THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280588
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
THE GOOD NEGRESS
A.J. VERDELLE
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 299 pp. $19.95.
A.J. VERDELLE, a statistical analyst in Brooklyn, has written a luminous first novel. The Good Negress welcomes the reader from the first sentence - ``I knew I was sleepin too long.'' Then, deftly, Verdelle creates a fictive world real and compelling, a narrator honest and lovable, and a story truer than life.
The Good Negress is about growing up African-American and female in the 1960s. It is also about matriarchy, devotion and the struggle to advance; it is about love, loss, dignity and hard work.
As the story opens, 7-year-old Neesey awakes at her Granma'am's house in rural Patuskie, Va., outside Richmond. In short order she learns that her mother has gone home to Detroit and her grandmother is going to raise her, starting then and there with breakfast: one boiled egg, bacon, a glass of brown juice.
So begins Neesey's apprenticeship. Granma'am is steadfast, industrious and wise. She gives the child a task, saying: ``The best way to make y'self feel better is to get y'hands to workin.''
In a skip, Neesey is 13, and back in Detroit, almost a stranger in her mother's house. Using the skills Grandma'am taught her (to clean, to cook, and to be a ``worker bee''), Neesey sets out to earn a place in the family. She cleans and plans meals and cooks as if these chores are her sacred devotions. And they are - that's part of the ancestral wisdom her Granma'am passed to her. Work is love made visible.
Neesey's next hurdle is school. Under teacherly direction, she unlearns her Southern vernacular and begins to master ``the rules a English.'' As she changes, the language of her narrative evolves. She begins to say ``ass-uh-kuh'' in place of ``aks.'' Before long, her name becomes Denise. Still, she is faithful to her ``country-folk'' heritage.
Neesey's story is one of acculturation and conflict. She struggles to protect her Granma'am's values and Southern upbringing while she makes her way in the urban North. Finally, as a grown woman looking back, Denise pulls all these strands together. There is no doubt she'll carry Granma'am's wisdom into the future. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Virginia
Beach. by CNB