Homeward

The power of unanswerable questions

History books are great if all you want is a factual survey of life in a period of time you’d like to know more about, but there’s nothing better than well-researched work of historical fiction by a skillful, huge-hearted novelist to make you feel as if you’re actually living in that time.

Homeward by Angela Jackson-Brown is just such a book. It brings the Civil Rights era alive in the fictional town of Parsons, Georgia through the eyes Rose Perkins Bourdain whose life is profoundly changed by a series of events that occur there in the early 1960s.

Rose married young, against her parents’ advice. She’s lonely in her husband’s Mississippi hometown and, while he’s away in the air force, becomes pregnant with another man’s baby. Despite his forgiveness, she flees, broken-hearted and ashamed, to her family in Parsons.

Upon her arrival, we meet the Perkins family. Rose’s mother, Opal, I was delighted to learn, was the main character of Jackson-Brown’s earlier novel, When Stars Fall Down, also set in Parsons. Her father, Cedric, once a promising baseball player, lost an arm in an ugly racial incident in that town. Sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, grandparents. They are a close, loving family, steeped in faith. Navigating the small-town strictures of segregation with caution and integrity, Opal and Cedric have raised their children with hope for the future.

Also, upon her arrival, Rose’s younger sister and closest friend Ellena tells her about joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Spelman College. It’s 1963, a volatile year. Both Rose’s adultery and Ellena’s increasing involvement with SNCC set in motion a series of events that that brings SNCC volunteers to Parsons, Georgia, challenging the Perkins family’s faith and their belief in what is possible for Black Americans.

I loved many things about Homeward but what I loved most was how Jackson-Brown brought me into the thought process of family members as they contemplated what they could and should do as tensions heightened. Join the fight? Wait patiently, as they had been waiting—as one SNCC member pointed out—for 347 years to be free? The reader comes to each person’s moment of truth, the moment when they knew the must join the resistance, with full knowledge of their personal challenges and what it will cost.

I also loved Martin Luther King’s (fictional) visit to Parsons, particularly the sermon he gave there—which Angela Jackson-Brown had to write herself due to copyright issues. MLK would be proud of her, I think.

I learned cool detail in a recent interview with Angela at MacArthurs Books, along with some fascinating details about where the book came from and her writing process.

When Angela finished When Stars Fall Down, she felt she wasn’t finished with Opal, the main character. She knew she wanted to write about the Civil Rights era and wondered how Opal might fit into that story.

The kernel of this novel she had only begun to imagine was in the experience of her mother, pregnant at an early age.

It’s difficult to write fiction based on real people and real events. It has to lift off at some point; the characters must become people in their own right, with lives that may or may not resemble their real lives that inspired them—and that’s what happened with Homeward.

Rose became a real person, with that kernel of truth in Angela’s mother’s experience at her core.

I have the idea that the best fiction grows from a few unanswerable questions that relate directly to the way the world shaped the writer—and that writers know what those questions are by the time they come of age.

Angela’s unanswerable question is, “Why can’t they see the racism right in front of them?” It is the question she addresses in all of her work, one way or another.

Homeward can’t answer this question but it allows readers to feel what it’s like to live in a world that not only devalues your existence but actively tries to destroy you and everything you love. The intuition of experience unlike their own, the shift from abstract to concrete, can bring a reader to a moment of truth, too.

Which is why I have faith that books like Homeward can and do make a difference.

And speaking of faith, I also loved the way Angela Jackson-Brown described her childhood faith.

“‘In the beginning was the Word’,” she said. She imagined words whirling around the universe, presenting themselves to her one-by-one, making pictures, joining together in sentences, then paragraphs, then books—each one a part of God’s world, until it was complete.

Clearly, becoming a writer was inevitable.