Zed: The Zoomer Book Club’s top three for Black History Month;
The transformative power of stories can combat the forces of historical amnesia and call readers to action. This season, and especially during Black History Month, three remarkable new titles lead the conversation
The Three Mothers > Anna Malaika Tubbs, doctoral candidate in sociology and a Gates Cambridge scholar (funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), brings her fieldwork and research on the diversity of Black motherhood to bear in
The Three Mothers (Feb.
2). “While their sons have been credited with the success of Black resistance, the progression of Black thought and the survival of the Black community, the three mothers who birthed and reared them have been erased,” she explains in the foreword of the group biography. “This book fights that erasure.” Their names are Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin and Louise Little, and they are the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and
Malcolm X respectively.
The famous offspring are figures often discussed together, so Malaika
Tubbs similarly entwines the formidable trio’s biographies (for example, upbringings in Georgia, Maryland and Grenada) and disparate experiences to show how their faith, creativity and intellect shaped their sons’ views and actions. And seeing the United States evolve throughout their lives –
which span a century – enriches our understanding of generations of Black resistance, not only during the civil rights movement but the Depression, the Great Migration from the south to the north and the Harlem Renaissance. The book’s epigraph sets the tone by quoting HaitianAmerican writer Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” about the Dominican Republic’s massacre of Haitian immigrants.
“Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze” is followed by George Floyd’s last words during his fatal arrest in Minneapolis in May: “Mama, I love you.” A welcome coda brings the discussion back to recent events, including #BlackLivesMatter, to underline how urgently history illuminates the present.
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
> In her outstanding debut How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Jan. 26), Cherie Jones, who works as a lawyer in Barbados, likewise takes a multigenerational view. Set in the summer of 1984, her novel explores the cycle of poverty and intimate partner violence in a fictional Barbadian resort town called Paradise. The title comes from a cautionary parable Wilma recounts to the granddaughter she is raising in the hopes of keeping the promising young woman out of trouble. By the age of 18, however, Lala is soon pregnant, trapped in a volatile marriage to a brutal man and living in poverty. (Jones’s prose doesn’t flinch from bloody physical conflicts and has earned comparisons to Jamaican writer Marlon James’s breakout A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fictionalized account of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.)
When Lala goes into premature labour, it sets this harrowing neo-noir in motion. Several lives fatefully overlap in the aftermath of a violent crime that happens when Lala’s husband, Adan, a burglar, and his longtime friend, Tone, are on a job. Mira, a former sex worker to the tourist trade who married a wealthy client and moved to England, is inexorably drawn in while vacationing on the island. Told through their alternating perspectives (as well as others, like the local madam and the beat cop investigating the homicide), the inner monologues flash back to what led to their choices. With empathy, the book lays bare the fear, bargaining and resignation that infuse their daily existence. While it’s by no means a redemptive narrative, it ends on a hopeful note.
Gutter Child
> The eerie familiarity of Gutter Child is unsettling. Though its determined young heroine’s attempt to escape the horrors of an oppressive regime may bring to mind Cora from Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Jael Richardson’s Gutter Child (Jan. 26) is more reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale – not in its totalitarian particulars but insofar as author Margaret Atwood has reminded us that every element of her dystopian novel has a true historical precedent.
Although it’s set in an imaginary apartheid country, Richardson – a culture journalist and the founder and artistic director of Brampton, Ont.’s Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) – has plumbed and remixed elements of Black and Indigenous history (like
Jim Crow laws in the U.S. and the Sixties Scoop in Canada) to create a nation ruled by settlers originally from an unknown Mainland. As colonizing forces in search of natural resources, the Mainlanders vanquish the indigenous Sossi, rename them the Gutter people and issue an automatic financial debt they must work off. The Gutter people stand apart due to their darker skin colour and are branded, treated as subhuman and toil endlessly in an economic system designed to destroy them. It’s distressing enough to come with a trigger warning: “This book is a work of fiction that explores a perilous world rooted in injustice,” the author writes at the start, urging readers to pause and rest “as required” to process the story. It’s a gripping tale of rebellion and perseverance, but it’s also about the psychological wounds of existing in a world where you are not wanted.