The year is 1925. Hattie is 17, pregnant and she has escaped Jim Crow-era Georgia to Philadelphia after her father was shot dead by two white men.
The year is 1925. Hattie is 17, pregnant and she has escaped Jim Crow-era Georgia to Philadelphia after her father was shot dead by two white men.
At the train station, Hattie sees black women tripping freely down a street, and a black woman chatting cordially with a white florist — the future suddenly seems full of hope. Wanting “looking forward names” for her new-born twins, Hattie names them Philadelphia and Jubilee. But much like her hopes for the future, the twins do not live long.
A bout of pneumonia kills them, a loss from which Hattie never recovers though she does go on to have nine children. Add to this number a grandchild and the lost twins, and you have the twelve tribes of the novel’s title.
The novel, spanning the first half of the twentieth century, dedicates individual chapters to the twelve children, with an occasional interlude into Hattie’s unhappily married life with her husband, August. Through her children, we learn about Hattie’s as well as her children’s trials and tribulations in a severely racially-segregated world.
The Twelve Tribes Of Hattie is the latest recommendation made by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. The book checks both the positive and negative boxes that usually accompany the talk-show host’s selections. The novel is a heart-wrencher, but it is also sentimental and uni-dimensional. August is a drunken gambler who abandons his wife and children for long stretches. Hattie’s children’s woes are no less than her own. Much like the Biblical descendants of Jacob — the 12 tribes of Israel who searched for and populated a new land — Hattie’s children find new lives in a land of promises (in the North). But the promise crumbles and new trials emerge. Floyd struggles with repressed homosexuality. Six, haunted by an accident from his childhood, can’t understand the religious fervour that overcomes him at times. Alice is tranquilised with sleeping pills by her husband. Hattie’s other children are saddled with different self-destructive tendencies, like schizophrenia, infidelity, and an almost fatal bout of tuberculosis. The men are drunk, confused gamblers, and the women struggle to keep body and family together.
The suffering is frequently overdone in The Twelve Tribes... and the characters become more symbolic (of historical periods) than credible individuals. If you can forgive the sentimentality, it’s a satisfying read with its simple language.
@apoorva_dutt
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