Lives of tragic desperation chronicled in Oprah’s latest pick
Oprah Winfrey has chosen The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis as the second book in her book club 2.0. Her first selection, a memoir called Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, shot to No. 1 on The Vancouver Sun bestseller list and stayed there for six months.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie will likely do the same, although it’s a bit of a tough slog. The novel is made up of 10 connected and tragic short stories, each of which tells the tale of one or more of Hattie’s
All of Hattie’s ‘ tribes’ are anguished, forlorn and desperate in their own way; they tell an important story, but if you’re looking for a lighthearted read, don’t look here.
descendants. In 1923, 15- yearold Hattie leaves Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a better life in the North than she had experienced in the South.
By 1925, Hattie has married August, who will never make her happy, but with whom she will have 11 children over the ensuing 30 years. The first two babies are twins, Philadelphia, a boy, and Jubilee, a girl. They both have pneumonia as the book opens and their young mother, Hattie, is trying desperately to keep them alive, despite no money and a furnace that’s not working. The two babies die within minutes of each other, setting a tragic tone that remains throughout the novel.
When Winfrey announced the book to her club, she said, “Not since Toni Morrison have I read a writer whose words have moved me this way,” and in describing Mathis, “I knew I was having the privilege of witnessing a great writer’s career begin.”
Mathis’s work is reminiscent of Morrison’s, and indeed, Mathis thanks Morrison in her acknowledgments: “To the novels and essays of Toni Morrison, whose words are both lighthouse and anchor, and whose work has made a way for all of us.” Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Beloved, which is about slavery, and she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her work.
Mathis isn’t writing about slavery, but she is describing a world of hardship: Life in the 20th century as a black family of very little means. The stories in her book run the gamut, but the theme must be the 20th century and its trials.
There is Floyd, Hattie’s son, who in 1948 is a musician on the road. He has picked up and is travelling with a woman, but during the course of the story it becomes clear he also loves men. Cassie is next, but readers don’t meet her until 1980, when she is battling a serious mental illness and Hattie has her hospitalized, separated from her daughter, Sala, who is the focus of the book’s final chapter and the 12th tribe.
Somewhere in between, there are Six, Bell, Alice, Billups and Franklin. Six gets burned when he falls into a scalding hot tub of water filled by Cassie and Bell, who are distracted because they are getting ready for a night out. Years after being burned, he is still subject to sudden bouts of both violence and what appears to be divine intervention.
Readers meet Six in 1950, when he is 15, and sent away from home with a group of revival preachers for viciously beating another boy. Bell’s story is set in 1975, when she is a middle- aged woman suffering from tuberculosis alone after her criminal lover leaves her to die.
Alice marries well — we meet her in 1968 when she is 25 — but she is fragile and can’t cope with her life, her husband, her loneliness or her domestic help. She’s closest to Billups — the pair shares one short story — who was sexually abused as a child, but who just might be the most together of Hattie’s children during the time of his or her stories.
In 1969, we meet Franklin, a soldier in Vietnam who has a significant alcohol problem and who is newly single after his marriage broke up because he was unfaithful, just like his father, August.
Ruthie and Ella are both babies when readers meet them, respectively in 1951 and in 1954. Turns out Ruthie isn’t August’s baby, and in this chapter, Hattie has run off with her father Lawrence, leaving all of the other children with just the irresponsible August to look after them. Hattie does return, however, giving birth to Ella with August in 1954. Ella’s story is perhaps the most heartbreaking — her parents are considering giving her away to relatives because they can’t afford to raise another baby.
All of Hattie’s “tribes” are anguished, forlorn and desperate in their own way; they tell an important story, but if you’re looking for a lighthearted read, don’t look here. This book is beautifully written and intelligent, but its message can be found in this quote from the book.
“Hattie knew her children did not think her a kind woman — perhaps she wasn’t, but there hadn’t been time for sentiment when they were young. ... They didn’t understand that all the love she had was taken up with feeding them and clothing them and preparing them to meet the world. The world would not love them; the world would not be kind.”