The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters - Hardcover

Bont, Sasha

 
9780593536087: The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593536088 ISBN 13: 9780593536087
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“An epic love song and remarkable ballad of generations.” —Leslie Jamison

“I couldn’t write about Black motherhood without writing about America.” —Sasha Bonet

Sasha Bonét grew up in 1990s Houston, worlds removed from the Louisiana cotton plantation that raised her grandmother, Betty Jean, and the Texas bayous that shaped Sasha’s mother, Connie. And though each generation did better, materially, than the last, all of them carried the complex legacy of Black American motherhood with its origins in slavery. All of them knew that the hands used to comb and braid hair, shell pecans, and massage weary muscles were the very hands used to whip children into submission.

When she had her own daughter, Sofia, Bonét was determined to interrupt this tradition. She brought Sofia to New York and set off on a journey—not only up and down the tributaries of her bloodline but also into the lives of Black women in history and literature—Betty Davis, Recy Taylor, and Iberia Hampton among them—to understand both the love and pain they passed on to their children and to create a way of mothering that honors the legacy but abandons the violence that shaped it.

The Waterbearers is a dazzling and transformative work of American storytelling that reimagines not just how we think of Black women, but how we think of ourselves—as individuals, parents, communities, and a country.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SASHA BONÉT is a writer and cultural critic based in New York City. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Aperture, New York Magazine, Vogue, and BOMB, among other publications. Bonét is a professor of creative writing for Columbia University and Barnard College.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

50 10

My grandmother Betty Jean had a dream about the water when her daughter was pregnant with me. And she had that same dream when I was pregnant with my daughter. One afternoon in May we were packed tightly in my grandmother’s home. There was something stirring in the living room. It was an unusual afternoon when you could clearly hear the tune of the ice-cream truck pass outside, more still, the children didn’t beg for a dollar or run out to the street in pursuit of sweetness. There was, of course, the savory stewing smell coming from the kitchen. I sat on the floor with my weight resting on my palms beside my cousins while the grown folks took the seats. The solemn aunties’ arms didn’t graze but their hips kissed across the length of the sofa, shapeshifting women who spread upon being seated. Sometimes that living room felt consecrated. Other times tribunal. That day it was peculiar, and I couldn’t place it. Betty Jean didn’t even look away from her crossword when she said she’d been dreaming about the fish and the water. A room full of wombs and I knew she was talking about mine. After I gave birth, before going home alone with my baby, I stopped first at my grandmother’s house so that she could hold her great-granddaughter. So she could bless her. My mother and I sat on either side of Betty Jean while she told my daughter that she was the one she’d been dreaming of, as if she had willed her here. And hadn’t she? From that day onward, I didn’t sit on the floor anymore. The women moved over now, making space for me on the sofa.

•  

We are deep. I am in the middle of about three dozen cousins. Not among the oldest, not among the youngest. As a child, I felt inconsequential at 5010 Chennault Road. The older cousins caused trouble, and the younger ones needed help with most things. I was merely a silent witness. This left me both excited to be there, because it felt like theater, and terrified because of the sheer size of the ever-expanding group. I was content if I got no attention at all. I would take a deep breath before entering because after putting my arms around my grandmother’s neck, my mother expected me and my younger brother, Shannon, to greet every auntie with an embrace, and on rare occasions, an uncle with acknowledgment. Worsening my angst by confirming along the way, “You speak?” It was imperative that my mother’s children be regarded as having home training. My heart would race as I pressed myself into them, becoming one. Each of them commenting on my body in some way. My hair was good, but why was it so short? I was getting tall, but why were my thighs giving my jeans hell? My hips were spreading, but I better be keeping my legs closed. My body belonged to the tribe, and they projected their insecurities onto me, and I held to them tightly. After all, this was my inheritance. It is from those closest to us that we learn how to love and how to hate ourselves too.

50 10 was our haven. Our well. A place for gestation. A place where big-legged women gathered with their troubles and sorrows tucked in their bosoms. The women came parched in search of answers and approval. They didn’t concern themselves with justice, fairness, or peace, for those were never promised. But what they did receive between those walls would help them stand more erect along the way. Where the women spoke emphatically, and the men knew to keep quiet or stay away altogether. A realm that contradicted everything learned beyond its threshold. A place where nothing grew but the children, and they did so quietly as to be seen and not heard. Markings on the wall outside the bathroom charted their progress. Making a monument of Black children blooming, because this too was never promised. The living room was center stage for the women stuck between life’s torments and the imminent threat of death, both of which kept them from wasting their time with the frivolity of dreams.

But despite it all, joy was at home there. The house, which never felt structurally rooted, would vibrate with the eruption of a chorus of laughter. The women’s bodies would lean into one another, waving from top to bottom with their heads rolling back. Substantial women who breathed deeply in laughter, otherwise their bodies were clenched like fists, sipping only the air necessary to survive. Never taking more than their share. Yet still stepping through the world full-footed, like they had a right to be there. You can’t erupt like this if you’re not intimate with tragedy. If you haven’t lain beside her and closed your eyes as she fondled your jugular. If you can’t smell the blood before you taste it, you’ll never know laughter like this. This joy was the kind you earned.

Conflict was not uncommon in the modern-day Greek tragedies that unfolded in the living room at 50 10. Where both betrayal and forgiveness were exercised regularly, and everyone agrees to forget. The walls hold records and keep the score. The water lines ring the discolored walls and baseboards, marking the rise and descent of flood waters. The punctures formed from a release with nowhere else to land. The sticky ribbons that hold petrified pests. And Betty Jean reigned over it all, maintaining an order that only they understood to be true. She sat as a guardian in her chair near the door, a tower of photographs of her kids, and their kids, and their kids in the corner beside her like a shrine, the hum of the AC unit in one ear and her girls’ stories ringing in the other. Listening and only speaking when she needed to be heard. It is here, and only here, that she feels most divine.

My grandmother’s home is a small single-story structure with sky-blue siding punctuated with white shutters. The porch is a concrete slab extending from the foundation. The air conditioner pokes out over the porch from the living-room window and slouches toward hell, which is precisely what sweltering summers in Houston resemble. The wide yard holds a sole grand live oak tree in the middle that shields the children playing outside from the relentless Texas sun. Most of the time the door is not closed, but the screen door must always be shut. The latch is stripped, but no one bothers to repair it because people pass through endlessly. Dropping kids, grabbing mail, taking naps. Recharging in the only place on the planet where they were always welcome.

Kids weren’t allowed to run in and out of the house, else the humid heat seized the cool air inside. We chose the outside, as to not hear the women shout in unison, “Quit slamming the screen door.” With the cicadas singing our favorite summer song, we felt most free out there. We listened to Screw tapes that seemed to embody the slow-motion rhythm of the heat waves we saw in the distance. If we were doing something we weren’t supposed to, we just needed to get out of the view of that front window, but if we got too quiet, somebody’s mama would peek her head out in suspicion: Y’all must be doing something y’all ain’t got no business. When we weren’t playing basketball across the yard’s hardened dirt, shooting anything round we could find into a milk crate that we’d tied to the trunk of the live oak, or picking and peeling switches from the tree’s limbs for Granny to welt our own, should we transgress, we were being embraced by its shade.

If you pull up to 50 10 and there is a car in the yard, then someone is there. Someone is always there. It is rare for less than half a dozen cars to be in the wide yard at a time. There was no driveway, just a path that led to the lip of the porch. A well-worn engraving that says we’ve been here, and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593536088
ISBN 13 
9780593536087
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781529979640: The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1529979641 ISBN 13:  9781529979640
Verlag: Merky Books, 2026
Softcover