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Title: Growing Up Nigger Rich: A Novel by Gwen Y. Fortune, Gwendoline Y. Fortune ISBN: 1-56554-963-5 Publisher: Pelican Pub Co Pub. Date: February, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Enlightened Work
Comment: It is a truly wonderful book. Certainly an education for us in terms of the dimensions of relationships in a complex culture. It is multi-faceted, a touching examination of all of the relationships of black people: north/south, schooled and unschooled, young and old, relatively rich and poor, men/boys and women/girls---all with both historical and contemporary perspectives.
The book showed in dramatic fashion how children learn how to act, what to be, and what to hope for. Fortune wove a touching web of loyalties amongst family members, children to parents and vice versa...regarding life's ambitions.
Some of the issues were, of course, universal and we all will readily relate to them, too. But the others, those described from the black perspective, from those who lived it--the indignities, the pain, and the qualities necessary to be able to find joy in spite of it, and to survive the slow battle--not yet won. Those were the most revealing and poignant passages in the novel. I recommend it to anyone who has empathy with and goodwill for our fellow Americans.
Rating: 5
Summary: Breaking Open the Stones
Comment: I took Gwendoline Fortune's new memoir-as-novel Growing Up Nigger Rich to read on the plane to San Francisco this weekend. Once started, I could not close it up to sleep, but read straight through start to finish. It is a rich and complex novel, well-wrought and fascinating, especially for someone like me who did not grow up in the South, or in America at all, but in Australia.
The story centers on Gayla Tyner, daughter of a respected Black doctor in Carolton, South Carolina, who comes back home to the painful task of confronting, and eventually overcoming, old hurts. As Fortune says, 'It takes a lot of weight to break open the stones.'
Gayla's story gives us a different perspective on growing up in the segregated South. It gives us the world of the educated, upper-class Black, showing us what it was like to feel equal, even superior, to the white people who, by reason of their whiteness, felt free to call her 'nigger coon,' 'jigaboo,' 'darky,' 'tarbaby,' 'old yellow thing,' a world where even the compliment of being asked to sing for wealthy white groups, 'who thought nobody could sing like "the Colored,"' was an insult, a world of dislocation, of not knowing 'exactly where we're from in Africa,' of 'white relatives who don't come to Christmas dinner.'
Gayla's world is richly peopled by characters who walk right off the page into the heart. Their stories wind in and out of each other, turning back to look behind, leaping forward to peer into the future, a kaleidoscope of past, present, and hoped-for all happening together, the way they do in all of us.
Much in this rich layering is dark, but the reader is not left in darkness. With her keen eye for the telling detail, Fortune gives us glimpses of the hope that has grown up since desegregation: a black hand in a white, a passing smile from white to black, a reference to the easiness together of black and white in her children's generation.
Running through Gayla's story is the story of her husband, George, a compulsive and eventually doomed philanderer, who 'loved women . . . Tall, short, light, dark, young, or a little mature. The only ladies George ignored were ugly ones.' Fortune shows him, a newly minted PhD, applying for his first real job, as an Aeronautical Engineer, and being redirected to 'Altman's Custodial Placement.' His story gives Fortune the vehicle to voice her concern for the plight of her generation's Black man who, 'knew how it felt to be invisible,' and as a result, 'can't move forward, and . . . will not move backward.'
Nigger Rich has a strong visual and tactile impact. Gayla's neighborhood comes alive with wonderful details of food and clothes and customs, the sound of voices. She gives us a place where dogs 'wag their tails in simple pleasure for a clear, warm day,' a place of old women, the 'grandmothers, who nurture all the children of their neighborhood.' Here is a funeral feast set out on 'the round, oak dining table, baskets of golden, hot, homemade rolls wrapped in large, white, starched, cotton napkins, a buttery aroma announcing their entrance . . . Silver platters high with home-fried chicken, cut-glass bowls of creamy potato salad edged with slivers of oily pimiento, and sliced boiled eggs sprinkled with paprika, lined the dining table and sideboard. Coconut, pecan, and sweet potato pies filled two card tables because there was no room for them anywhere else.'
Fortune spends some time considering the concept of how to name her people: Black? Negro? Colored? African American? She comes down to the delicious notion of 'People of Color.' What a lovely phrase, and so apt. Never have I read a story with such a feast of skin color: yellow, high-yellow, molasses, umber, caramel, black-as-night, coffee, honey, cocoa, taupe, bamboo-brown, copper, buttered toast, henna, ebony, tea, chocolate. It's like a poem, or as one of her people says, "There's nothing prettier than a roomful of us, all decked out . . . A flower garden with all the colors of the rainbow. Yes, ma'am."
Growing Up Nigger Rich is a lovely book: an engrossing story, an education, and a finger pointing toward hope for true and lasting amity between the races.
Rating: 5
Summary: Growing Up Nigger Rich: Wealthy in Wisdom
Comment: Gwendoline Y. Fortune's novel Growing Up Nigger Rich seems at first to tell a straightforward, simple story. College professor Gayla Tyner pays a visit of determined self-discovery to her parents and hometown. Caught in the ambiguities of a troubled marriage relationship, she contemplates her family relationships, connects with old friends, considers her options.
But scratch the surface of Fortune's story, and you find a commentary full of wisdom and experience that proves the old saying that the personal is political. Gayla embodies the peculiar social and economic history of this country. She is a daughter of privilege, yet as vulnerable as any African American to the insults and outrages of racism. Through her story, we see the history of social change in this country and are confronted with troubling questions that remain. Who are we? What have we gained, and what have we lost? And most importantly, where are we going?
Growing Up Nigger Rich is about reconciliation: Gayla's need for personal reconciliation with herself, her father, her husband's infidelity; but also America's need for reconciliation of its present with its past. Thanks to Gwendoline Fortune's skill as a storyteller, this is an alternately painful and exhilirating, ultimately enriching and most engaging process.
(c)2002 Jan Maher
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Title: Cobwebs of Time by Tesa Jones ISBN: 1582441936 Publisher: Rutledge Books, Inc. Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van (Today Show Book Club #5) by Alan Bennett, Alan Bennett ISBN: 0812969650 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Stage Door. by Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman ISBN: 082221069X Publisher: Dramatist's Play Service Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
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Title: A Love No Less : Two Centuries of African American Love Letters by Pamela Newkirk ISBN: 0385503792 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 20 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Jeeves in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse ISBN: 0060972823 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 14 March, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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