By Bernice L. McFadden.
239 pp. Akashic. Paper, $15.95
NYT
Young Easter Bartlett’s life in Jim Crow-ruled Georgia, in 1910, is dominated by racism. After her sister is brutally raped by a group of white boys, her family crumbles and Easter flees her hometown of Waycross, only to witness more brutal and unpunished instances of white cruelty. A chance encounter leads the book-loving girl “up South” to Harlem, where the stimuli of city life coax forth her burgeoning artistic sensibility. Standing on a subway platform, Easter stares “down the dark throat of the tunnel” and sees “a pair of dim eyes peering back at her.” McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth, and intersperses fictional characters with figures including Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes and a libidinous Fats Waller. When Easter begins to gain recognition as a writer of short stories, she is initiated into a Harlem Renaissance milieu of interracial parties and intellectual life, but also the complicated and self-congratulatory culture of “negrophilia,” in which wealthy whites champion the works of black artists. Having escaped the South’s overt, violent racism, Easter must navigate a far more nuanced brand of intolerance, cloaked in the pretense of acceptance. McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos. Returning to Waycross late in life, under vastly different circumstances than her early literary promise might have suggested, Easter speaks to an admiring reporter from a Harlem newspaper: “A still and steady silence fell over them. It was a deep and mournful quiet usually reserved for the dead. It was appropriate.”
