BIPOC author

On the Rooftop, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

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In the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District had a large Black population, contributing to its reputation as the largest jazz scene on the West coast. Vivian sees music as the ticket to give her three daughters a better life. Ever since hearing Ruth, her oldest, astound the church with her choir solo, Vivian has been training her to become a professional singer, adding Esther and Chloe, the youngest, as they began to show interest and talent.

By the beginning of this, Sexton’s third novel, the three are performing regularly at neighborhood clubs as the Salvations. Vivian drills them relentlessly on their routines up on the roof of their apartment building, inventing warmup exercises, song arrangements and dance steps.

Having endured racial violence in Louisiana, the death of her beloved husband, and the drudgery of her own nursing job, Vivian wants more for her daughters. Now, just as the dream seems within reach, with an offer for major representation, the three young women begin to second-guess the path they’ve been following.

The joys and conflicts between three sisters are familiar from fairy tales and folklore. Some of us (me) also have personal experience of these dynamics. Sexton shifts between Vivian’s point of view and that of each of the sisters, giving us their distinct personalities and desires, as well as their complicated relationships with their mother and each other.

Further difficulties arrive with White developers, maneuvering to drive out Black residents and business owners with underhanded tactics and cash offers. Clearing out Black people in the name of “urban renewal” happened in cities across the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century. Here, not only renters like Vivian are threatened, but also the owners of the clubs, the church that is so much a part of the family’s life, and the businesses where they work.

This is not an action-packed thriller, but rather a story of family and community, how love and tensions can co-exist within them, how one generation’s dreams may or may not be relevant to the next. Even big blow-ups are treated with realism rather than melodrama. This isn’t a typical rags-to-riches drama of an artist’s life, but something more real, more important.

I mostly identified with Vivian and her concern for her children. However, I can imagine younger readers being put off by the amount of control she exercised over her daughters, trying to direct their lives down the path of her choosing. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can attest to how common it was back then for parents to expect to make such decisions for their children.

Also, as we just saw during the Olympics, to achieve at such high levels requires dedication and hard work from an early age. This family reminded me of Venus and Serena Williams and made me consider what sacrifices they had to make. It also made me wonder about the emotional negotiations that must have taken place between their dreams and their father’s.

I enjoyed this slow burn of a story, with its focus on relationships. Vivian, the three daughters, Vivian’s best friend Mary, even the Preacher are all vivid characters with their own dreams and desires, their own flaws. I found it a gift to be part of this family and their world for a little while.

Have you read a novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton? What did you think of it?

Neighbors, by Diane Oliver

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It may seem unfair to read a debut story collection by a 22-year-old woman right on the heels of reading the final short stories written by a Nobel Prize winner. However, Oliver’s work stands up to the comparison. In fact, although Munro’s stories take place in Ontario and Oliver’s mostly in the South, they seemed quite similar.

Both are almost all about women, ordinary women, with piercing insight as to the reality of their lives. While Munro’s works remind me of how confining women’s roles were in the middle of the 20th century, before feminism’s Second Wave, Oliver’s open up the lives of Black women at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the title story, young Ellie is helping her little brother Tommy get ready for bed. In the morning, the first-grader will be integrating the local school. Oliver captures the nuances of concern and caring and determination of the children as well as the parents. His father says, “‘I keep trying . . . to tell myself that somebody’s got to be the first one and then I just think how quiet he’s been all week.’” In a later story a young woman goes off to college to oblige her parents but inwardly hates being “the Experiment.”

In other stories, parents struggle to care for their children in the Jim Crow South. A few deal with mothers who’ve been left behind by husbands who’ve gone north as part of the Great Migration. One packs her children onto a bus and takes them to meet the father who hasn’t written in months. In response to her daughter’s question, she says, “‘I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.’”

These stories go beyond the stereotype of the strong Black woman. We see their weaknesses and accommodations. Oliver’s subtle prose shows the self-deception of a rich doctor’s wife and the blank face that a maid turns to her employer. We walk with a young woman as she heads to her first lunch counter sit-in.

So much meaning is packed into each sentence of these stories, each gesture, each bit of dialogue. What is left unsaid rumbles beneath the text, driving the characters down what comes to seem an inevitable road.

Sadly, this brilliant writer died in 1966, only 22 years old. At the time, she’d had four stories published in journals, so was just beginning her career. I’m grateful for this new collection of her work, and so terribly sad that she couldn’t have been with us longer.

These are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Is there a short story you’ve read that you’ll never forget?

The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

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I’m always thrilled to stumble across an inspiring story based on real events, a story that’s been lost to history. In 1865, the Civil War is over, but freedom has only worsened the lives of former slaves. On the Montgomery Plantation, twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo carries the trauma of her years as a slave: her mother being sold away, her father lynched, and beatings that have scarred her back and soul.

She hates, with all her being, and cannot find room in her heart for love, even for William, the older preacher who loves her. Still, she knows he is a good man and agrees to marry him. She knows what she wants: to make real her vision of a Happy Land where people can live freely and be treated with respect. She envisions a cooperative community, where everything is shared so that all can prosper.

When events make it impossible to stay on the plantation, Louella and William lead a group of former slaves to find a place to settle and build their community. They travel for months, encountering dangers and surprising succor in the post-Civil War South, eventually settling in the Carolinas. Louella and William are appointed Queen and King of Happy Land. It thrives, growing to 500 families, but internal friction develops and threatens all they’ve built.  

Miller’s fictionalised version of this true story captures the drama of Louella’s terrible journey from hate to love. The injustice and outright abuse can be hard to read about, but will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with slavery and Reconstruction. Another aspect that can be off-putting but not unexpected for someone of the time is Louella’s devout Christianity. While no doubt historically accurate, Louella constantly excusing injustice by saying that God has His ways or hoping God would hear her need seemed to take all the air out of the story.

Luckily she often speaks her mind and finds creative ways to accomplish her goals. Such parts kept the story moving. By having Louella take the lead and speak her mind, Miller shows us a complex character. Each of the characters—and there are a lot—is fully depicted as an individual.

Given the egalitarian nature of Happy Land, I was uncomfortable with the titles of king and queen, especially since they were used as day-to-day nomenclature, i.e., referring to King William or the King and Louella likewise. Of course, this is one of the dangers of using real events for a novel. The author shouldn’t go against the actual historical record.

Having just read Erasure, a novel of how the public and the publishing industry only want and will only accept one view of The Black Experience, I appreciated this portrait of a harmonious and loving marriage as well as that of a thriving community.

The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

The book’s language is fairly simple; in fact, I wondered if it wasn’t a Middle Grade or Young Adult novel, though the traumatic violence rules out Middle Grade. However, it’s an easy read and an immensely valuable addition to our understanding of the time and also of what one woman can accomplish. She had a dream, and she made it come true.

What novel have you read that was based on real events?

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

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The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team.

Deems gets away with just losing an ear, but all the witnesses are shocked by the genial drunk’s use of violence. They are also concerned about the danger to Sportcoat from the police, Deems himself, or competing gangsters. It is 1969, just before communities such as this—a mix of Baptists, Catholics and criminals; Blacks, Latinx, Irish, and Italian—began to disintegrate due to the loss of idealism after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the changes in city politics, and the influx of crack cocaine.

McBride uses what Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode calls a spiral structure, which “begins at a point and moves onward . . . spinning around and around that central point or a single axis.”

As we spiral out from the shooting, we get to know many of the people in the community: Sportcoat’s best friend Hot Sausage who gives out the high-quality cheese that appears regularly as if by magic, an Italian gangster known as the Elephant, and Deems himself, once a promising pitcher but lured away by the easy drug money. We meet Potts, a policeman near retirement who’s come back to his early beat in the Cause Houses, a number of strong church ladies, and a quiet Nation of Islam convert named Soup, among many others. It’s a large cast, but everyone is so colorful that it’s easy to remember them.

With humor and compassion, McBride gives us their stories, while always coming back to Sportcoat and the shooting. The deacon claims he doesn’t remember shooting Deems and instead is trying to get him to come back and play baseball. Sportcoat is also in near-constant conversation with his dead wife Hettie, who disapproves of his laziness and drinking, and refuses to reveal where she hid the money collected for the church’s Christmas Fund.

The Christmas Fund is one of a number of other spirals in the story, cropping up repeatedly, as does the question of who is providing the cheese. There’s also a recurring question expressed by various characters as to what exactly a deacon does, and stories about the founding of the church.

A lot of humor is created by the shenanigans the characters get up to, such as Sausage and Sportcoat sharing a single driver’s license on alternating weeks or trying to fix a recalcitrant generator. Even when poking fun at them, McBride sidesteps stereotypes to present each character as a full human being, flawed perhaps, but trying their best to get on.

While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed—one I am familiar with.

Between the humor and the human drama, the story moves quickly. A common problem for spiral stories is how to end them and, indeed, here the ending seems a rush to tie up the different subplots. Disappointingly, there are some loose ends left dangling and bit of time confusion, but these are small quibbles for a book that manages to be both rollicking fun and profoundly moving.

Most of all, I treasure stories such as this one where the characters, despite their failings, are treated with respect and compassion. We all want that for ourselves. And what a better world this would be if we could all manage to extend the same to everyone we meet.

It’s rare to find a bestseller that lives up to its hype. This one does. Have you read it? What did you think of it?

Blackberries, Blackberries, by Crystal Wilkinson

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Wilkinson’s first book is a collection of short stories—perfect for my attention span just now! These stories feature Black women in rural Kentucky, young and old, each with her individual take on the world, her own idea of herself.

In some stories, such as “Tipping the Scales”, we meet women who can’t be bothered by society’s conventions. A big woman, “not sloppy fat, though,” Josephina Childs has “sure had her hands full in the men department most all her life.” All her life she’s been aware of how “the whole town ‘bout tripped over” themselves to find out what was going on with her mother in the house Ethel’s lover build for them. So when Josephina wants children, she goes ahead and has them. I could hardly wait to find out what happens as she charts her own path among the gossiping townsfolk.

A few stories are from a man’s point of view, such as “Mine” in which Joe Scruggs complains about his former girlfriend Racine. She’d left him when she found out he was cheating on her. Now he sees that she has cut the long, straightened hair he’d loved in favor of short natural hair. Worse than that, she’s had breast reduction surgery and “black women do not get their breasts worked on.” The voice is pitch perfect as Joe thinks about what he sees as Racine’s insult to him and about Darlene, the woman he cheated with, now his wife. It’s a strong indictment of a man’s idea of ownership.

Wilkinson’s use of voice carries each of these stories. Without resorting to dialect, she captures the individual rhythms of her characters’ thoughts and speech. In “Mules” she finds just the right voice for a naïve girl, just starting to develop and learning to navigate the complicated and risky world of men. In “Deviled Eggs” Wilkinson gives voice to a young girl who is dragged along when her mother goes to her job as a domestic servant and has a startling lesson in racism from the elderly white woman who thinks she is doing the child a favor. In “Need” we meet three characters in a café, two women embarking on a difficult conversation and their male waiter, each with a distinctive voice.

I’ve been thinking recently about the shape of short stories, how they begin, how they end. The variety of story shapes is this collection is part of what makes it so enticing. Some stories spiral back to their beginning, while others rise to a new understanding. Many for me ended in ways that surprised me, taking a direction I hadn’t expected: Wilkinson displaying the penchant for independence we see in many of her characters. I love being surprised!

In every story, Wilkinson demonstrates the writer’s mantra that the personal is universal. These may be Black women in Appalachia, but I saw myself in each of them. Reading their stories has been a gift, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Do you like reading short stories? Can you recommend a collection?

Trip Wire, by Charlotte Carter

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Another mystery, this time set in Chicago in December of 1968. It’s the end of a tumultuous year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Summer of Love, and in Chicago itself the violence around the Democratic National Convention.

Seeking independence, Cassandra has left the home of her well-off grandaunt and granduncle to live in a multiracial commune in a questionable part of town. She’s in her early 20s, cutting college classes to read books on politics and social justice. When she met Wilt, a charismatic Black man, she found a friend who was on the same wavelength, and was delighted when he encouraged her to join the commune where he and his white partner Mia lived along with several others.

She delights in her new freedom and friends, happy to have found a family she has chosen rather than the over-protective relatives who took her in after her parents’ death. There are tensions, not only family issues but also marijuana use perhaps affecting her schoolwork, sexual freedom coming up against learned ideas about relationships, decisions about who else to admit into the commune.

Then they discover the brutally murdered bodies of two of their members. As Cassandra tries to untangle why they were killed, she is confronted by how little she knows about her new friends, while navigating the questionable tactics of the police and resisting her family’s attempts to make her come home.

The secrets and hidden agendas that make mysteries so fascinating are well-constructed here. The story kept me guessing, surprising me at times. I also found Cassandra a realistic and intriguing woman, simultaneously familiar and different, someone I enjoyed spending time with. All the characters come alive, not just their flaws and fine points, but also the different worlds they straddle.

Carter succeeds in capturing this period, which I remember only too clearly. Seeing it again through the eyes of a young Black woman, with all the additional hurdles and advantages, fascinated me. For example, much as most of us hippies distrusted the police, a person of color has more factors when deciding whether to call them when a crime is committed.

And thinking of the differences and similarities of the country during that election and the current one has given me a slightly different perspective on today. Change is hard, and the Age of Aquarius which once seemed within reach is something we are still seeking.

Anyone who is interested in a glimpse of what the 1960s were like, looking beyond the memes and stereotypes, will enjoy this book, as will mystery readers. I’ll be looking for more books in Carter’s Cook County mystery series.

What do you look for in a mystery series?