04 Jan / Some Sing, Some Cry by Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza
Sometimes my inability to process dialects actually has an upside … because now I can just turn on the audible versions and be read to in my old age. So if you have the choice, I highly recommend the audible recording of Some.
Yes, at 26.5 hours (it’s 576 pages in print), we’re talking time-ly, but worth the commitment all the way through. While Robin Miles‘ performance consistently draws you in (she falters briefly when she sings – in spite of a gorgeous voice, her notes occasionally wander too far), the most important reason to listen comes at the very end when the authors Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza – who also happen to be sisters – speak about their 10-year journey to write the book. Shange, who created the seminal piece, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, spent half of that decade off, recuperating from two strokes which still linger in her speech. Listen to the interview as she vibrantly reveals how the legendary Maya Angelou helped get her reading and writing back …
Which leads to this epic saga, covering almost 200 years and seven generations of the extended Mayfield family. Music binds and divides the clan, with many of the characters embedded in the diverse music styles – spirituals, blues, jazz, rock ‘n roll, and everything in between – that provide quite the soundtrack for much of American history.
With the end of the Civil War, matriarch Ma Bette is thrown out of the only home she’s ever known, Sweet Tamarind, now sold to antebellum carpetbaggers. Ma Bette imparts a final goodbye to the late Julius Mayfield, her “Pa-lover” – her father, the father of her children, her former owner. With her granddaughter Eudora in tow, Ma Bette makes her way to the Charleston home of her daughter Blanche, who “[d]id so well for herself,” enjoying a privileged life among the city’s colored elite. Blanche is less-than-welcoming of her unrefined “Geechee”-island relatives, and Bette and Eudora are forced to make their own way in Lil Mexico, the city’s colored enclave.
Generation by generation, the Mayfield epic unravels, overlaps, separates, and dovetails again; Ma Bette with her seeing powers is never far, even in eventual death. Eudora, whose life begins with such diligent promise, suffers brutally. Of her two daughters, Elma the elder never learns her true origins, while Lizzie the younger tries desperately to escape her own violent memories. Their children eventually scatter, some fulfilled, others forever troubled. The music, however, always reunites them …
The dense novel is certainly ambitious … and if you listen, you will most likely finish. Besides, you must get to the final sisterly interview!
Admittedly, Some proves uneven in both story and style: Too many strong Mayfield women succumb to worthless men, too many repetitive tragedies desensitize the reader, too many impossible chance meetings happen, too much attention is given to musical history over Mayfield family history. Indeed, the pivotal decades from World War II into the 21st century are rushed through in the final 70 pages, diluted by too many distant characters. Ironically, the undeniable strength of the book’s first half made me long for a separate, second book to fill in the blanks, rather than feeling the ultimate disappointment of missing the post-war homecoming, the civil rights era, the anti-war movement, even the decadent disco years, with the latest Mayfields. I’m convinced … they still have their stories to tell …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010