The Mothers, by Brit Bennett

The Mothers  by Brit Bennett

Reviewed by NC Weil

This 2016 novel, Bennett’s debut, deals with secrets and lies; behavior that seems harmless till someone gets hurt; and, yes, mothers. The narrative, primarily third person as it dips into the minds of smart but destabilized Nadia Turner, her preacher’s son boyfriend Luke Sheppard, and her shy religious friend Aubrey Evans, also rides in the first person plural of The Mothers. This group of older church ladies spend much of their time in Upper Room Chapel, praying for those who leave prayer requests in the sanctuary, but also spreading gossip as they learn fellow congregants’ secrets.

The Mothers have seen it all: girls who get pregnant too young, endure lopsided marriages till either they or their husbands flee, and every other mistake a girl or woman can make, most having to do with trusting men. So they look with suspicion at the boys and young men in their congregation, scold the girls who dress provocatively, and picket the abortion clinic, though they distance themselves from the white fanatics whose instinct is to bomb clinics and murder doctors.

Nadia’s mother kills herself violently when her daughter is seventeen, and Nadia, unable to understand that act, sees her own existence as the crippling of her mother’s potential. They are a perfect lineage, each seventeen when surprised by pregnancy. The older woman, kicked out of her home by her angry mother, joins and weds her baby’s father at the Marine base in Oceanside, California, where he is soon deployed to Iraq. Nadia doesn’t consciously meet him till she’s four, and by then she and her mother are a closeknit pair, her father on the outside. It’s an ordinary household till her mother’s suicide, but then Nadia goes off the rails.

She and Luke spend as much time together as possible, sneaking around his parents’ house in their absence, so her pregnancy should come as no surprise. Luke helps her, but that assistance comes at a cost too high for everyone their lives touch: Nadia, Aubrey, Luke and his parents, his friends… the reverberations of Nadia’s and Luke’s actions go on for years, intensifying when they could have ebbed, and throwing many lives into chaos.

Nadia thinks about her mother, about the pregnancy at seventeen that derailed her life: “Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain…Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.”

A handful of years pass. Nadia’s upward trajectory – college and law school – is interrupted by her father’s health. Luke’s hopeful return to football after a devastating early-college injury is derailed, opening the way for a more meaningful life. Aubrey, who has carried Nadia’s and Luke’s secrets, keeps her own locked away where they fester. And the Sheppards, leading their church as pastor and First Lady, must pay the consequences of helping Luke end Nadia’s pregnancy.

None are guiltless, all undermine their own promise in ways alternately thoughtless and self-sabotaging. Like all of us, they make their tainted choices for what seem the best of reasons, and so we sympathize even as we shake our heads at the damage they cause.

The Man Who Thought He Owned Water, by Tershia D'Elgin

My son the hydrologist recommended this book, the biography of the author's father in relation to water laws and usage and rights in Colorado. In this state, as in those to its west and south, water is an overdemanded resource. Since the settling of the West, observant explorers have noted the scarcity of water and dryness of the landscape. All the same, residents continue to dodge this reality. From the 1880s on, "Rain follows the plow" was the myth that lured sod-busting homesteaders. The 1920s and 30s drought that picked up that plowed dirt and blew it up into massive dust storms, proved it wrong - and yet, builders of cities were able then, and continue today, to pull water from the rivers and the aquifer. At the cost to farmers.

D'Elgin's father, Bill Phelps, heir to the Eatons (his great-grandfather Benjamin Harrison Eaton was Colorado's 4th governor), moved to the family's property on a bend of the South Platte River west of Greeley, and became a gentleman farmer, enough family money behind him that he didn't have the same depth of worries other farmers struggled with. The water rights on his property were very old ("senior," as the term goes) - and yet, over time, as cities procured western slope water and permission to draw from the Platte, the right of farmers, including Bill, to draw from wells as they always had, was suddenly challenged. 

The details are many and complex, and if you want to take a look at water law as it affects humans, this book is a great place to start. Decades of farmers' handshake agreements with local water managers suddenly collapsed as water courts ruled consistently in favor of cities. Though water speculation was outlawed, clever men found a work-around on postage-stamp-sized parcels by creating semi-public water districts - given special status in Colorado law - which could then buy water rights and sell them to the highest bidder - always cities, since farmers have no money.

D'Elgin's wrath is mostly directed toward the mindless water use of city dwellers - what are we doing with water that's so valuable, compared to raising food? The water we waste maintaining lawns does not return to either groundwater nor the rivers. We're lulled by the certainty that when we turn on the faucet, water gushes out. More people move to cities in the West every day, many from regions with abundant rainfall. If their neighbors have jewel-green lawns, well, why shouldn't they? Meanwhile, the "buy and dry" method of acquiring water rights from desperate farmers guarantees once-productive land will return to dust. She notes the high incidence of suicide among farmers.

The lot of farmers has long been tragic, and she recounts reasons: Big Ag controls the crops: they pay less than the farmers' cost to grow corn, but offer a guaranteed market for it, and with the difference provided by government price supports (the Farm Bill), farmers survive. Any who want to grow something else have to convince banks to lend for crops without those established markets - and bankers would rather not take the risk. And of course, farmers are more vulnerable to weather than the rest of us - a hailstorm can destroy a year's crops in a matter of minutes. Drought in the absence of irrigation is a death sentence, but cities will always have more money to buy up water than rural water districts. 

It's worth remembering that Thomas Jefferson, at the founding of this country, identified farmers as the backbone of the new nation. Since then, fewer farmers run larger acreage. In the paper today, an article notes yet again that the number of farms has shrunk, with the average acres per farm increasing. This is Big Ag, whose monocropping and reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilizers have played havoc with the former ecosystems of land and water. There's a blues line we'd do well to remember: "You don't miss your water till your well runs dry."

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T - a mad movie musical!

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This film was directed by Roy Rowland, produced by Stanley Kramer, and, most important, written by Dr. Seuss.

How did I never see this remarkable movie until now? Made in 1953, it was Dr. Seuss’s only foray into the movie business. Featuring song and dance, wonderful costumes, and sets based on the landscapes and details familiar to all Seuss readers, it tells the story of Bart (Tommy Rettig), a young boy (8?) who lives with his attractive widowed mother, Mrs. Collins, somewhere in America. But the Dr. T of the title, Dr. Terwilliker, is a musical monomaniac. Bart struggles at the piano at home while his mother, Mary Healy, criticizes his practice of the piece assigned by Dr. T.  Soon we meet the villain himself, Hans Conreid, and realize that along with nurturing dreams of a grand concert of this trivial song he has composed, he also has designs on Mrs. Collins. He’s not her only suitor - there’s also the kind modest plumber, Mr. Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes), who sides with Bart but cannot break through to Mrs. Collins.

Soon Bart is moved to Dr. T’s Academy, ringed with barbed wire and equipped with guards, searchlights, and dungeons, where a two-tiered keyboard snakes around a grand performance space. Dr. T’s dream is to conduct 500 boys playing his Happy Fingers song in unison at a great recital - hence the 5000 fingers of the title. Each boy will have a room in this fantastical prison, where Mr. Zabladowski is installing sinks in their cells. Dr. T. himself, and Bart’s mother, live in the upper reaches, above the recital hall.

This movie was intended for children, and as in The Cat in the Hat, they are given minds of their own and some pretty good lines. It’s surprising that it didn’t make more of a comeback in the sixties and seventies as a movie well suited to psychedelics - it would be a marvel on acid!

I don’t want to give away those delicious details that will surprise and amaze first-time viewers - just go see it! If there’s an indie theater in your community, request a screening - it’s worthy of big-screen appreciation.

Roma, a film by Alfonso Cuaron

If you know anything about this much-lauded film, you’re already aware that Roma is a slice-of-life based on Alfonso Cuaron’s childhood, seen primarily through the experiences of the family housekeeper. Shot in lustrous black-and-white, with the camera mostly in the middle distance - the frame of a nearby observer - the story immerses us in personal and national travails of the early 1970s in Mexico, primarily in Mexico City.

The parents are upper-middle-class intellectuals, and their home in the eponymous Roma neighborhood is rich with the trappings of that life - books and lovely furnishings, spacious areas for dining, TV-watching, and family activities. Each of the four children has his/her own room, but they all share Cleo, who wakes them, helps them dress, with her comadre Adela makes them breakfast, and gets them all off to school. While they’re out she’s changing sheets, collecting laundry to scrub on the roof and hang to dry, cleaning, running errands. At the end of the day the cycle is reversed - again the family is fed, tea is fetched for the husband, Cleo tucks in the children one at a time, singing each to sleep. At the end of that long day, she’s in the kitchen washing and putting away dishes for tomorrow. The two young servants live in a small room off the garage, and the daily rhythm of their lives will look familiar to any homemaker - cooking, cleaning, sweeping, scrubbing, and tending to the endless needs of others.

The family’s lives are disrupted, and the way they cope highlights the central role Cleo plays in their world. She may be a paid lower-class addition to the household, but when it comes down to it, she is a member of their family, bossed but also cherished and, yes, loved.

Cuaron’s passion for detail is clear in all the camera takes in - a busy clinic, a hacienda where they go for holiday, Cleo and Adela’s day off, the street vendors, bands, and protest marches that crowd their neighborhood, the 1960s and 70s cars, ubiquitous dogs, jets overhead reminding us they live in a large city. The credits are extensive - he invested much of himself in this homage to his family and particularly to Libo (his Cleo stand-in), to whom it’s dedicated.

The density of images brings to mind Ingmar Bergman’s wonderful late-career film Fanny and Alexander, which celebrates the textures and visual richness of a warm and open life, in high contrast to the stark asceticism of his usual priests and patriarchs. Though Bergman’s film was in saturated color, the detail, the wondrous individuality of each object picked out by the camera, is the same. It reminds us that children often remember in vivid specifics what adults consign to categories: dogs, or windows, or cars. We are richer for Cuaron’s exquisitely-shared memories.

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

Barely over a year into their marriage, Celestial and Roy, a rising Atlanta couple, visit his parents in rural Louisiana. Knowing his mother’s discomfort with his choice of a city girl, independent and artistic and ambitious, he opts to lodge with Celestial at a motel not the house. Which proves fateful: he is accused of raping another guest, and we watch the well-greased skids as an African American man is in quick succession accused, tried, convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated, with little concern for due process, legal subtleties, or opportunity to assert his innocence.

This novel is told in first person, in the voices of Celestial, Roy, and Andre, Celestial’s childhood friend and confidante, who introduced her and Roy.

Through an exchange of letters we watch the couple’s relationship devolve. Celestial’s prosperous family gladly foots the bill for appeals, but her visits dwindle as her business, hand-sewing fabric doll-babies, takes off. Roy supported her dream before his own was derailed, but the incongruity between her life and his becomes an intolerable burden. Celestial writes:

“At your mother’s funeral, your father showed what the connection is between husband and wife. If he could have, he would have gone into the grave instead of her. But they lived under one roof for more than thirty years. In some ways they grew together and grew up together, and had she not died, they would have grown old together. That’s what a marriage is. What we have here isn’t a marriage. A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.

I blame it on time, not on you or me. If we put a penny in a jar for each day we have been married, and we took a penny away every day we’ve been apart, the jar would have been depleted a long time ago... The last three times I have visited, we said almost nothing to each other. You can’t bear to hear about my days and I can’t bear to hear about yours.”

Her friend Andre claims more ground based on their lifelong kinship, and Celestial finally stops waiting for the end of her husband’s twelve-year sentence. These young men are careful in how they treat each other - both want Celestial, but both respect her career, her choices, her needs. And they respect each other, which doesn’t make it any easier when they finally face off as rivals.

These characters remind us of what “civilized” means: having a highly-developed society and culture; polite, urbane, refined. In our current climate of polarization and intolerance, such characters might seem quaint - yet it is their conviction that civility is essential that makes their dilemma so striking. It would be easy to put a gun in the hand of Roy, maybe Andre as well, but Jones has greater range than to settle for the predictable solution. She dives deep into her characters’ love and anger and loneliness, and doesn’t let anyone off the hook as their desires collide.

She offers us different versions of marriage: Roy’s mother, pregnant at 16 and abandoned by the baby’s father, meets Roy Hamilton who not only marries her and adopts the boy but loves him as a son, honoring him with his own name, fathering no other children who might displace his love for the boy. Celestial’s mother divorced, and her second match was for love. Andre’s father left his mother, marrying another woman and raising children with her - at which point Celestial’s father positioned himself as a father to Andre.

These families disapprove of the affection they observe blooming between Celestial and Andre - “Aren’t you still married?” - but in Roy’s absence, she discovers in her oldest friend a deep understanding she cannot push away. Jones doesn’t take sides - she gives as much weight to Roy Sr. and Celestial’s parents as to Celestial and Andre. All their convictions are heartfelt, and utterly at odds. Someone has to lose.

Here’s a sample of how she puts it:

Gloria [Celestial’s mother] said, “I raised her to know her own mind.”

My father [said], “What is all this stuff about love and her own mind?... What did Roy do to deserve any of this? He didn’t do anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Though this is a story about marriage, it is also inescapably a story about what it is to be black in America. Roy’s college degree and rosy future mean nothing in prison - he is reduced to a man without agency. And it’s clear that if this can happen to him, it can happen to any man of color. When white people complain about the term ‘white privilege’, it is without experience comparable to a black man’s that demonstrates what that really means: the ground of assumption that one is dangerous, even criminal, regardless of one’s circumstances. ‘White privilege’ means one is not automatically at risk of suspicion or arrest or death for wearing a hoodie, browsing in a store, driving a car, renting an AirBnB ... anything you might do in the course of your life. I recently watched a YouTube video called “Birdwatching While Black,” a droll but not funny guide about how to avoid getting arrested or shot while in the field identifying birds, if you happen to be black.

Thank you, Tayari Jones, for making a world real, for plumbing the hearts of people who mean each other no harm, but who in the end lack the choice.

The Place, a film by Paolo Genovese

Not since My Dinner with Andre can I recall a film set in a single location - now we have Paolo Genovese's 2017 Italian film The Place, a cafe by that name in which a distinguished-looking fiftyish man holds court at a back table. Supplicants come to him with the problems that most deeply disturb them, and he flips through his thick handwritten notebook to one of the red ribbons - the kind you’d see in a Bible to mark a verse - and tells them what act will bring about what they want.

These acts have nothing to do with their problems - a woman who wants to be prettier is told to steal a very specific amount; a blind man is told that raping a woman will give him sight. But once he pronounces an oracular “deal” he has no alternate solution. They are free not to accept it, or to follow through, but each of them wants their outcome strongly enough to make their pact - at least to begin with.

They stop by to report on their progress, which he records in his notebook. The tasks he assigns often overlap, either by his design or by some hand of providence, and some people get what they ask for, some change their minds and drop the whole thing, and some try to convince him they did as he said - but he tells them they didn’t. “How do you know?” A man of few words, he doesn’t answer, but we know they didn’t. If they had, something about them would be different.

He is an enigma - we learn the names of some characters, but even in the credits he is Uomo (the Man). He’s at The Place when they’re setting up in the morning, he’s there when the waitress is mopping up at night. As she probes, he admits he doesn’t sleep much. We don’t see him arrive, we don’t see him leave. Sometimes The Place is crowded, other times he’s the only customer, and the chairs are upside down on every table except his. Why doesn’t he get kicked out? What’s his source of funds? He eats and drinks all day, but we never see him pay.

For a man intent on details, he offers few of his own. His supplicants ask him questions, including “Who are you?” which he deflects, returning to why they have come. One character accuses him of being Satan, which he neither confirms nor denies. He displays a lordly indifference to what they think of him - his only concern, once he’s assigned their task, is what steps they’re taking to complete it.

Is his purpose to awaken conscience, or to demonstrate to people that their desires blot out their morality? Or is he an evil being with the power to grant people’s wishes - as long as he gets in trade their compromised integrity? Or is he simply a mirror of a self-absorbed culture in which our happiness is so important we’re willing to destroy someone else’s to get it?