One Dark Body
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Set in Pearl, Washington, One Dark Body is the story of Raisin, a twelve-year-old girl abandoned at birth by her mother and raised by foster parents along with other damaged and unwanted children. It is the story of her mother, Nola, who has returned to reclaim her daughter and to put to rest the ghosts from the past who continue to haunt their lives: the spirit of El, Raisin's father, who committed suicide; and of Ouida, Nola's mother, who, it is rumored, shot her husband. One Dark Body is also the story of Sin-Sin, the fatherless fourteen-year-old son of the local schoolteacher, and his relationship with Blue, the wanga-man, a healer and shamanic figure living in the forest outside of town, who has determined to initiate Sin-Sin into manhood. It is the story of Sin-Sin's mother, raised in her father's house by an emotionally abusive stepmother, sexually abused by her cousins, and neglected by her father. And it is the story of Blue and his family: his father, who was murdered for burning down the hanging tree after taking revenge on the white man who raped his wife, and Blue's own lessons in the ways of traditional African folk medicine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Called ``Raisin'' because her mother's botched abortion attempt left her skin marked and deformed by wrinkles, 12-year-old Septeema Barnett narrates most of this elegaic and lyrical first novel. Raisin is raised by the midwife in the African American community of Pearl, Wash. (also the setting for Sherman's short-story collection, Killing Color ) , and at first she wants no part of her mother, Nola, who returns from Chicago to reclaim her daughter and start a new life. Raisin finds solace in dreams and in communion with ancestral spirits who speak to her from the earth. Among these are the spirit-women who usher her into womanhood, the Night People, ghosts of slaves who roam the woods near Pearl and protect their descendants, and the soul of her father, El, a suicide who refused the only work allowed black men in that town--coal-mining--and buried himself in a shallow grave before Raisin's birth. Sherman also explores Nola's specters: her grief over El's death, her memories of a violent mother and her shame at deserting her child. The novel offers a convincing portrayal of the spirituality that shelters these African Americans against racist and sexist oppression. Engaging characters and lilting prose illuminate this mythopoeic story.
