Elbow Room

ELBOW ROOM

by James Alan McPherson

 

Award: Pulitzer Winner 1978

 

Nomination: National Book Finalist 1978

 

Date Read: November 25, 2025

 

 

Why I Like Country Music

The unnamed narrator of this story enjoys country music because it is nostalgic from his primary school upbringing in South Carolina. Although he is often side-eyed by his wife for his taste in music, the narrator cannot help but focus on a spring event in his youth that called for square dancing. In the 4^th grade, our narrator was put on the team for square dancing for the spring showcase. He was so mortified to dance in front of his peers that he had his dad wright a note saying he needed to be on the maypole team. While watching the square dancers practicing, he realized how much fun it seemed and that he missed out on an opportunity to dance with his crush, Gwenneth Lawson. On the day of the event, her partner was unable to dance because of spurs on his boots so our hero steps in and was able to dance with her after all.

 

The Story Of A Dead Man

Billy Renfro was a repo man and got shot more than his share in the execution of his duties. Many rumors have floated around about Billy but our narrator, who is Billy’s cousin, wants to set the record straight. Beyond all of Billy’s shenanigans, he ultimately becomes the father to a child he doesn’t believe is his and assumes responsibility for the kid and takes his mom as his common-law wife. During a dice game, he stabs someone who questioned the honor of Billy’s wife and is sent to a prison where he is put on a road gang. He is eventually paroled and that is when he becomes the repo man, a job most white men would never take. After several years, the narrator and Billy meet up in a bar where he’s in rough shape – missing an eye, scroungy and gray. Billy begins a long tale about he lost the eye: ultimately due to a woman. In one of his repo skirmishes, Billy ends up killing a man and Billy spends the rest of his days looking for his own death.

 

The Silver Bullet

Willis Davis decides that he wants to join the Henry Street guys, and Dewey Bivins tells him that in order to show the lengths he is willing to go to join, he must rob Slick's Bar and Grill. In reality, the robbery is less about Willis's loyalty and more about the Henry Street guys being low on funds. Willis decides that midday is the best time to rob the bar, as it will have the least witnesses. He waits for the cook Bertha Roy to leave the kitchen, then enters the bar and approaches Jones, the bartender. Willis makes conversation for a minute, then puts his hand in his pocket and tells Jones to give him the money in the cash register. Jones tells Willis he has a silver bullet under the counter, and Willis leaves without the money. Dewey tells Willis that he has no excuse for not getting the money. By his friend Curtis's suggestion, Willis seeks out help from W. Smith Enterprises and a man named R.V. Felton. R.V. tells Willis that his group is concerned with the betterment of the community. He says he will help Willis, and that Willis will get 12% of the earnings from the robbery. The next afternoon, R.V. arrives at Slick's with Willis. He tells Jones that Jones will give him money for the community on Friday, though Jones pulls a shotgun from under the counter. Willis tells Dewey and the boys about R.V., and Dewey becomes enraged with Willis for involving others in their affairs on their territory. On Friday, R.V. shows up to the bar with a man named Aubrey and tells Willis he only gets six percent. When they enter, Jones is holding the shotgun. R.V. tries to demand the money from Jones when Dewey and Chimney enter. All the men begin to argue while Jones continues to hold the shotgun. The arguing stops when a man comes into the bar to tell Jones that a cop is outside writing a parking ticket. All the men leave, but Jones demands that Willis stay. Jones laughs at Willis, and the young man runs away, past Bertha Roy, who yells at him that his "momma oughtta give [him] a good whippin'."

 

The Faithful

A preacher who moonlights as a barber is quickly becoming out of step with the times. He’s losing customers in his barber shop and congregants in his church. He doesn’t understand young people’s desire for long hair and afros and his preaching is rote and angry. He loses one of his barbers to another, more modern shop. Even his wife laments how rigid he has become and unwilling to change.

 

Problems Of Art

Mrs. Mary Farragot has been arrested for driving under the influence, while she swears she’s a teetotaler. She has been assigned a white lawyer, per her request, who is trying to make out what exactly happened that night. Attorney Milford has the challenge of trying to understand his client, as well as her witness, who tells a chaotic tale, highlighted by the gap between how people see themselves and how others see them. There is a brief interlude where Attorney Milford is fixated on a picture of Jesus in Ms. Mary’s apartment. After the hearing, where Ms. Mary stands to lose her driver’s license, they learn that she wasn’t offered a test at the station to determine her blood alcohol level. When she leaves to use the restroom, her witness, Clarence, admits to Attorney Milford that Ms. Mary hits the bottle every night.

 

The Story Of A Scar

A man in a doctor’s waiting room becomes fixated on a woman’s facial scar, who is also waiting for the doctor. She begins a tale about her past life working at post office where two men fancied her attention: ambitious Billy and playboy Teddy. Ambitious Billy is the one who sliced down her face and she hopes the doctor who they are waiting for can help with her scar.

 

I Am An American

The narrator here is a black man on vacation in England with his wife, Eunice. While staying at a run-down hotel with shared amenities, he sees a man enter the room next to theirs and knows it’s not the Japanese students who occupy the room. Both the narrator and Eunice get sucked into the drama of a robbery, deterring them from seeing London like they had planned. The Japanese students are thankful the narrator came forward, while the police are skeptical about the circumstances.

 

Widows & Orphans

Louis Clayton receives a civic award at a banquet in Los Angeles and stops by his former student’s awards banquet. He reflects on his failed romance with Clair and Clair’s mother professes how proud she is of her daughter, while lamenting how she treats her.

 

A Loaf Of Bread

A grocer gets caught by the community charging his black customers in a black neighborhood more than the white customers in a white community. The grocer argues that his overhead is higher in the black community (e.g. security, insurance, theft, etc.) that justifies the higher prices. His wife is having none of it when she finds out and offers him an ultimatum: spend one day giving everything in his store away for free or she will take the kids and leave him. The grocer adamantly refuses but ultimately capitulates to his wife’s demands. I believe that by the end of the story, those protesting and boycotting his store realize the service the grocer offers to their community.

 

Just Enough For The City

A variety of evangelists work the neighborhood. The Germans pretend to be humble, choosing their words carefully. The Redeemer's Friends look sheepish, but are self-righteous and smug. As the narrator likes to read magazines he will not buy, he endures the newsstand boy's talk about the Master, an elderly East Indian and accepts his broadsides, and because he enjoys watching how a beautiful, peaceful Muslim girl's body moves inside her long dress, he buys Danishes and endures hearing how, as a descendant of Mohammed's beloved muezzin, Bilalia, he must submit. The Germans' young leader also talks about his particular prophet and promises the usual remedies, but fails to get the narrator's point about how most groups find their greatest success among blacks. The Redeemer's Friends are more direct. Anything not in the Bible...

 

A Sense Of Story

After four days of sitting silently at his murder trial, Robert L. Charles interrupts his attorney'x summation to tell the jury calmly he killed the sonofabitch and is only sorry the gun broke before he could get six slugs into him. Having ensured his doom and ended the trial, Charles sits down and the judge, a thoughtful, painstaking man, retreats to his book-lined office to read rapidly through the transcripts and decide whether evidence tip the scales against Charles, rendering the outburst moot. The facts present an open-and-shut case. Charles shoots his employer of 13 years, Frank Johnson. After hearing the shots, mechanic Jed Jones finds Charles bending over Johnson with a smoking gun in his left hand and stuffing bullets into Johnson's mouth with his right. Charles waits to be arrested and does not resist officers.

 

Elbow Room

An editor feels obliged to impose order on a piece by a shrill author who is an open enemy of conventional narrative categories, holds unevenness a virtue, and flaunts traditional modes. The editor points out flaws in discipline in comments on the draft of a story that begins with Paul Frost leaving Kansas for school in Chicago and remaining there to work in a mental hospital as an alternative to being drafted. Paul attends Quaker meetings, reads history, philosophy, and moral philosophy, and realizes many inmates are sane. Emerging rarely from his room, and not dating, Paul is taken for an idiot. After months of silence, Paul asks a patient why he is here and is unsettled when the patient turns the question back at him. Paul begins talking with total strangers.