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Exploring entitlement
By Roy Hoffman |
August 14, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
LAND and its title, singular and collective, are the ties that bind, and nearly unravel, in this account of an African-American family far-flung from its moorings. Cary - whose first novel, "The Price of a Child," followed the antebellum travails of a runaway slave turned abolitionist, and whose second, "Pride," set late in the last century, featured the voices of women telling of love and loss - has now found a through-line from the 19th-century to the 21st-century South.
During a visit to his great-grandmother Nana Selma in South Carolina, Philadelphia-dwelling Alonzo Rayne, the 30-year-old protagonist of "If Sons, Then Heirs," relives his troubled but nurturing boyhood, and also gets a dollop of history. In helping Selma untangle the snarl of his inheritance - and that of many other relatives, it turns out - he visits the state's Center for Heirs' Property Preservation and receives this daunting explanation: "William Tecumseh Sherman had given low-country land to ex-slaves. If the original owners bore 18 live children, then the land was divided 18 times." And so on down the line. "Think like the Genome Project," he's told. "All the people on this earth who came from them - all them people - that's who owns the land."
Inevitably, the land becomes far more than what Rayne has dismissed as "55 acres of South Carolina backcountry."
Cary works hard to insert background information about property rights into an otherwise engaging narrative. Sometimes, though, the novel's discussions of complicated laws can try the reader's patience.
But Cary, who loops memory and flashback through an otherwise simple story, creates characters with such full-bodied life that their predicaments remain vivid. Most prominent of these is Nana Selma: ancient, obstinate, wry, a woman holding her scattershot family together through sheer determination.
Will Rayne claim his birthright, becoming part of a reverse migration, north to south? Can Nana Selma hang on long enough to celebrate that day? Such questions aren't usually the basis for high drama, but they propel Cary's bluesy and emotionally resonant novel, in which several generations set out to rescue one another.
During a visit to his great-grandmother Nana Selma in South Carolina, Philadelphia-dwelling Alonzo Rayne, the 30-year-old protagonist of "If Sons, Then Heirs," relives his troubled but nurturing boyhood, and also gets a dollop of history. In helping Selma untangle the snarl of his inheritance - and that of many other relatives, it turns out - he visits the state's Center for Heirs' Property Preservation and receives this daunting explanation: "William Tecumseh Sherman had given low-country land to ex-slaves. If the original owners bore 18 live children, then the land was divided 18 times." And so on down the line. "Think like the Genome Project," he's told. "All the people on this earth who came from them - all them people - that's who owns the land."
Inevitably, the land becomes far more than what Rayne has dismissed as "55 acres of South Carolina backcountry."
Cary works hard to insert background information about property rights into an otherwise engaging narrative. Sometimes, though, the novel's discussions of complicated laws can try the reader's patience.
But Cary, who loops memory and flashback through an otherwise simple story, creates characters with such full-bodied life that their predicaments remain vivid. Most prominent of these is Nana Selma: ancient, obstinate, wry, a woman holding her scattershot family together through sheer determination.
Will Rayne claim his birthright, becoming part of a reverse migration, north to south? Can Nana Selma hang on long enough to celebrate that day? Such questions aren't usually the basis for high drama, but they propel Cary's bluesy and emotionally resonant novel, in which several generations set out to rescue one another.
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