HOMEGOING

The story of a New York City lounge singer reconciling her troubled past with the possibility of a brighter future.

Johnson’s novella opens in 2006 with Maddie, a professional chanteuse in her mid-40s, recovering from a divorce and a miscarriage. Her parents, who are also split up, provide her with no solace and little sympathy. A visit to her hometown of Monroe, New York, north of the city, drudges up childhood memories of growing up Black in a White neighborhood, where she faced racist slurs and feelings of isolation and loneliness. Maddie’s Jamaican mother, Velma, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed—or wasn’t bothered by—her daughter’s childhood experience. The climax of the story happens at the funeral of a family friend, where Maddie realizes that time can march on and the past, as awful as it was, is in the past. The tale includes an excessive amount of backstory, and the storytelling style can be heavy-handed at times. However, the author deftly captures the complicated dynamic of self-involved parents and vulnerable children and expertly details Maddie’s misery to the point where readers will experience the character’s pain. Velma’s casually judgmental comments effectively establish tension (“You’ve got too much furniture in here,” Velma says of Maddie’s living space. “But the chest of drawers does look good by the piano. I didn’t think it would”), as do Maddie’s father’s clueless statements (“That dress looks good on you kiddo. You lost some weight,” he says, after her miscarriage). Also, it’s shown that no one in Maddie’s life is as bothered by the racism in her hometown as she is, until she’s vindicated in a final scene in which she effectively finds a way to move forward.

An insightful, if sometimes-uneven, novella about coming to terms with life’s most difficult moments.