Moving on
BOOKS Cheryl P Sucher reviews a debut novel that explores the alienation at the heart of a seldom-discussed mass migration.
BETWEEN 1915-1970, more than six million black Americans moved out of the south to the north and west in search of opportunity and equality. This mass exodus came to be known as the Great Migration. Ayana Mathis has fictionalised the fate of one black family swept up in its agonies in her elegant and powerful debut novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.
In her moving introduction, Mathis reveals that at the age of 10 her family split into two factions – her mother and herself on one side, her grandparents and siblings on the other. Acutely aware of what she lost, ‘‘the aunts, uncles and grandparents I knew when I was a child, grew to myth as I gained adulthood . . . The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is my imagination’s striving to give myself context, to have people again’’.
And so Mathis literally walks the years of the Great Migration through the life of the formidable matriarch Hattie Shepherd, a ‘‘high yellow’’ black woman from ‘‘good people’’ whose mother could pass for white but who chose to remain with her own. In 1923, 15-year-old Hattie, her older sister Marion, her younger sister Pearl and their beautiful mother are forced to flee Georgia when their blacksmith father is summarily executed by white men who immediately usurp his business and property. After 32 hours on the train north, they arrive in Philadelphia, Hattie’s ‘‘skirt still hemmed with Georgia mud, the dream of Philadelphia round as a marble in her mouth and the fear of it a needle in her chest’’. Thrust into the urban tumult, Hattie notices a young negro woman purchasing flowers from a white vendor. She accidentally drops them. In the subsequent melee, Hattie sees their hands accidentally brushing. ‘‘She waited for the other negroes to step back and away from the object of the violence that was surely coming.’’ But the vendor simply picks up the mess as the negro women apologises and walks away, holding her cone of