I was wrong about “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.” I’d read a few reviews and got the impression it was all about the Great Migration, all earnest and depressing, The-Novel-as-Duty. I mean there it was right on the jacket cover: “Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration, a story of love and bitterness and the promise ...” etc.
Like a chore. Read it, taste that bitterness.
But that was all wrong. Ayana Mathis has written a remarkable book, compelling, clear-eyed, yet rooted in the mystery of our human existence. “Twelve Tribes” is a family portrait in the shape of a broad, glinting jewel held up to the light by a steady hand, turned this way and that to display its extraordinary facets.
Like the other reviewers do, I’ll tell you how this book begins: with 15-year-old Hattie fleeing Georgia for Philadelphia, where she marries August and bears twin children, who die at seven months. But what I didn’t bargain for was how instantly and expertly Mathis would plunge me into those days and nights of Hattie’s babies’ last gasps for life — how I clung to hope even when I knew it was hopeless (that jacket cover again: it gave it away), leaving me panting, like Hattie, with exhaustion and despair.
What follows is a serpentine journey along the lives of the rest of her nine children, plus a granddaughter who Hattie raises. Hattie presides over this winding tale, but that doesn’t mean she dominates it. In many of the chapters about her sons and daughters she scarcely appears. Sometimes she is a mere off-stage presence, a grown up child’s fierce memory. When 22-year-old Floyd raises his trumpet in 1948 in some juke joint in Georgia, he flashes on Hattie and this wretched place she left behind:
“He owed these people something, of that much he was sure. Music was the only way he could step into the current of their experience. There was some condescension in this, but he knew no other way to go about it.”
Other times Hattie strides into the midst of the story as if Mathis herself hadn’t seen her coming through the thin wooden door: In 1975, Hattie’s daughter, Bell, excommunicated from the family, dying of tuberculosis, recalls her own act of treachery against her mother as she slides into a final delirium, only to be physically dragged back into the world by Hattie herself.
Or son Franklin, in 1969, who cheats and fights and repents and confesses, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not like I don’t know I’m doing wrong or like I’m powerless to stop myself. I just do what I’m going to do, despite what it’ll cost me.”
“Hattie” is a novel of wise choices, not just of which scenes to present but also how to show them to us. The author’s control reminds me of a summer storm with lightning that illuminates a tableau.
To try to puzzle out how she pulls it off, I have gone back to page 70, near the end of the chapter about Hattie’s 15-year old son Six in 1950. Six is a budding preacher, gone South to a revival after an accident scarred him and a violent outburst made it unsafe for him to stay back in Philadelphia. Some people think Six has the gift, the gift of healing, but Six doesn’t believe it, and some of the other revival ministers want him gone:
“Rose came out onto the porch. She gazed at him with such expectation and such reverence — he wanted to please her, to be what she thought he was. She led him through a darkened main room and into a bedroom that smelled more of sadness than of disease. A woman lay on a pallet on the floor with the moonlight shining silver in her. Six saw her skepticism and her exhaustion.
“ ‘This him?’ she said to her daughter.
“ ‘Y’es, ma’am,’ the girl answered.”
Mathis gives us everything we need to see this with the sudden clarity of a lightning flash. She writes with restraint, but she makes no fetish of economy.
By the last chapter, Hattie and the tottering August have outlasted their passions and their pride. They are old; they are raising their daughter’s daughter. Surrounded by people but alone, 10-year old Sala rises in church to answer Brother Merrill’s call to accept Jesus as her savior; she steps out into the center aisle to become a child of God.
“Sala understood nothing. She didn’t feel the way the other parishioners seemed to feel. She had only the slightest inkling of their devotion, as though it were an image in a mirror glimpsed through a half-open door.”
Sala reaches out to grasp what the preacher is offering, the “promise of love.” Until Hattie thrusts herself into center stage of the story on the second-to-last page of the book. Our last glimpse is of her jaw-set determination, as if to say to us once and for all, “I was; I am; I will be.”