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Tracie Church Guzzio
Grooms, Anthony (1955– )
Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on January 15,
1955, Grooms received a bachelor’s degree from
the College of William and Mary in 1978 and an
M.F.A. from George Mason in 1984. He has taught
at various universities in Georgia, including the
University of Georgia, Clark Atlanta University,
Emory University, and Morehouse College. He
has also taught at the University of Cape Coast in
Ghana, West Africa, and has been on the faculty at
Kennesaw State University since 1994.
While a theater major at William and Mary,
Grooms had two of his plays, “Accidents” and
“Dr. Madlove,” produced. His stories and poems
have been published in such journals as CALLALOO,
AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW, Crab Orchard Review,
and George Washington Review. Although he has
published a collection of poems, Ice Poems (1988),
Grooms found his most eloquent voice in his fic-
tion, particularly on the subject of the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT. Grooms has given this context to his
subject matter in a public interview:
I consider myself privileged to have come of
age at the time of great social change in this
country. I feel that in many ways my expe-
riences straddle social and historical lines.
Whereas I have vague memories of “Col-
ored Only” signs, and of riding in the back
of buses, my more vivid memories are of
being “first” or “only” or “one of a few” as the
various social barriers fell. In retrospect, it isthese latter memories that give me the sense
of privilege and have contributed to the tex-
ture of Trouble No More. The events of the
stories come from various origins—family,
hearsay, and history.Taking his title from a song by BLUES legend
Muddy Waters, Grooms does his best work in
“Negro Progress,” a story in which a young man is
caught in downtown Birmingham on the day that
Bull Connor has ordered city fire fighters to bring
out the hoses to attack civil rights marchers. Using
the facts of history and the names of historical fig-
ures (MARTIN LUTHER KING, Walter Cronkite, and
Bull Connor) and Birmingham neighborhoods
(Mountain Brook and Titusville), Grooms blends
in fictional characters who could have been caught
in the fray. The story begins: “The water hunted
the boy. It chipped bark from the oaks as he darted
behind the trees. It caught him in the back. His
lanky legs buckled. Then, as if the fireman who
directed the hose were playing a game, the boy’s
legs were cut from under him, and he was rolled
over and over in the mud” (26). Grooms captures
in words the power of the disturbing photographs
of the day.
In his first novel, Bombingham (2001), Grooms
returns to the city of Birmingham of 1963. He
begins with Walter Burke, a Vietnam foot soldier,
who labors at writing a letter to the parents of his
comrade who has been killed. Burke struggles with
his words, unable to stop reflecting on his youth in
Alabama. When he was 11, his mother died of can-
cer on the day the 16th Street Baptist Church was
bombed, and his best friend, Lamar, died as well.
Historically, on that day, two white 16-year-old
boys shot a young boy named Virgil Lamar Ware
while he was riding on the handlebars of a bicycle
pedaled by his brother; he fell to the ground and
died. Grooms’s fictional Lamar’s death matches
the known details of young Ware’s death, a tragedy
that was lost in the more dramatic news of this in-
famous day. Grooms’s novel calls attention to this
oversight: the tragic death of a youth and the pro-
found impact such loss has on the ordinary people
who know firsthand what it feels like to grieve for
the young.Grooms, Anthony 217