|
|
By Breena Clarke
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 1999
Breena Clarke's first novel takes place in Georgetown in 1925, where a large and close-knit African American community took
shape beneath the shadow of segregation. At the center of the story is baby Clara, who is swallowed by the Potomac as her
sister, Johnnie Mae, cools off in the brackish water. It's the only place the girls can find relief--they're banned from the
new, clean swimming pool the white kids use.
After Clara drowns, the river is never the same, and Johnnie Mae hovers on the edge of womanhood wondering if she'll be able
to get past her guilt and emptiness. In an eloquent passage, Clarke writes, "Losing a loved one, a family member, is like
losing a tooth. After a while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split the distance between themselves
and the other teeth still left, trying to close up spaces."
Bits of wisdom like this are the book's charm. Most remarkable are the church scenes, which Clarke renders almost purely in
the give-and-take of voices: the booming preacher's sermon ("The people we love, we only borrowing them"), and the congregation's
"Praise Jesus, Amen" exclamations. The author based her novel on stories passed down in Georgetown--tales of that area's first
black churches, founded when people decided they wanted their own place of worship, and implicitly their own God. In church the
novel takes flight. Elsewhere River, Cross My Heart suffers from clumsy, purple prose, and a plot that moves forward in labored
fits and starts. Clarke painstakingly tries to re-create this past world, but sometimes it seems her duty to history is holding
her back, bogging her down in period-piece details. In the effortless church scenes, history loses its gravity and is absorbed
by grace.
|
