In 1913, Leo Frank, superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia, was found guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old factory worker. Less than two years later, after Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was kidnapped from his cell and lynched. On these facts, Maggie Nye has built her debut novel, The Curators, which centers on Ana Wulff and four friends in a city buzzing with social change. The teenagers—they call themselves “the Felicitous Five”—develop a fascination with Frank, who is Jewish like them, and of a respectable class like them. The girls wear his photograph “in the strap of our chemises, facing in.” They collect newspaper articles about the police investigation and his trial, they mourn his death, and like much of Atlanta, they view his body before it is buried. They even acquire a portion of the rope supposedly used in his lynching, for their planned Leo Frank Museum, despite the rope peddler’s anti-Semitic slurs against their hero.
After Frank is lynched, the girls try to understand why a mob became Frank’s last judge and executioner. Frustrated by “adult lies and their attempts to keep us in the dark,” the girls seek out clues elsewhere, reciting half-remembered prayers; visiting an alleged witch in Darktown, one of Atlanta’s segregated Black neighborhoods; and comparing folktales, specifically those about the golem. Each girl has heard a different version of the golem tale from her mother. In some, he avenges the innocent. In others, he swallows his makers whole. Concluding that “to make a golem is to bring yourself closer to God, or something like that,” the girls set out to make their own from the dirt in Ana’s yard.
The Curators is rich in detail, heavy on primary sources, and fluent in the minutest subtleties of manners and class in early-twentieth-century Atlanta, but it is the golem that breathes life into this story. As the golem transforms from a lump of earth to a feeling, speaking, and eating man, the language becomes brighter and more poetic, as if Nye gave herself permission to shrug off the tangled mess of facts and explore the possibilities magic brings.
Nye’s writing about the golem is some of the most vibrant of the novel. She describes the “sticky-sounding thud” of his limbs, his “mud-colored voice,” and his “fingerless hands” casting shadows when Ana leads him in a dreamy scene of shadow-puppet play in her darkened living room. When Ana tends the creature in her attic, apart from the other girls:
… he murmured O O O, soothing himself, a primitive lullaby as he rocked himself with difficulty. His blockish feet prevented the movement granted naturally by the flexibility of an arch. Having no true heel on which to catch himself, he rocked too far back and tripped on a fallen hat form. In the shock of unbalance, his petals flared open and he saw Ana and the flame of her lamp. Trapped between two nightmares, he sank to the closet floor, then shut his petal eyes tight, hiding like a child in his own blindness.
Awakened and learning, the golem is an impulsive child, a girlhood crush, and an avenger with beyond-the-grave knowledge, all in one. His actions parallel the golem of the old stories when he becomes a hero and an instigator of events that threaten unsuspecting humans. In the final scenes, Nye skillfully connects ignorance about the golem to the novel’s other major throughline, the dehumanization of Atlanta’s Black community. While epigraphs from contemporaneous newspaper clippings and the girls’ thoughtless judgments of Black people remind us of this fact, the golem reveals the depraved lengths the novel’s white characters will go to in punishing their neighbors.
In a Note at the conclusion of The Curators, Nye observes that Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986, and Nye’s meticulous attention to detail and sensitivity to the bigotry he endured provides both Frank and Mary Phagan with a dignity they did not receive in their own time. The shockingly racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic primary sources featured throughout the novel go a long way toward explaining how Frank ended up dead by a lynch mob, and why teenage girls, nearly the same age as Phagan, would be so desperate for clarity. This is an impressive feat for any novel, but the addition of magic in the form of the golem lifts The Curators out of the archives and into the world, delivering a three-dimensional rendering of a time and place that quoted sources simply can’t. The golem is muddy, messy, and unpredictable, much like history itself.
Publisher: Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books
You might also like
