Other Voices, Other Rooms

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Truman Capote’s first novel begins with the arrival of young Joel Knox in the fictional Mississippi town of Noon City. Having been summoned from New Orleans by his long-lost father from New Orleans, where he’d been living with his aunt, Joel’s time in Noon City is merely a stopover as he makes his way to the even more utterly rural Skully’s Landing. Even after Joel arrives at the decaying plantation— home to fluttering, verbose Randolph; determined, lively Zoo (as well as her elderly father, Jesus Fever); and nervous, demeaning Amy in addition to Joel’s father— a sense of journey and restlessness troubles the novel as the entire cast of characters reckon and contend with their individual and shared realities and histories. Other Voices, Other Rooms is a wily, charming, feverish, tenderly desperate investigation of leave-taking and journey: can one really leave a place, an identity, a past? What are the caveats and limits in attempting to set out for some other future; the trick mirrors, the ghosts?

Even as it explores the idea of journey, Capote’s first novel is itself firmly encompassed within a tiny slice of the rural South. The sentences thrive and flourish with the pulse of heat and growing things: “...here, in the overgrown confusion, were some plants taller than his head, and others razor-sharp with thorns; brittle sun-curled leaves crackled under his cautious step...The sultry smells of summer and sweet shrub and dark earth were heavy, and the itchy whirr of bumblebees stung the silence” (64). Capote is skillful and relentless in pulling the suffocating, transcendent, powerful fecundity of the Southern landscape through the book, employing his rhythmic, obvious delight in language to make clear that here, in places such as Skully’s Landing, there is no escaping the environment. Even though Zoo, a Black employee of the Skully family, fantasizes about snow—and eventually leaves for the North in its pursuit—she is back in the overwhelming heat and growth of the South before the novel’s end.

More oppressive and inescapable than humidity is the U.S./South’s history of slavery, violence, and dispossession. Set in the decrepit plantation owned by a decadent and eccentric white family familiar to the Southern Gothic genre, Other Voices does not stop at the mansion’s crumbling door step. Capote goes farther than some other genre novelists—his Black characters are rendered human in a way I’ve rarely read a white Southern novelist manage. They are visited with and considered friends; they have ambitions and terrible pains and moments of rapturous loves. Most importantly, they are portrayed as having lives rich with meaning beyond the white gaze: at one point, Joel stumbles upon two Black lovers in the woods, is stunned with awe at the profundity of their love-making, and does not disturb them.

Moments such as these filled me with hope for the novel and the possibilities it imagined for how a white Southern man could be, but also can’t be looked at in a vacuum. For one, even as Capote managed to write fully human Black characters, his entire novel is studded with references to indigenous/American Indians that make clear the limits of Capote’s imagination. American Indians are objects of myth and metaphor, symbols of the far-distant path, or commodities: “Whooping like a wildwest Indian, the redhead whipped down the road” (20); “In the woods they walked the tireless singing of larks had sounded a century, and more...stars had fallen here, and Indian arrows too..." (127); “A fat horsefly dived toward the Red Chief tablet where Joel’s scrawl wobbled loosely over the paper” (91). And, perhaps unsurprisingly given these quotations, Joel’s—and the novel’s—ultimate allegiance is not pledged to the non-white, non-male oppressed.

The novel’s fascination with the queer is abundant and wide-ranging, as non-normative genders, sexualities, and bodies are explored through the tomboy Idabel and her femme twin Florabel; through Randolph and the tale of his coming out to himself and the mysterious woman Joel spots in what he later comes to know is Randolph’s window; through the hermit Little Sunshine, the traveling show performer Miss Wisteria; through Joel himself. For most of the novel, Joel’s longings for love and affection are directed at the people he finds the strongest and most admirable: the genuine, generous, and vivacious Zoo, a Black woman, and the headstrong and fearless Idabel, a white tomboy. He trucks around with Zoo and Idabel more than others, craves their approval, and feels deep emotion towards the stories of their pains and desires. But it is, apparently, too good or too difficult to last. The final journey Joel makes in Other Voices, Other Rooms is a months-long passage through a terrible fever, with Randolph as his attentive attendant. And while he makes it through to the other side, he is not unchanged. Listening to the dreadful story of what happened to Zoo when she left Skully’s Landing for the North, Joel plugs his ears. Idabel does not appear in the book again. All of the diverse, rampant, overflowingly complex history and queerness that the novel takes within the sweep of its journey narrows, at last, down to Randolph’s window.