Growing Up Nigger Rich Review

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(More customer reviews)I took Gwendoline Fortune's new memoir-as-novel Growing Up Nigger Rich to read on the plane to San Francisco this weekend. Once started, I could not close it up to sleep, but read straight through start to finish. It is a rich and complex novel, well-wrought and fascinating, especially for someone like me who did not grow up in the South, or in America at all, but in Australia.
The story centers on Gayla Tyner, daughter of a respected Black doctor in Carolton, South Carolina, who comes back home to the painful task of confronting, and eventually overcoming, old hurts. As Fortune says, 'It takes a lot of weight to break open the stones.'
Gayla's story gives us a different perspective on growing up in the segregated South. It gives us the world of the educated, upper-class Black, showing us what it was like to feel equal, even superior, to the white people who, by reason of their whiteness, felt free to call her 'nigger coon,' 'jigaboo,' 'darky,' 'tarbaby,' 'old yellow thing,' a world where even the compliment of being asked to sing for wealthy white groups, 'who thought nobody could sing like "the Colored,"' was an insult, a world of dislocation, of not knowing 'exactly where we're from in Africa,' of 'white relatives who don't come to Christmas dinner.'
Gayla's world is richly peopled by characters who walk right off the page into the heart. Their stories wind in and out of each other, turning back to look behind, leaping forward to peer into the future, a kaleidoscope of past, present, and hoped-for all happening together, the way they do in all of us.
Much in this rich layering is dark, but the reader is not left in darkness. With her keen eye for the telling detail, Fortune gives us glimpses of the hope that has grown up since desegregation: a black hand in a white, a passing smile from white to black, a reference to the easiness together of black and white in her children's generation.
Running through Gayla's story is the story of her husband, George, a compulsive and eventually doomed philanderer, who 'loved women . . . Tall, short, light, dark, young, or a little mature. The only ladies George ignored were ugly ones.' Fortune shows him, a newly minted PhD, applying for his first real job, as an Aeronautical Engineer, and being redirected to 'Altman's Custodial Placement.' His story gives Fortune the vehicle to voice her concern for the plight of her generation's Black man who, 'knew how it felt to be invisible,' and as a result, 'can't move forward, and . . . will not move backward.'
Nigger Rich has a strong visual and tactile impact. Gayla's neighborhood comes alive with wonderful details of food and clothes and customs, the sound of voices. She gives us a place where dogs 'wag their tails in simple pleasure for a clear, warm day,' a place of old women, the 'grandmothers, who nurture all the children of their neighborhood.' Here is a funeral feast set out on 'the round, oak dining table, baskets of golden, hot, homemade rolls wrapped in large, white, starched, cotton napkins, a buttery aroma announcing their entrance . . . Silver platters high with home-fried chicken, cut-glass bowls of creamy potato salad edged with slivers of oily pimiento, and sliced boiled eggs sprinkled with paprika, lined the dining table and sideboard. Coconut, pecan, and sweet potato pies filled two card tables because there was no room for them anywhere else.'
Fortune spends some time considering the concept of how to name her people: Black? Negro? Colored? African American? She comes down to the delicious notion of 'People of Color.' What a lovely phrase, and so apt. Never have I read a story with such a feast of skin color: yellow, high-yellow, molasses, umber, caramel, black-as-night, coffee, honey, cocoa, taupe, bamboo-brown, copper, buttered toast, henna, ebony, tea, chocolate. It's like a poem, or as one of her people says, "There's nothing prettier than a roomful of us, all decked out . . . A flower garden with all the colors of the rainbow. Yes, ma'am."
Growing Up Nigger Rich is a lovely book: an engrossing story, an education, and a finger pointing toward hope for true and lasting amity between the races.

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An intricately crafted novel of homecoming and the South. Gayla Tyner is haunted by the South, what it means, has meant, and is becoming, as she struggles to find her place as professor, mother, wife, and daughter.

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