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| image copy/pasted from npr.org. pls don't sue me |
I took several
weeks to read The Twelve Tribes of Hattie even though I easily could
have finished it in a couple of days. I knew from the second page that the
story would be heartbreaking and decided to break it up into small, easily
digestible portions, even though I normally enjoy a good binge read. Not
surprisingly the story, penned by Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, Ayana Mathis, is
expertly written in a non-linear vignette style.
The novel tells
the story of Hattie Shephard and the twelve children she raises after migrating
from Georgia to Philadelphia with her mother, sisters, and husband. Like millions of other African-Americans who moved from the south to other parts of the
U.S. during The Great Migration, Hattie left the south
with high hopes and great expectations.
My favorite
facet of the book is that each child and the issues that he or she battles can
be seen as a representation of the various hardships that African Americans
face as a community. The hardships encountered by Hattie and her family include
but are not limited to: homophobia, mental illness, attempted suicide, child
sexual abuse, infidelity, poverty, joining the upper class as new money,
physical disfigurement, loneliness, faith and religion, barrenness, adoption,
racism, war, the pain of burying a child, addiction to gambling, and divorce.
Hattie perseveres in the face of a series of seemingly unending heartbreaks.
Overall the
story was harrowing and depressing. And I thought to myself, couldn’t just one
of those children have a happy ending? Couldn’t Hattie? Hattie moved up north
with so much hope so how could all of her children have lived such miserable
lives? But I think that may be the final point of the book.
There have been
individual successes within the African American community obviously (Oprah
Winfrey for example), but as a whole, we’re actually worse off than we were
before the 60’s in many ways. African Americans may be federally protected
against discrimination, but there can never be any real protection from the
insidious material and psychological consequences of being descended from
African slaves.
So there is no
happy ending as of yet. Only perseverance.
