Again
I am reading a book made up of inter-locking or inter-connected
stories put together to create a novel. This one follows a strikingly
beautiful woman who has fled from the Jim Crow rules of Georgia
to Philadelphia in the early 1920s. Hattie marries handsome young
August Shepherd and starts a family. When her first babies sicken and
die Hattie is propelled into a depression and sadness from which she
will never be totally free. We follow Hattie through nine more
children and her battles to raise them all and keep the family whole.
She scrapes, and claws from their poverty all the best she can for
their essentials. But in the mean time Hattie gives the children
little of herself and no tenderness or loving touches which they
crave. August is a product of his time and while he loves Hattie and
adores all the children still he lives by a masculine code of male
dominance, working, smoking, drinking, gambling, and womanizing.
The
book is not constructed linearly. There are significant time jumps
both forward and backward, and each chapter is a vignette of a family
member at a significant event or turning point. Floyd, the oldest boy
struggles with his homosexuality while following his art in the music
industry. Six turns to religion and becomes a child evangelist while
struggling with his inner demons of anger and violence. Billups falls
into mental illness after being sexually molested and Alice, the
drugged wife of a wealthy lawyer, tries to be his caretaker forever
because she feels responsible. Cassie becomes a severe schizophrenic,
leaving Hattie to care for her child, Sala. Franklin gambles and
drinks and goes to the war in Vietnam. Beautiful Bell is self
destructive. Ruthie who doesn't belong to August but is a product of
an affair that Hattie has with the gambler Lawrence. When the final
child Ella comes there is nothing left for Hattie to give and so Ella
goes to live with Hattie's well to do sister back in Georgia.
Hattie
dreams of being free; free from August, free from the poverty, free
from all the children. But when she has a shot at freedom she passes
it up. I suspect she really didn't want to be freed. Perhaps? I read
some pretty harsh reviews of this book. People saying it is
unfinished, disjointed and such. Possibly, but also possible is that it is meant to be this way so the reader is forced to ponder, to think,
to muse about what it all means. Open-ended is not a bad thing.
This
book is beautifully written and I will be thinking about these people
for a long time. (Yes I know they aren't real.) I often wish for a
magic wand that I could wave and make things better and so I wished
for a magic wand for Hattie. Deep down she loved her children but
never learned to show it. She did the best she knew how. At the end
August has settled and Hattie is 71 raising a small grandchild. Hopefully for Sala things will be better. I
would read this one again.
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