Heads-up: this novel has a daunting cast of characters. In their favour, they are interestingly diverse: they live over multiple decades in two continents, they are black, white, married, single, straight, gay, male, female, and of various ages. Some are related, others not, but they are all loosely connected. Unfortunately, despite the two page cast list at the beginning, I lost track of the connections about halfway through the book.
That said, most of the chapters in The Travelers are well put together, and interesting as independent stories.
Two families form the bulk of the characters. One lot are the Vincents — a white, middle-class family from Long Island with a lecherous father, a staid librarian mother, and a successful lawyer son. The first chapter briskly follows the fortunes of James, the son, through decades of success, divorce, affairs and remarriage. A generation on, James’ son Rufus marries Claudia Christie, a black woman, and James struggles with the idea of biracial grandchildren.
The Christies are the other main characters, a black family from Buckner County, Georgia. In 1966, Agnes was nineteen, with an on-and-off, under-the-covers girlfriend called Eloise. Their forbidden lesbian relationship is never public, of course, and breaks off when Agnes falls for a visiting male engineer called Claude, but haunts them both for their entire lives. Another event that occurs when Agnes and Claude are on a lonely road is even more traumatic, reflecting the dangerous reality of black existence in 1960s Georgia. Agnes eventually marries Eddie Christie and names her first child Claudia, after Claude.
It is not wise for a reader to get attached to any one character, as there are only a few pages devoted to each one before the next chapter moves to a different time and space. Indeed, after Agnes’ child is born, the next chapter follows her second daughter fifty years later, now a nurse in New York treating James Vincent. There is one strong connection: Rufus’ marriage to Claudia, but beyond that the Vincents and Christies drift tangentially in and out of each others’ lives over the course of the book.
Some chapters are told directly from the point of view of a character.
The man James is stranded here in the Neurological Intensive Care Unit. I promised Claudia I’d check in on him during my break.
Others are told from a third-person perspective.
Jimmy rolled up his khaki shorts and waded knee-deep into the Atlantic.
Some characters recur as secondary characters in the stories of their lovers or spouses. A few chapters after Agnes’s tale, Eddie Christie gets a chapter to himself.
I joined the Navy to get away from the Bronx. [..] We were open-sea sailors on the USS Olympus, an 1,056 aircraft carrier on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The breadth of these characters and settings makes it possible for Porter to touch on an enormous range of socio-cultural issues: the civil rights movement, Jim Crow laws, the perpetual tension and danger for black Americans then and now, the Great Migration of black Americans from the south to the north, AIDS, and several chapters set in and about the military. While there are novels and films about black families in the south, there are few stories of black soldiers and sailors, and Porter uses these chapters as a window into some rarely told history.
Even more unusual is Eloise, the black woman from Georgia who goes on to become a pilot, following her idol Bessie Coleman.
Bessie Coleman was the first woman Eloise Delaney loved — before she knew love meant anything. There is a rectangular photo cropped from the Buckner County Register, a local Negro paper, of Coleman standing atop the left tire of her Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplane. The photograph is at least thirty years old and dates back to 1926, the year of the brown aviatrix’s untimely death.
Eloise’s forthright determination, independence, and willingness to forge her own path is likely to make her one of a reader’s favourite characters.
While the protagonists in some chapters are black, and other chapters white, it’s the black characters that stand out in this reader’s memory, hence the title of this review.
The photographs are one of the most pleasing aspects of the book. They are unlabelled, but hint at the research that went into this book. How many readers will have seen photos of the black service members in WWII and Vietnam?
So there is much to like in this book, but its major flaw is the number of characters. It is a bad sign if the cast list has to be listed at the forefront of the book, and it is an even worse sign if they have to be identified with their characteristics, as in ‘dark-haired son’or ‘burly first cousin’.
Porter’s prose is straightforward and simple, more informative than captivating. Perhaps this befits a collection of historical vignettes, but it is not beguiling; the reader reads on to find out what happened to the characters, and not for any literary flourishes. I did appreciate the non-judgemental tone throughout, even when describing a racist or otherwise unpleasant character, simply stating the facts and leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. When a black family moves next door to the Camphors:
[Hank, 13]: ‘I was thinking maybe the new boy next door could come over to our house?’
[Charles, his father]: ‘No, son, I don’t think so.’
[…] It fell on [Charles] to teach his son how things were done. ‘You boys can meet in the gazebo’.
Some of the chapters move briskly through a description of the character’s life over decades, others focus on one incident in detail. The latter chapters were more interesting reads, allowing the author to explore the personality of the character, so that those characters were more memorable to the reader as well.
A well-researched but uneven debut.
Really interesting to read this review. Must admit, I doubt I could keep track of such a cast of characters too and so find this aspect off putting.