delores passed away in relative obscurity at the age of 63 in 2014. I was introduced to The Darkest Child in 2017 by a friend and colleague who knew I was researching representations of disability in African American literature. She suggested that the novel—with its attention to a variety of human experiences, including deafness (one of Rozelle's children is deaf and creates her own form of sign language) and madness (there is debate if Rozelle is "mad" or just downright evil)—might be a rich text to enhance my scholarly pursuits. When I read the novel, I found it incredibly poignant, funny, hopeful, and tragic, all at the same time, and I was driven to find out more about this mysterious author. Much to my dismay, other than a short biography [End Page 45] in the back of the book, a bare Wikipedia page, and Phillips's obituary, there seemed to be no substantial information about this formidable artist. Thus armed with Phillips's obituary, I reached out to Shalana on Facebook—and surprisingly, she messaged me back. After a few months of communication, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, where Shalana and Phillips's sister Linda Miller reside, to discover more about this amazing writer whom I never had the opportunity to meet. Opening their homes and their lives to me through several interviews—over Linda's homemade desserts and Shalana's tuna sandwiches—they shared honest and transparent details about their sister/mother. Over the years, we would sift through boxes of what we would determine were pages of Phillips's unpublished writings, which had been tucked away in Linda's attic for years. As we began to assemble what would become Phillips's archives, including her computer hard drive, magazine clippings, several hundred pages of typescript documents, journal entries, transcripts, and medical documents, I learned that Delores was unequivocally no one-hit wonder. Instead, her literary career spanned her entire lifetime, as she wrote over a dozen poems, a collection of short stories titled The Renwood Circle Stories, and at the time of her death, two additional, albeit unfinished, novels: a sequel to The Darkest Child called Stumbling Blocks, and a standalone novel entitled No Ordinary Rain.2 This investigative journey would not only become a crucial step in recovering her literary legacy, but would also reveal the intricate ways that her experience with chronic illness, medical racism, and personal tragedy underscored the harmony and tensions between her fiction, public persona, and interior self. Delores Faye Phillips was born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950. The second of four children of Lennie Miller, a brick layer, and Annie Ruth Banks, a domestic laborer, Phillips and her family lived in several of the rural town's segregated spaces. Delores began writing poetry during her childhood, inspired by Annie Ruth...