jo's Reviews > The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

i have no idea how to rate this book. it's beautiful in so many ways, but it's not a book one likes. so terribly painful. maybe i'll write a review. i have to recover first.

REVIEW 3/23/13

there is only one way i can make myself like (not appreciate, not admire, not respect, because those i already do: like) this book, and it is if i imagine it representing the author's childhood. in the acknowledgments she writes: "To the Philadelphia School for Girls, for being a light in the darkest part of my life..."

that would be her childhood.

now, if i'm an author who wrote a book about the terrible suffering the befalls each of the nine children of a cold and distant mother and a drinking, absent father, and i went to great pains precisely to show how terribly fucked up each child of this couple is; and if in the acknowledgments i refer to my childhood as "the darkest past of my life:" well, it seems to me i'm inviting the reader to gather that i had a distant, emotionally disconnected mother and an absent father, and that this caused me unimaginable pain.

this goes hand in hand with the very forgiving portrayal of both mother and father, who, in spite of their glaring shortcomings, are devoted to their children and love them, albeit in terribly flawed and entirely inaccessible ways.

also, mother's and father's personal anguish is contextualized. they leave jim crow georgia and come to the north (as it happens, philadelphia) full of hope and optimism. hattie, 16, is pregnant and soon gives birth to twins she clearly adores. hattie and augustus (17) live in a rented home but have great hopes soon to buy a house. that the twins are a seal of this promise is imprinted in their names: philadelphia and jubilee. at 7 months the twins catch pneumonia and die. maybe they die because it is 1925 and in 1925 babies died of pneumonia. maybe they die because they would have died in 2013 too. maybe they die because hattie prefers old wives' remedies to the medicines recommended by the doctor. who knows.

philadelphia is cold. philadelphia is humid. philadelphia is not georgia.

this death marks the end of everything: of augustus's ability to stand on his own two feet and keep on walking, or hattie's capacity to be emotionally available to her children, of a future, of middle-class living. the rest of hattie's children's life is spent in hunger, abject poverty, emotional starvation, and the distress of living with parents who are so embittered with each other, they can't even be in the same room (except, clearly, to have sex and make babies).

each child is marked by his or her own brand of misery. one is schizophrenic.

the background is a background of dislocation. in the south maybe hattie and augustus would have been happy. the north is cold and unforgiving. the north is lonely. yet the south is intolerable, unlivable. and the children, in their own ways, all die.

i can make myself like this book only if i think that ayana mathis described her childhood. otherwise i'll just have to settle for admiring it and hope that whatever demon haunted this young writer was exorcised in the writing of this book, and the next book will have the same expertise and artistry and none of the deadly bleakness. because this deadly bleakness (broken only, and with much welcome, by a tiny rain of sun right at the end) gives me nothing.