First-time novelist Ayana Mathis has written a powerful debut novel. Paralleling “The Great Migration” of blacks from the South to the North in the early part of the twentieth century, this is the story of Hattie Shepherd, her husband August and their eleven children.
Hattie, her mother, and her sisters leave Georgia for Philadelphia, in the 1920s after the death of her father. She marries young and according to her family socially beneath her. Soon after the first year of their marriage, Hattie’s first-born twins die. This event coupled with never-ending poverty and losses, make Hattie a hard, brittle, rage-filled human being. Her children fear her and never are sure if they are loved.
Each chapter is loosely connected to the telling of Hattie’s life story. A chronological progression, more or less, each chapter relates the hardship and tragedies that were experienced by Hattie and her children. Hattie does not exhibit outward signs of affection toward her children. She does love them, but because of what she has experienced, she wants them to be able to survive in the harsh world that surrounds them. Unfortunately, the suffering continues to the next generation.
Although this is an unrelentingly sad novel, Mathis’ writing is poetic. As she describes the physical and emotional torment of her characters, I felt compassion for them. In the NYT’s Sunday Book Review Section of January 6, Isabel Wilkerson reviewed “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.” “Mathis chooses to tell…a compelling story of lost, empty souls at the margins of survival.”