‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’ is a twisted fairy tale, a parable that resists a clear object lesson. Cousin Lymon falls deeply in love with him. Marvin Macy returns after a stint in the penitentiary. Soon, she opens a café, and it’s a happy place–but not for long. Miss Amelia falls for his story and then, to the shock of the nosy townsfolk, falls in love with him. A trickster comes to town, an odd hunchbacked dwarf who claims to be long-lost Cousin Lymon. Miss Amelia’s a shrewd one, part medicine lady, part bootlegger, possessing secret knowledge of potions and the like-a witchy woman. Preferring a sexless life, she kicks her lusty husband Marvin Macy out of her shabby mansion, sending him on a crime spree. In either case, we’re back at the freak show.
We have an outsider coming to town, disrupting the order of things.
In many ways, Carson McCullers’ ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’ reads as a revision of Faulkner’s most-anthologized tale, ‘A Rose for Emily.’ We have a brooding protagonist, a one-time scion alienated from her community. Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1917.
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