Kinfolks - Hardcover

Lattany, Kristin Hunter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345407067 ISBN 13: 9780345407061

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1996

Synopsis

Profiles two African American women who, during the heyday of civil rights and the sexual revolution, choose to have children out of wedlock

About this title

About the Author

Kristin Hunter Lattany received the Moonstone Black Writing Celebration Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. She is the author of nine published works of fiction, four for children and five for adults. All of her novels have been widely translated and well received. <b>God Bless the Child</b> (1964) won the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award; <b>The Landlord</b> (1966) was made into a film in 1970; and her popular novel for teens, <b>The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou</b> (1968), received the Council on Interracial Books for Children Award, the National Conference of Christians and Jews Award, and many other awards.<br><br>Kristin Hunter Lattany has been a writer for the <i>Pittsburgh Courier,</i> an advertising copywriter, an information officer for the city of Philadelphia, and, until her retirem

From the Inside Flap

on the wrong side of forty, solid-bedrock, tight-forever friends Patrice Barber and Cherry Hopkins came of age in the sixties, veterans of Snick, CORE, and God alone knows how many Black Power rallies. By turns ferocious and fearless, passionate and proud, they rejected anything that was sanctioned by society. Sororities? No, thank you. Hair straightening? Get outta here. Marriage? Are you outta your mind? They became single mothers by choice. So who would have dreamed that these two ex-revolutionaries would find themselves trying to compose a la-de-dah wedding invitation for their soon-to-be-married children?<br>True, Cherry's beautiful, somewhat spoiled daughter Aisha--excuse me, that's Eliza now--is about to jump the broom with Patrice's son, Saint, a ruggedly handsome computer whiz who likens himself to a Lone Star, like Texas. But Patrice feels a flutter in her gut, sensing something is deeply wrong. Cherry's favorite phrase is "no problem," but she's got big ones.<br>For a shatt

Reviews

YA. A delightfully engaging story. Cherry Hopkins and Patrice Barber, two middle-aged African-American women, discover they share more than their youthful experiences during their Freedom Riding days of activism and Black Power rallies. Single mothers by choice, they realize while preparing for the wedding of their very traditional offspring, that these young people share the same father. This shock of discovery sets Cherry and Patrice off on a mission to locate the rest of the kinfolk that may exist and the man, Gene Green, who started it all. Meanwhile, the youthful lovers, now turned brother and sister, find their father, blind and alcoholic, living on the streets. Humor and pathos mingle throughout the everyday trials of living for these likable, creative, determined, middle-class females and their equally talented and resourceful children. The coming together of the generations, the merging together of contrasting values, and the richness of African-American culture and traditions make this story an excellent addition to YA collections.?Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two African American women whose premeditated single motherhood was a political statement 20 years ago animate Lattany's funny and poignant third novel. Patrice Barber and Cherry Hopkins, both in their late 40s, share a friendship dating back to the 1960s, when they participated in the civil rights movement. Patrice's son, Toussaint, and Cherry's daughter, Aisha, have been inseparable since childhood, and no one is surprised when they become engaged. In a contrived plot device, Patrice tumbles to the coincidence that Toussaint and Aisha share an allergy and an identical pattern of moles. Neither Cherry nor Patrice has ever admitted the identity of the men who sired her child. Confession time on both sides: the father of both turns out to be poet and revolutionary Eugene Dessalines Green, whose current whereabouts are unknown. The young people adjust to half-sibling status with what is almost a sense of relief, but Patrice determines to locate Green's other offspring to prevent other instances of inadvertent sibling romance. Enlisting Cherry's aid, Patrice ferrets out Green's other lovers, women like themselves?independent, proud, intelligent and without regrets. Green's reappearance is yet another coincidence, but Lattany handles it well. Patrice and Cherry, their worldly-wise children and the magic man who reenters their lives are some of Lattany's (Guests in the Promised Land) most mature creations, and she uses them to demonstrate that true kinship resides in the heart rather than in the bloodline. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The author of five previous (and much praised) novels, including The Landlord (first published in 1966, but made into a movie in 1993), Lattany here portrays the changing lives and times of two feisty African-American women in their 50s--former 1960s political radicals, currently struggling to make ends meet and launch their two convention-hugging offspring into the world. As the story opens, the kids, Aisha and Toussaint--daughter and son, respectively, of old friends and single-mothers-by-choice Cherry Hopkins and Patrice Barber--are engaged to be married to each other. But Patrice, a queen-sized earth mother with a shrewd streak, senses a serious problem: The kids, who have always looked alike and been weirdly similar in disposition and tastes, also, it turns out, share an allergy to strawberries and a mole beneath their left ear. Could they possibly share the same father, Patrice wonders--a dashing, debauched, highly educated black poet named Eugene Green, whom all the ``brilliant, achieving, liberated young sisters'' of the '60s coveted? Yes, it turns out, after Patrice and Cherry compare notes on the subject; and immediately they decide to take to the road and hunt up Eugene's presumed other progeny--their kids' presumptive brothers and sisters. Meanwhile, Toussaint and Aisha, furious with Patrice and Cherry for screwing up their lives yet again, take up with a homeless drunk named Gene, a charming, mordantly funny ex-professor who teaches them that joy can be found beyond rigid social conventions. Of course, Gene is Eugene, their father--as they all learn when Cherry and Patrice return home with a passel of women and children who have also been touched by Gene. Heartwarming, with vivid characters (especially among the children), but marred by a plot that's silly and full of holes. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

During the 1960s, Cherry and Patrice rejected all of society's norms, joined the Black Panther party, and raised children as single women. Now at 40-plus, these lifelong friends are forced to reconcile with their past. Cherry's daughter, Aisha, and Patrice's son, Toussaint, are in love and about to marry. The impending marriage sends the mothers on a mission to untangle some family skeletons. This quest uncovers an old acquaintance, Eugene Dessalines Green, the carefree poet, and the knowledge that he is father to both Aisha and Toussaint. As disturbing as the truth may be, these women, with their "take on the world" attitude, learn to accept their mistakes and, more important, learn from them. Lattany has woven an incredible story about the complexities and frailties of love and relationships and the primacy of family. Kinfolks is about recognizing that no matter how strong or weak the bloodlines, in times of trouble, family is the one certainty that people really count on. Lillian Lewis

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: PATRICE

It just doesn't feel right. It feels strange. Here we are, stretched out on my living room floor, humming and kicking our sandaled feet to the rhythm of Roberta Flack singing "Killing Me Softly with His Song," and trying to compose a wedding invitation. An engraved if you please formal wedding invitation. Cherry and me. Veterans of Snick, CORE, and God alone knows how many H. Rap Brown Black Power rallies.

"Hey, Patrice, remember the Chant?"

Who could forget it? We sang it, clapped it, stomped it, and kicked it at every rally. The tune of "Land of a Thousand Dancers," by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. And by Wilson Pickett: E, DEDE, DEDE DBD BAB AG DEDE. It meant nothing. It meant everything: black unity, energy, the confidence that comes from knowing you are right, and a challenge flung down to the Establishment.

Later for that cool wailing dirge on the radio. These days, we have enough public mourners and freelance pallbearers as it is. More than enough premature eulogies and obituaries. The Death of the Black Family. The Endangered African American Male. The Pathology of the African American Community. The Self-Destruction of Black Youth. At least we'd done, were doing, our part to offset all of that. I turn off Miss Flack and launch into three choruses of the Chant, followed by our cheer:

"Umgawa!"

"Black Power!" Cherry responds.

"Umgawa!"

"Black Power!"

"UMGAWA!"

"BLACK POWER!"

We follow it up with screams and a Black Power handshake: (1) my fingers grasping her thumb; (2) reversed--her fingers, my thumb; (3) fingers grasping fingers, palms up; (4) palms slapping. "There," I say, collapsing happily on the floor. "That always makes me feel better."

Cherry gives me a critical look. "There's a rip in the seam under your right arm. Patrice, do you realize we might soon be grandmothers?"

I check my Saturday caftan, black mud cloth to appease Saturn on his day. I pride myself on having the most fabulous collection of caftans on the East Coast. Just because I'm a big woman doesn't mean I can't be ravishing and gorgeously attired. Sure enough, she's right. A depressing rip under the right armpit, and no seam allowance for repairing it. That's the second time I've regretted buying something from Chic Afrique. Sometimes I think we've overromanticized these Africans. All they do is come over here and rip us off. But then I chide myself for having ungenerous and xenophobic thoughts that are probably not even my own but the result of media manipulation.

Something Cherry just said suddenly gets through to me.

"Cheryl, are you trying to tell me something? Is Aisha--"

"No, no, nothing like that. Just thinking about the probable consequences of all this, a year or two from now."

"Well, that would be wonderful, wouldn't it? Still, I'm glad there's no hurry--"

"No hurry! Patrice, do you realize how boojy you sound? We weren't worried about legitimizing our offspring."

We sure weren't. We, Cherry and I and the rest of our circle of fine, brilliant, achieving, liberated sisters, went to great lengths to arrange the opposite. We were determined to go against tradition in every way possible. Premeditated single motherhood was one of the principal ways we chose, because marriage would bring legal and property issues into our personal choices.

"It won't be wonderful," Cherry says in her smallest voice. "We thought we were going to be young forever. Remember?" I look and see two big tears rolling down her copper cheeks.

Cheryl Hopkins is a trip. She has a mouth full of razor blades disguised as pretty teeth, and she'll bare them and cut you up into person julienne in a minute. Downtown she has a reputation for being the meanest loan officer in East Coast banking. But come to her with the right sob story, especially one that features oppression, and she'll give you the entire bank--real estate, deed and all. And when she is hurt, she is all the disappointed little five-year-old girls in the world rolled into one. I give her the hug her sobs call for, but can't help noticing that she has more gray hairs on top than I can count.

"Remind me to introduce you to my friend Miss Clairol," I say when her shoulders have stopped heaving.

We are both a trip, really. One shriveling up, the other ballooning past size 20, and both middle-aged, to put it generously. A pair of grandmotherly ex-revolutionaries. Only we don't feel grandmotherly or ex-anything. Inside, we are still the same young women who dedicated themselves to the Movement, and who didn't want to come near anything bourgeois, legal, formal, or sanctioned by society. Sororities? Tea sipping? No, thank you. Hair straightening? Get outta here. Marriage? Are you outta your mind? We came of age in the sixties. We thought all rules were made to be broken. We wanted nothing to do with churches or ceremonies. Now here we are, trying to compose some la-de-da wedding invitations, and we can't even get the words right.

"How's this sound?" I say, ignoring Cherry's angry expression and her furtive inspection of her cornrows in a compact mirror. "Ms. Patrice Lumumba Barber and Ms. Cheryl Mandela Hopkins invite you--"

"Request the honour of your presence," she corrects me.

"Do you spell 'honor,' O-R or O-U-R?" I ask.

"O-U-R," she replies without hesitation. "And my middle name is Ann."

I write dutifully, trying to refrain from political comment. But it sneaks out. "Honour with a U is British spelling. Do we want to be that traditional?"

"It's what Aisha wants," she replies.

Oh, boy. We spent our youth and young adulthood kicking over traces, shaking off shackles, and brandishing our fists in our elders' faces. Sometimes I feel bad about that part, thinking of the pain I brought to the faces of Mama and Daddy and Nana, the extra wrinkles I put there. But retribution is coming, sure as rain follows thunder. Oh, yeah. We are about to be elders ourselves.


Retribution is already being visited on Cheryl, I think--in the form of a prissy, proper daughter who wants everything done by the rule book.

"British tradition is not our tradition," I cannot resist rebuking her.

"It's the only tradition we've got in America. Do you want to invite people to come and watch our kids jump the broom?"

I refrain from asking Why not? and read,

"... REQUEST THE HONOUR OF YOUR PRESENCE AT THE WEDDING OF THEIR CHILDREN--

"MISS AISHA G. HOPKINS

AND

MR. TOUSSAINT D. BARBER--"

My reading is interrupted by a howl of pain from Cherry. "These days my daughter goes by Eliza," she says.

I let that pass because it doesn't deserve my attention. But when I ask Cherry what the G in her daughter's name stands for, something I've always wondered about, she only howls louder. Deep down beneath my navel I feel a funny flutter. I know what that flutter means. Something is deeply wrong.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0345407067
• ISBN 13: 9780345407061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276