She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. But in the final analysis, everyone is responsible for his or her own life, and one must learn to come up (or down) from what happened before.A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. It is too much to ask if things would have turned out differently with Hattie if she had been able to love, as well as doing the cooking and housework for her family, or if things would have turned out differently for her children. The book ends in 1980, with a final section about one of her granddaughters. We also learn of the continuing lives of August and Hattie, who are not faithful to each other. The book carries us through the years and into the lives of her children, who all deal with their various demons and heartbreaks. She and August had hoped to be in the rent house for a few months, until they got the money to buy a house, but she raised all of her children in that house. Hattie’s soul never recovered though she gave birth to seven more children, she concentrated on keeping her family fed and clothed, rather than on feeding their souls.
Her mother dies, and Hattie gives birth to twins, but they die of pneumonia before their first birthday.
They settled in Philadelphia, and two years later she married August Shepherd. In 1925, Hattie is remembering how she, her mother, and her sisters had fled Georgia three years before when she was fifteen her father ran a blacksmith shop, and was killed so that white men could take it over. This book takes us from 1925 to 1980, centered in Germantown in Philadelphia, and deals with the experience of blacks who had fled Georgia and Jim Crow. This fiction book was the Oprah 2.0 Bookclub selection announced in December 2012 I am slowly catching up to the present time in reading the Oprah Bookclub selections.
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