Nowhere Is a Place - Bernice L. McFadden

Bernice L. McFadden’s Nowhere Is a Place was an unexpected gem. I hadn’t a clue what it was really about when I picked it up, and it wound up being quite moving. A story within a story, an African-American woman and her mother drive cross-country to a family reunion in Georgia, but the narrative about the lives of their ancestors that springs forth from this road trip becomes the heart of the novel.

The thirtysomething daughter, Sherry, has long puzzled and frustrated her mother, known to family and friends as Dumpling, with her travels, her searches for meaning, and her relationships with white men (and men of other colors). In a loving relationship and newly pregnant, Sherry decides it is time to finally understand an event from her childhood: a violent and unexplained slap from her mother when she was six years old. She comes to find that slap was generations in the making.

Sherry and Dumpling are both readers and writers in the story, Dumpling presenting an oral history of their family’s roots and Sherry, after “reading” this history, novelizing it and presenting it for Dumpling to read. While I find the idea of Sherry writing this polished work during a few stops at motels and other spots along the trip a bit weak (that aspect of the plot becomes thankfully easy to overlook after awhile), Sherry and Dumpling’s roles as readers and writers are central to their eventual mutual understanding. Further, it is only after Dumpling comes to know her own story from an older family friend, giving Sherry the final pieces of the puzzle regarding that slap, that Sherry is able to overcome her reticence and let Dumpling in on her current story, allowing her mother to speak to the—white—father of her child on the phone.

In some ways, Sherry is the reader of this story along with us. Sherry’s open-mindedness on race and philosophy is in line with the “color-blind” way many of us think we see the world, or want to see it. Dumpling, meanwhile, sees the world in black and white. Reading their family history, we and Sherry come to understand just why that is. By the end, we have met in the middle, but not before being confronted with the brutal truths we conveniently like to forget about our country’s history and like to ignore regarding the reasons our racial divide is still so wide.

I must say that McFadden’s poetic prose, while sometimes gorgeous, is often just too much. This first printing of the book is also irritatingly in need of a proofreader. But McFadden is incredibly gifted in the art of creating vivid characters. Lou, Buena, Brother, Suce, Lovey, and Dumpling leave indelible marks, and I missed them when I was finished reading. The lost childhood of Nayeli, the Native American girl who is sold into slavery, named “Lou” after a dead family dog, and becomes the family’s matriarch, is tragic, and her choices and sorrows are shocking. Brother, Suce, Willie, and the others’ mundane but terrifying existence in the shadow of the big house and their crazed, bedridden master, unaware of their own freedom and then struggling for a way to claim it, is riveting. The sheer amount of this family’s history that is packed into the novel’s 280 pages—in the form of an engrossing plot—is stunning. McFadden has talents for both emotional punch and narrative structure. The book began slow for me—the first twenty-five pages were okay but not thrilling—but once Lou’s, and the family’s, story began, the work became a page-turner.

Nowhere Is a Place came out in 2006; McFadden has five other novels, and I definitely plan to check them out.

Grade: A