New Book Review: I'll Watch Your Baby

Title: I'll Watch Your Baby

Author: Neena Viel

Date: May 2026

Publisher: St Martins

ISBN: 978– 1– 250– 28916– 2

Quote: "Selling children is the natural order."

In the mid-twentieth century a woman whose original name was Martha Louise White became infamous under one of twenty-some names she used, "Linda Taylor," as the "Welfare Queen." Her many hustles, which included various victimless crimes as well as welfare cheating and allegedly included fraud, theft, child trafficking, and possibly murder, may or may not have made her a millionnaire. Nobody was ever sure. Nobody ever proved most of the charges against her; all that was known for sure was that, in the early 1970s, she was taking welfare money under a few different names, claiming more children than were actually found living with her, covered in furs and jewelry and owning three expensive new cars. Welfare payments were supposed to be for women abandoned by men, but "Linda Taylor" had several beaux on her string. For a woman who lived mostly in the North she was quite the Southern Belle. She claimed to be Black, White, or other things as suited her purposes; usually White when she was claiming to be married to a White man. She might have been a sociopath. Ronald Reagan's speeches about welfare reform often referred to the one crime that was proved against her, the welfare fraud, and often suggested that others were doing the same thing. There has never been any shortage of welfare cheats but neither has there ever been a confirmed case of welfare-cheating on anything comparable to the scale on which "Linda Taylor" did it. She was unique.

In order to be the supreme scam artist of her time Martha Louise White had, as Neena Viel brings out in this horror story base on her, to be intelligent (though she had no education to speak of) and charismatic; some of her identities were spiritualists and at least one claimed the title "Reverend." Photo evidence shows that she was pretty, a femme fatale. She could as easily have been a heroine as she chose to be a criminal. She was truly a legend in her own time.

This web site's first Black History Month book pick (tomorrow we'll look at a Valentines Day romance) is based on the legend that was "Linda Taylor." Viel's antiheroine, Lottie Turner, seems made of equal parts of Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind with a sprinkling of Marie Laveau. Her most significant long-term relationship is with another classic motif in the American literary tradition: the haunted site where bad things done in the past have attracted a malevolent spirit. This is a horror story, though for most of its beginning it deals with natural, if very unpleasant, events in the lives of living, if unadmirable, people, and seems like a gross-out story. The ghost isn't named as a ghost until the last quarter of the book. The gross-outs seem attributable to human nastiness, drinking and drugs. The ghost may remind you of the more malevolent ghost in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, as the vivid (and nasty) sensory details may remind you of Stephen King's horror stories generally. One of Lottie's admirers may remind you of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, too. Those are strong characters that tap into enduring archetypes. The effect of mixing those archetypes in one novel is intense.

Lottie is obsessed, and the younger people who gather around her in her old age become obsessed, with red-eyed white flies. Lottie thinks she remembers them from her childhood in Tennessee, sees them everywhere she goes, and seems to be projecting them into the minds of the young people. Houseflies have red eyes, but there are no red-eyed white flies in Tennessee; what gardeners call whiteflies are something different. Those unnatural white flies and their white larvae appear wherever Lottie goes throughout the book. There's a red nightgown that keeps popping up in spooky ways, too, and a photo of a woman with a baby and anywhere from one to ten other children.

The story starts when Lottie, fleeing the scene where she's been convicted of welfare fraud, becomes the friend of Phyllis, "Filly," a woman for whom she works as a baby-sitter. In the 1970s tuberculosis was treatable, but Filly apparently does not benefit from the treatment; lots of TB gross-outs lie ahead. "Linda Taylor" may or may not have murdered a family for whom she worked and burned down their house. Lottie at first remembers being poor, lonely, and aggrieved when she was young in Tennessee, and occasionally thinks she hears an inner voice warning her not to have "another friend." Then Filly's husband confronts her with the fact that she's the Welfare Queen, escaped from justice. Lottie thinks  of killing him, thinks of fleeing, but hasn't done either when her dying friend "turns into a werewolf." Lottie recognizes that although she didn't want to kidnap and sell Filly's children, for the sake of friendship, and didn't need the money, something wanted her to sell the children; Filly says she's arranged for Lottie to "get the children and the house," but something makes sure that can't happen. 

Later some younger people go to a big house in Tennessee where an old woman who calls herself Mrs. Gibson is dying of tuberculosis. The two young men and two young women are friends, almost siblings, not couples. They are, of course, children Lottie trafficked. One of them wants to do to Mrs. Gibson all that she believes Lottie did to her family. Others just want to cheat the old woman out of money. But things get weird. The young people think some of them have drugged, changed the clothes of, damaged the property of, others of them. They are wrong. They're being led to meet the ghost of a slave who was especially badly treated. Her name has been lost. She's the Queen of Flies.

Exactly what's going on isn't always clear. Lottie has a vivid imagination and often speaks metaphorically. Some major events and some details are hallucinations, dreams, or drug trips, and some are metaphors, and some are part of fictive reality. When a character describes something bizarre you have to wait and see whether other characters saw it too, or whether the character describing it expected that they would.

In an afterword Viel identifies Martha Louise White with her mother--whether she's confessing any literal physical relationship, or only saying that her mother took welfare and may have taken more than she was entitled to, she refuses to say. Thus Lottie can't be the cheerful sociopath many like to imagine that "Linda Taylor" was. For Viel the welfare-cheating is trivial, and it's important to Viel to establish that Lottie hated the child trafficking she did, didn't actually commit the murders people thought she did, and didn't particularly relish the sex offenses she perceives as being done to her. 

If you want a real Tale of Blood and the Supernatural, I'll Watch Your Baby is one that will be hard to forget. If you have a sensitive heart and/or a sensitive stomach, read something else.

(How can I be reviewing a book that's supposed to be published in May when it's only February? As regular readers know, publishers sometimes send advance copies of a manuscript they're going to publish to reviewers in order to generate publicity before the book is available in stores. This review is based on an advance copy.)