Washing the Wounds
‘Gathering of Waters,’ by Bernice L. McFadden
By JESMYN WARD
Published: February 10, 2012
Novelists writing about traumatic historical moments face a particular challenge: how to bring the event to immediate, visceral life without overpowering the characters or their experiences. In “Gathering of Waters,” her eighth novel, Bernice L. McFadden recreates not just the Mississippi flood of 1927 (one of the most destructive ever in the United States) but also the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. It would be easy for her characters to recede in the glare of these events, but McFadden works a kind of miracle — not only do they retain their appealing humanity; their story eclipses the bonds of history to offer continuous surprises.
GATHERING OF WATERS
By Bernice L. McFadden
252 pp. Akashic Books. $24.95.
“Gathering of Waters” opens in the early 20th century in Oklahoma, with a girl named Doll possessed by the spirit of a dead woman. But after an unsuccessful exorcism and a decision by Doll’s mother to put her up for adoption, the story shifts to Money, Miss., where Doll grows up under the influence of the bitter, vengeful spirit that inhabits her. She steals, she has sex with near strangers and she eventually gives birth to a daughter who comes to despise her. After the flood of 1927, the novel’s attentions jump to that daughter, Hemmingway, just until her own daughter, Tass, falls in love with Emmett Till during the summer he will die. Then the story follows Tass, who marries and moves to Detroit with Emmett’s spirit at her heels.
Bernice L. McFadden / photo by Eric Payne
McFadden makes some unconventional choices, but she pulls them off. The town of Money itself narrates the novel, providing a roving, close perspective and complementing the book’s magic realism, its premise that matter is finite and spirit eternal. “For a time I lived as a beating heart, another life found me swimming upstream toward a home nestled in my memory,” Money says. “Once I was a language that died.” In this world, spirit lives in an object until its host dies or grows useless, then it moves on. The diction Money uses to describe spirit is beautiful and evocative, in contrast to the spare, urgent voice elsewhere, as in this description of the flood: “At the church, someone looked down and saw that water was rising up through the seams of the floorboards. Another member spied it seeping in from beneath the door. The choir continued to sing.”
“Gathering of Waters” isn’t long, but it brings three generations urgently to life. Doll is irascible and voracious, untrustworthy and sometimes surprisingly vulnerable, while Hemmingway is her polar opposite: respectable, upstanding and aloof, even with her own daughter. Tass is the novel’s most tender character. Although she marries and has many children, she remains naïve and compassionate, traits that draw Emmett’s spirit to her in death as in life. Indeed, McFadden’s conception of Emmett is very human — here, the boy sheds the pall of his death, the history of slavery and segregation and cultures and continents colliding that coalesced at the moment of his murder and burned and blazed and could not be contained afterward, and instead, assumes the identity of the adolescent he might have been: funny, sensitive, rakish and, in the end, devoted.
This is where the real power of the narrative lies: not in the Mississippi River flooding 23,000 square miles, killing some 250 people in April 1927, and not in the awful, brutal death of a boy who later became a symbol of the civil rights movement, but in the richness and complexity of the characters, of the women of the Hilson family and the men, Emmett among them, who love them. While they inhabit these pages they live, and they do so gloriously and messily and magically, so that we are at last sorry to see them go, and we sit with those small moments we had with them and worry over them, enchanted, until they become something like our own memories, dimmed by time, but alive with the ghosts of the past, and burning with spirits.
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Caribbean Women Writers
(series): Telling Stories
Lorna Goodison's
By Love Possessed
My favorite short stories work like cinematic vignettes, which is to say that they are essentially portraits or scenes I am pulled into by a purposeful narrator or speaker, who gives me a quick tour or perusal of the scene or portrait, and simultaneously causes me to experience a quick wringing-out impression of the substance of that scene or portrait and leaves me a bit breathless--both from pace and matter. Connecting in some major way with narrative voice, whether it is first, third, or some other perspective, is for me the key component to enjoying short fiction. The Caribbean short story has a fascinating history of writers’ experimentation with narrative voice, which is one of the subjects discussed in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, a recently published collection of essays, edited by Caribbean scholars, Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt, and Emma Smith. In one intriguing study, Suzanne Scafe focuses on a fat chunk of the history of the short story in Jamaica (1938-1950) and makes the following observation:
Some of the most effective . . . in the dominant expression of Jamaican culture were those that privileged the use of Jamaican creole, not as dialogue, a form to which many readers had already become accustomed, but as either the narrative voice or as a means of articulating a complex interiority.
The clear-visioned heroine The first story in the collection, “The Helpweight,” gives us a female character whose no-nonsense attitude about love and relationships is a dominant one in the collection. In the story, a pair of former high-school sweethearts contend with the left-over emotions from their past relationship. She is now a successful marketing manager, and he is a lawyer. Their relationship ended years ago when he got married to an Irish woman he met while studying in England, but he has returned to Jamaica (wife in tow) and seems bent on resuming their relationship. She’s clearly not interested (she is about to become seriously involved with a doctor), but she lets him get close enough to publicly humiliate him a few times--including making him wait outside her office for over an hour before she sees him--then she finally cuts him off completely for having the “unmitigated gall to suggest that she settle for being his concubine.” In the story’s parable-like construction, she is presented as a heroine with the clear vision to see through his empty promise--“...You are number one, you will always be the queen”-- and recognize that he is no better than men like the deadbeat father of her house helper’s children, a man the helper says “is not a helpmate, ma’am, him is a helpweight. All him do is help weigh me down.” As a woman who has done well for herself, she can effectively challenge and reject the weight of a number system (so to speak) of power and ownership designed to benefit men. Her rejection strikes a decisive tone for the female-focused collection. This clear-visioned Jamaican heroine is present in many of the stories, including those with women who are not as financially successful as the female protagonist in “Helpweight.” One such woman, a struggling artist, receives an offer to become the girlfriend of a wealthy man who asks her out, but tells her he doesn’t have much time in his life for “something like this” (time to invest in a serious relationship, perhaps?) but he can get her anything she wants. Her rejection of his offer is made particularly significant when she recalls seeing a woman of “house colour” (explained as the name Jamaicans give to the complexion one gets from spending most of one’s time indoors) taking inventory of her possessions in a jewellery store. She imagines that the woman’s collection of jewelry is the result of a life spent with someone who didn’t have time to invest in a serious relationship with her, and doesn’t want that for herself. Sometimes though, as another story illustrates, a woman in a relationship with a “busy” man can negotiate her way into a compromise that pleases her. But she’ll require some help from divine sources. In “Jamaica Hope,” (name for a “champion” breed of cattle, which the narrator tells us were “bigger than most men”) Lilla, who “pledged her head, hands, heart, and hopes into building a life with Alphanso,” (her own version of a champion breed, perhaps) spends ten years living with him and bearing children for him without being married. Her contentment changes when she discovers he is seeing someone else. She then decides she wants the security of marriage and asks him to marry her. The ensuing dialogue about marriage--he talks to his brother; she talks to her mother--tells a story (though notthe story) of Jamaican cultural beliefs regarding marriage:
“Bob, hear my crosses now, Lilla want get married.”
“All woman want to get married.”
“You know how much people live good good then them go and get married and everything crash?” “Mama, Alphanso don’t want get married.”
“No man in Jamaica ever want get married.”
Though Lilla may have been successful in getting the kind of relationship she desires, the collection, which shows a wide range of relationship situations, is full of other women whose efforts to build their lives solely around men are predictably unsuccessful. And where the women remain stubbornly persistent in trying to make those relationships work, the narrator pokes merciless fun at them. One woman, for instance, who pays a man’s way into a movie theatre when he claims his pocket had been picked, and who then becomes involved with him, is criticized by the narrator:
If she had been seeing straight, she would have noticed that some people were laughing when he raised the alarm. But she didn’t see anything except the handsome brown-skin man with “good hair,” straight nose, and a mouth like a woman’s.
Though the major focus of the collection’s vignettes is on the agency or lack thereof of women in mostly dysfunctional relationships with men, and though (to that end) we get rather superficial and dismissive portrayals of the men with whom they are involved, two of the stories with male protagonists give a deeper look at a certain male condition. “Henry,” is the story of a young boy who is sent by his mother to “fight life” for himself when she determines his presence in the home is a hindrance to her relationship with her boyfriend. Henry tries to make a living selling roses on the street and he dreams of being rescued one day...
The sliver cloud will stand still, the rear window will be eased down, and the wife of the Governor General will call out . . . ‘Hello you, you little one in those red corduroy trousers that must be so hot on you, come dear, and let me find a place for you to live. You really should not be out on the street like this.'
Enjoy herself? This time Joseph was working so hard to send the two children to school clean and neat, Joseph become mother and father for them, the man even learn to plait the little girl hair. Enjoy himself?
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By Love Possessed, by Lorna Goodison (McClelland & Stewart 2011, 272 pp).The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, eds. Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith (Peepal Tree Press 2011, 356 pp).
>via: http://signifyinguyana.typepad.com/charmainevalere/2011/09/caribbean-women-wr...
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Review of Violated
by Guitele Jeudy-Rahill