Seaside Stories
by S.R. Martin Jr.
Blue Nile Press

Seaside Stories is a collection of short stories. They are centered around a small Black community in Seaside California, and particularly the family of a strong, charismatic, Pentecostal preacher. The era is the 1950s. The themes include conflicts over race, gender, morals, and the changing of the guard. The characters are richly realized, graced with colloquialisms of the time and place. The collection is rich in humor, insights, and a deep sense of the people and the places along the California coast in the middle of the last century. For many it will be a homecoming to a home they’ve never seen.

Excerpt from
“A Good Provider”
Seaside Stories

After twenty-two years, Sarah was still in love with Booker Hankerson. She thought his powerful, six-foot-four-inch body handsome, his bearing dignified. She liked riding beside him in the car, shopping next to him in the grocery story, lying entwined with him in bed. All her married life she had resented her parents’ attitude towards her man.

“A big, rusty, black field hand,” they’d called him. Hadn’t wanted him to have their dainty, fair-skinned girl. But he had become a man of substance, and now pastored the largest black congregation on the Monterey Peninsula.

Despite how generous the members were to them, Booker and Sarah struggled to be financially independent of the church. He fixed up and sold old houses and cars to make extra money, and she guarded their meager reserves carefully, adding to them from house money whenever she could. At last, they saved enough to leave the parsonage and build their own house on a hill in a growing neighborhood quite a distance from the church. Their comfortable home had an air of stability about it, was a symbol of their hard, honest effort. Unfortunately, she thought, her confidence in Booker and their success just added to his stubbornness, a source of some of their marital problems.

They shared most decisions, but the Hankersons nearly always disagreed about money. However broke they were, Booker never wanted Sarah to work outside their home. As their boys grew, she wanted to do day work for a little extra change like some of the other young women in his growing membership were doing. When Booker spotted her list of potential employers, he pitched a fit that lasted for a week.

"You can't go," he finally proclaimed. "My wife don't do no day work for white folks. She cleans up her own house.” Case closed.

She understood his race pride and his determination to supply his family’s needs, but even so, she felt more dominated than comforted. True, she sometimes playfully called him her "lord and master," but everyone knew that was a joke. She gave in on the day work issue because the possibility of her hiring out seemed to hurt him so, to make him feel so small, and he was, after all, a good provider.