COLEMAN HILL

A dark “biomythography”—to use a word coined by Audre Lorde, as Foote does—about the Great Migration.

Around 1916, the families of Lucy Grimes and Celia Coleman decide they’ve had enough of the South. Sick of living on and farming land that belongs to white people, they opt to move north, lured by letters from friends and neighbors who have relocated: “Us women could stay at home all day, baking blackberry pie for our husbands and children. We could have hands like the lily-white ladies in the Sears Roebuck catalog—real soft and smooth, cuz we’d cream em every night. The only cotton we’d touch would be our dresses and gloves and the babies’ diapers.” Lucy and Celia meet on a train to New Jersey, where they hope for better things. The two are unlikely friends: Lucy is gentle and retiring; Celia is “coarse” and “abrasive.” Both become widowed and are forced to raise their children alone; Celia turns to the bottle for comfort. Their relationship is destroyed after Celia catches her son, Jebbie, playing doctor with Lucy’s daughter Bertha. Jebbie and Bertha grow up to have children together, but Bertha loses a pregnancy after Celia shoves her down the stairs. The rest of Foote’s debut novel—inspired by her own family—traces the intergenerational trauma of the entwined families over the ensuing decades. There’s a great deal of focus on Celia, who is revealed to be so mean and drunk that some of her own grandchildren plot to murder her. Though this is a brutal novel, devoid of anything approaching light, Foote’s prose is excellent and her dialogue rings true. She paints a vivid picture of the community of Vauxhall, New Jersey, and sticks the landing at the end of the book. The structure is a bit scattered, and one wishes the stories that make up the novel cohered a little more, but that’s mostly nitpicking—this is a promising debut from a clearly gifted writer.

A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.