~ The Mothers. By Brit Bennett ~
This astonishingly assured first novel centers on a black community in a small Southern California town, and specifically, three young people: Nadia Turner, beautiful, smart and unhappy; Luke Sheppard, the pastor’s son; and Aubrey Evans, quiet, friendless the ‘good Christian girl’.
Nadia’s mother killed herself six months before the start of the novel, leaving Nadia bereft, shaken and edgy.
She was startled by how rarely she had been alone back then. Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.
She couldn’t stand to be around anyone now — her teachers, who excused her late work with patient smiles; her friends who stopped joking when she sat down at lunch, as if their happiness was offensive to her.
Nadia’s father turns to the church for support, and Nadia turns to the pastor’s son. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that she is pregnant at the end of the summer — the novel starts with this information. The only thing she is sure of is that she wants to get out of town, and her scholarship to the University of Michigan is the path to a different future.
Aubrey, it turns out, is also essentially motherless. She lives with her sister, and doesn’t tell anyone that her mother chose an abusive boyfriend over her child. Even deeper buried is the secret of her own abuse.
Luke Sheppard was the golden boy, the football star, until an injury ended his playing career. Now he waits tables at a diner. He is searching for a new future as well.
‘The Mothers’ of the title are a Greek chorus of sorts: the older black women who run the church and social events, and whose wisdom appears in every chapter.
If Nadia Turner had asked, we would’ve warned her to stay away from him. […] She wouldn’t have listened, of course. What did the church mothers know anyway?
All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn’t. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the spring Nadia Turner got knocked up by the pastor’s son and went to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it.
While the voiceover of the Mothers did provide an overarching connective structure, I found them almost distracting at times. Towards the end of the book their importance to the novel (and the community) became clearer.
New characters appear organically and naturally, as Nadia goes to college, and they are fully developed personalities.
She’d started taking cod-liver oil pills that her boyfriend Shadi swore by, to at least his Sudanese mother did, sending them to him by the boxful. He’d grown up in Minneapolis, so he knew how to be cold. [..]
“You think I’m joking,” he said. “But it’s unnatural, being colored in all this cold. We need more sunlight than these white people.”
Being Black is a part of the lives of the characters, but does not define them more than other aspects of their adolescence. That said, there is an understated awareness woven into the characters’ lives:
Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.
A topic like abortion is bound to have readers with preconceived opinions before they read a page, and I did think Bennett went a little overboard on the missing baby theme in the second half of the book. But overall, there is no judgement one way or another here: the characters all make mistakes, and all deal with consequences.
Unlike many first novels, this one is controlled, restrained without giving in to the (understandable) authorial temptation to include more community issues or display extravagant writing. This makes it a quiet novel, but it is all the better for it.
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