Blood Ties
By KAIAMA L. GLOVER
Published: September 24, 2010
For roughly the last half-century, nearly every black female writer of any consequence in America seems to have had one very particular story to tell — or, rather, one particular question she’s tried to answer: Just how in heaven (or hell) have black women managed to survive? How, that is, were great-grandmothers not completely destroyed by enslavement, grandmothers not irreparably broken by bigotry, mothers not wholly defeated by loneliness? How have black women in this country kept on doing battle with everything, for what seems like forever, without falling apart? And what toll has this taken on their daughters? From Margaret Walker to Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones, to name only a few, America’s black female authors have tried to make sense of a difficult present by writing bridges to the traumas of the past.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Ntozake Shange, left, and Ifa Bayeza.
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SOME SING, SOME CRY
By Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza
568 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99
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Related
Up Front: Kaiama L. Glover (September 26, 2010)
Excerpt: ‘Some Sing, Some Cry’ (pdf)
A Writer’s Struggles, on and Off the Page (September 18, 2010)
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Now Ntozake Shange (of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” fame) and her playwright sister, Ifa Bayeza, have staked their own place in this tradition with their novel, “Some Sing, Some Cry.” A rich mix of storytelling and African-American history, it follows seven generations of black women who, largely through music, are able to survive the violence of their national and personal histories even as they find themselves too battle-scarred to mother their children with real joy.
The narrative begins with the nostalgic musings of a newly emancipated slave, Betty Mayfield, as she prepares to leave Sweet Tamarind, a plantation on an island off the coast of South Carolina, with her granddaughter Dora. Daughter of a slave woman and the powerful white planter who would also become Betty’s own lover and the father of her three daughters (“Keep tellin’ myself ain’t no sin in bearin’ no child when there ain’t no choice”), she is a living testament to the perverse intimacy of “the peculiar institution.” Owned, abused, but maybe also loved by a man she calls “Pa-lover,” Betty refuses to be ashamed of the lasting passion she feels for this “lover and owner,” “master and partner.” On the contrary, she’s proud to belong, as she sees it, to the Mayfield family, to have been the favorite of its deceased patriarch and to have borne his children.
These dubious beginnings haunt Betty’s female descendants. Not quite a curse, but certainly no blessing, their blood ties to the Mayfields make them stand out, as much for their exceptional beauty (“girls whose eyes suggested fog-laden dawns, whose skin was opalescent, whether bronze or ivory”) as for the ancient crimes their surprising features recall (“The shame lookin’ em right in the eyes. Eyes dey call beauties. Got dey nerve”). “Some Sing, Some Cry” traces the way each of these Mayfield women fights not just to survive but to thrive in a world seemingly arranged to ruin her. Shange and Bayeza give us generation after generation of black women whose greatness and potential for happiness are undone, or nearly so, by men who lash out at their own impotence. If any of the Mayfield women manage to realize some measure of success, it’s despite — or to spite — the men in their lives.
For her part, Dora builds a successful dressmaking business in Jim Crow Charleston, only to suffer a gang rape by a group of wealthy whites that leads to the birth of her first daughter. She’s brought low again by a desperate marriage to the father of her second daughter, a man she never lets herself love or need. Her girls, Elma and Lizzie, follow similar paths. They rise high and fall hard. A talented singer, Elma is a star in college but marries a man who delivers on none of his promises. Lizzie, raped by her best friend’s older brother, ultimately abandons the daughter this violence produces. And all this takes us through only the first two-thirds of the book. Every one of these women’s stories could be a novel on its own; every one has a complexity and scope that keeps readers turning page after page.
That said, it’s also true that “Some Sing, Some Cry” is a very long book, one that at times feels too full, too rushed, too obvious — too much. The novel bears at once the doubled voice of its co-creators and the polyphonic contributions of all the women who get to say “I” over the course of its hundreds of pages. It’s as if Shange and Bayeza hoped to tell every black woman’s story to make up for the silence of the past. As a result, the narrative suffers from a surfeit of drama, with characters who shine almost too brightly to be entirely credible.
In a somewhat gimmicky appropriation of Josephine Baker’s life story, for example, Lizzie moves north, transforms herself into a Harlem chorine, then high-tails it to Paris, where she takes the music-hall scene by storm, develops a signature song “honoring her dual nations” and ends up spying for the French Resistance. Cinnamon, the daughter Lizzie leaves behind, gets into Juilliard, begins a career as an opera singer, attends Marian Anderson’s Easter Sunday performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — where she’s hit on by none other than the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. — and later loses her voice to an incurable case of laryngeal dystonia. Cinnamon’s daughter is a Grammywinning R&B darling whose comeback tour in Africa closes the novel.
And yet, despite such soap-operatic indulgences, this story of lifesaving music and heartbroken maternity is engaging from start to finish. The Mayfield women are hilarious and sexy, gorgeous and strong. They all work the same refrain: “Never go backward. Always be movin’, movin’ forward. Life is in front of me, not behind.” After every near defeat, these women pick themselves up, sometimes literally off the ground, and take the next impossible step. And while they all take that step differently — choosing to run or to work, to curse or, yes, to sing — not one of them spends much time crying.
