The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

Previously published in the Herald Magazine. 

Ayana Mathis’s debut already bears a heavy burden - that of an Oprah Winfrey recommendation that states that nothing has moved Oprah this much besides Toni Morrison. And just like that - here’s another burden: to have the same effect as the work of the legendary Toni Morrison. Two huge crosses to bear - and Mathis bears them as best as she is able with The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a cross-generational story about race, societal changes, family and most of all about one woman’s love for her children and the strength she needs to hold them all together. 

The story begins with a young Hattie and her twin babies, living in Philadelphia in the 1920s, having left the Jim Crow system in Georgia behind. Hattie and her husband August live in an ‘in-the-meanwhile’ house, trying to make ends meet, hoping to soon improve their lives. But Hattie’s fate will not allow anything to simple or happy in this story - there is much tragedy and despair to follow her, and each of her children. Mathis dedicates a chapters to each of Hattie’s children, and it is a testament to her skill that one short chapter is somehow enough to create these many characters and those whose lives they touch - somehow, within these short chapters in a fairly short book, their lives are shown, their stories are told and so is Hattie’s. 

Hattie’s first two children, the twins Philadelphia and Jubilee die of pneumonia at 7 months, ‘in the order in which they were born’. This loss huants Hattie constantly, even as she goes on to have nine more children. We meet them all via Mathis’ clear prose - Floyd, the traveling musician who picks up women easily on the road until he has an secret, meaningful encounter with a man whom he later betrays and feels remorse for: ‘I should hang myself like Judas’. Six is a teenager, badly burnt as a child, whose ‘pain was his most precious and secret possession, and Six held on to it as fiercely as a jewel robbed from a grave’. He descends into a trance-like state when he preaches in church, where ‘the Word [would] come over him like a fit; it hijacked him completely’. Baby Ruthie is a result of Hattie’s long standing affair with another man - the only man with whom she is seen smiling, though he is unable to clean up his act, just as Hattie’s husband August isn’t.  Hattie’s last baby is Ella, a baby she can no longer afford to raise, the one she must give up to her childless sister for adoption. Alice marries a doctor from a prominent family but isn’t able to cope with life, spending much of it in a somnambulistic haze, on occasion trying to run away from her anxieties ‘out on the street, her panic burning away in the frigid air’. She is routinely rescued by her brother Billups who no longer needs her as she does him. Franklin is a gambler whose habits have driven away his wife and the daughter he finds out about in a letter sent to him while he fights in Saigon. Bell is now a ‘husk, an old dried-up leaf curled in on itself’, alone and almost dead when she is reunited with Hattie, who loves her no matter what her transgressions may have been, while Cassie hears voices in her head: ‘The Banshees screeched. “Everything is spying on you, everything has ears, everything reports”’. She is unwell and unable to take care of her child Sala - Cassie’s child raised by Hattie, who even now is ‘not too old to weather a sacrifice’.

This is an effective, evocative history of an important time in America. There are a great many characters here, a great many stories, some more effective than others. Mathis connects her stories well, and is able to create a complete picture of Hattie’s life via her ‘tribe’, and as easy as this book is to read, the overwhelming feeling is of sadness and despair. None of the tribe really seem to prosper - there’s is a sadness carried over from Hattie’s, a sadness that prevails in the entire book and all the tribe carried over from the horrible death of Hattie’s first babies. The world changes around them, and yet their sadness, their despair remains.