McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) first-time sexual encounter, Mick Kelly (13), and Harry Minowitz (15), a “Jew boy” with horn-rimmed glasses. Mick is taller than Harry. She’s 5’3″ and 103 pounds. He’s a couple of inches shorter.
Mick and Harry’s romance is without love or passion. “They were close against each other. She felt him trembling, and her fists were tight enough to crack. ‘Oh, God,’ he kept saying over and over. It was like her head broke off from her body and was thrown away. And her eyes looked up straight into the blinding sun while she counted something in her mind. And then this was the way.”
They go on as if nothing happened; she is cold and stiff when they part when it’s over. Both say they don’t want to marry, ever. Harry says he will leave town and work as a mechanic. He says he’ll send Mick a postcard to find out if she is OK. When the postcard comes, she responds OK, and that’s that.
Go to the woods, fifteen miles from town. Mick and Harry talk. It’s hot in March, and Mick suggests a place to swim. There is a “deep, wide, creek” 229. “We’ll ride out and take a picnic dinner,” Mick said.” (229) It’s Sunday, and Mick has off from her job at the soda fountain once a month. Mick thinks he is handsome. She feels good about the date. “Tomorrow, she would borrow Hazel’s blue necklace and wear the silk dress. For dinner, they would take jelly sandwiches and Nehi.” Mick wonders if Harry will bring something strange and Jewish to eat. He does. His Jewish mother’s “cold liver pudding and chicken salad sandwiches and pie.” (230) She has also packed hard-boiled eggs and separate packages of salt and pepper, blackberry jelly, butter sandwiches, and napkins.
Featured Image: Robert Ellis Miller. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968). Mick Kelly (Sondra Locke) and Harry Minowitz (Wayne Smith).
PS: In the American South, livermush (sometimes livermush or liver pudding) is colloquially known as “poor man’s” or “poor boy’s pâté.” In the Jewish kitchen, it is known as chopped liver. There’s no telling how Harry Minowitz’s mother prepared her pudding.
See Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940; Robert Ellis Miller. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968). The screenplay by Thomas C. Ryan is based on Carson McCullers’s novel (1940).
* In the American South, livermush (sometimes livermush or liver pudding) is colloquially known as “poor man’s” or “poor boy’s pâté.” In the Jewish kitchen, it is chopped liver. There’s no telling how Harry Minowitz’s mother prepared her pudding.