What an astonishingly beautiful and haunting book this is. Told by the teenage Esch, it’s the story of the four motherless Batiste siblings and their hard-drinking father in the twelve days’ run-up up to Hurricane Katrina. I read the last third of this book in a state of high tension with a lump in my throat, as the children try to protect each other and themselves and the things that are meaningful to them in the wake of the coming disaster.
The brothers are Randall, rising basketball star, who is desperate to get to camp where his talent may be recognised by a scout; Skeetah, whose beloved fighting dog, China, has puppies, which he can sell for $200 a throw if only he can keep them alive, and seven-year-old Junior, whose birth killed their mother, who is loved by his siblings as best they can but is ‘the pup who was weaned too soon’.
Living in grinding poverty in Bois Sauvage with an emotionally stunted and occasionally cruel father who is nonetheless doing his best, the children are, above all, looking for love, and they do what they can to show it for each other. Their long-dead mother is evoked with huge tenderness in the memory of her daughter, and her absence hovers over the life of her children like a permanent shadow. ‘We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing we could do.’
Esch, the only girl in the family, is used by the neighbourhood boys because ‘it was easier to give them what they wanted rather than to make them see me.’ ‘I’d let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved.’
She finds herself in love with and pregnant by the preening, strutting Manny, who never kisses her, who tells her ‘You know it ain’t like that’, who grabs his pleasure with her when he feels like it. Esch’s inner world is astoundingly complex. Large in her mind is the legend of the sorceress Medea, who deceived her father and killed her brother for Jason, only to find herself betrayed and cast aside by him in favour of the princess of Corinth. She exacts a terrible revenge, killing his new bride, her father, and her own children, to punish him for what he has done.
Once she has struck, Katrina melds in Esch’s mind with Medea: ‘Katrina… the mother who swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind as puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.’
I loved, loved, loved this book. Esch and her brothers felt as if they were my own children, particularly the mischievous little Junior, who makes his presence felt in every scene, despite ostensibly being so low in the pecking order. Do yourself a favour and read it.
