Finally! As promised, here’s the first book I listened to while mowing. It takes me a while to mow, so I could finish a big chunk of this one.
So we begin this novel with an ethereal voice telling us that they represent the town itself, but also death, life, and maybe a kind of group of spirits. We then meet a young family moving to the black section of a Mississippi town, now established once the white members of the town settle and decide where the Black folks are allowed to live. It’s the 1930s and well, it’s Mississippi.
This young family is a new minister and his new wife, a woman we find out has the spirit of a harlot trapped in her body from an incident in her youth. This spirit runs wild and she’s gets herself into trouble in the town.
We then move on to the generation coming next, the children in the family. Now begins the bulk of the novel as they grow up, have kids, raise families. The center of the novel involves the child of the daughter of the minister, who becomes friends and would-be young lovers with a new boy in town for the summer, Emmett “Bobo” Till. And well, you know what happens next. After his death, our character grows up, gets married, has her own children, and the novel follows her and her historical destiny.
This novel plays around with history, destiny, the world of spirits. The opening reminds me so much of the opening of Toni Morrison novels. But something here bothers me…not with this novel, but with the narrative associated with Emmett Till, something I THINK we’re started to engage with more. There’s the clear insistence here and plenty of other places that he was “innocent” of whistling at the white woman who testifies against him in court. This was a reminder to me to not care one bit who he did and didn’t whistle at.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Waters-Bernice-L-McFadden/dp/1617750328/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=gathering+of+water&qid=1555873652&s=gateway&sr=8-1)