Chewed Water (review)

And only those who have chewed water
Know it has bones.

These lines bring closure to a memoir that is the coming of age story of Virginia Hughes. If we have learned anything from Chinua Achebe's assertion that for Africans (specifically the Ibo) "proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten," we know that in order to fully grasp what lies within the pages of this book we must step into another way of knowing, another way of speaking and experiencing literature. Aisha Rahman's title and final words force us to acknowledge the bravery with which she shares her history with us. This proverb communicates the belief that only those who have truly tasted bitterness and survived can call it by its true name. After dedicating the memoir to her daughter, Yoruba, Rahman tells the reader that this book, "this act of homage tastes bittersweet with memories." Rahman has "paid her dues" as Amiri Baraka reminds us in the afterword, and has earned the right to commit her memory to print.

The beauty of this coming of age story is that it gives you a clear sense of the international dimensions of Post WWII Harlem. It is a Harlem of the Savoy Ballroom, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, and Father Divine. It is also a Harlem in the wake of the Renaissance and the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The cultural matrix resulting from migration of Black peoples from the South and the Caribbean to Harlem facilitates the percolation of ideas, arts, and culture that Rahman depicts in her memoir. She captures this in the backdrop of a story that is both painful to read yet laugh out loud funny at times, highlighting the tensions and cooperation many found necessary in order to survive.

Foster child Virginia Hughes is left with Mrs. Feral, a migrant from Bermuda, by her mother May Anna. May Anna trekked to New York from North Carolina as one of thousands during the second wave of the great Migration north. She carries the memory of the strength of her maternal ancestry to sustain her as she transitions from rural to urban space. The decision to leave home is a difficult one for she and her mother Yula. Yula cannot understand May Anna's desire to uproot herself from the soil in which she and her ancestors have sown their joys and sorrows. She tells her daughter, "The South is our Holy Land. Our Blood make it so" (15). With much hope and apprehension she sends May Anna off with a token of her love, a small wood carving of the letters L I V E.

May Anna's own story, as conveyed by Rahman, is one of disappointment that is the direct result of the tumultuous racial politics of America in the 1930s. She steps into New York City hoping for a taste of happiness and to escape the hardship that appears to prey upon the women in her family. Virginia recollects,

All the men were dead or gone away. Most of the women in her family, from generation to generation, alone. That's what she was trying to escape, what seemed to her eyes as the black curse, death for the men; aloneness for the women. My mother believed she could leave it behind but that day, standing, facing Mrs. Feral in her living room, she must have felt that the curse was slowly creeping up on her. (13)

May Anna's chance at love is stolen from her. James Manman Jackson, Virginia's father, is a "race Man," a Garveyite, U.S. WW I veteran, and veteran of the African Legion. Refused disability payments by the racist Veterans Administration, he works as a doorman downtown. Manman loses his job as a doorman in the affluent Park Avenue Arms at Park Avenue and 37th Street to the desk clerk's son, who he himself had trained only a few weeks before. In an act of...