Author: Jacob Surpin
A little more than two months ago – this past January 7 – I was in New York, and I was sitting on the floor of Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene. It was the most crowded bookstore I have ever been in, and it would fill up even further before the reading began, but no one seemed displeased. No ill feelings were noticeable between the members of the audience as we waited; no grudges held between those who sat and those who stood and those who laid in the back. We waited and talked to each other about what united us in our waiting: a book, and the author who wrote it.
“The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” the acclaimed debut of 39-year-old Ayana Mathis, was published in early December 2012, well ahead of the originally scheduled January 2013 release date. This, and the crowd at Greenlight, was largely due to an extremely fortunate happenstance for Mathis and her publishers at Knopf: “Hattie” was selected by Oprah’s Book Club in December 2012, catapulting Mathis to instant literary fame (or, at the least, an otherwise unreachable audience). Mathis became a public media figure overnight, appearing in several interviews and promotions for the book. Nearly every major media outlet made sure they published a review on “Hattie” – reviews that were mostly, and deservedly, positive.
I first met Mathis two summers ago, in 2011, in her one-bedroom apartment off of Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. She was a first time teacher, and I a first time student at the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop. There were seven students in the class, and none of us had any idea who she was. I remember googling her before the class began, hoping to find a publishing history and uncovering only one short article in Lambda Literary Review lamenting the absence of joy in literature.
Mathis may not have been a household name, but it quickly became apparent that she knew the craft of writing. Our meetings consisted firstly of finding chairs and stools to huddle around the coffee table in her living room, followed by a discussion of an assigned short story, and ending with the workshopping of a student’s piece. None of the pieces were very good – mine included. Yet Mathis was equal parts kind and constructive, meeting each story on its own terms. Towards the end of the summer she set up meetings with each of us. She and I talked for an hour outside of the Brooklyn Public Library. I remember it was sunny, that she has a habit of pausing to gather her words – often pursing her lips – before she speaks, and that she mentioned towards the end of our talk that her book had been bought by a publisher.
I found that book, “Hattie,” on Amazon as soon as I went home and experienced a brief rush of maybe knowing a famous person before noticing there wasn’t a release date listed yet. But I continued to keep tabs on the book over the next couple years, until on the morning of December 10, 2012, I clicked on the link to a New York Times article titled “The Wind at Her Back, a Writer’s Buzz Gets Louder” and was met with a large photo of a familiar writer in a familiar apartment. It was Mathis, and the article outlined the aftermath of the call she received from Oprah letting her know that “Hattie” had been selected for the book club: the attention, the disbelief, the pressure of new expectations.
“Hattie,” a collection of stories centering around a family’s struggles during the Great Migration, is indeed an impressive debut. It is more a short story cycle than a novel, consisting of twelve stories, one for each of Hattie’s children, that relate to each other but have no cohesive story arc.
Mathis has, predictably, been anointed as the heir to writer Toni Morrison, and there are certainly resonances between them, mostly in that they are commercially successful black writers who deal principally in black characters, an uncommon event in the literary worlds of both today and yesterday. Stylistically, however, Mathis is much more plain-spoken than Morrison, producing well-written yet far from lyrical sentences like: “It occurred to Hattie that it was roses she needed to brighten the living room. She didn’t care for them but Pearl liked sweet, cloying things.”
In terms of stylistic forbears, Mathis may have the most in common with Virginia Woolf: there are echoes of Woolf in Mathis’s deep and extended psychological expositions of her characters, and in the point of view she uses, a roving third person that takes up the interior of specific characters at will.
As a result of that psychological style, the effect of each story depends on Mathis’s ability to create a complex interior for her characters. She does this with varying degrees of success. A few of her characters (mostly her men) feel like types: Franklin, the alcoholic in Vietnam; Billups, who was sexually abused as a child; even August, Hattie’s husband, fits too well into the prototype of the tomcatting man. Yet Mathis also has the ability to paint deeply affecting character portraits, as she does with Alice, the only child of Hattie’s who married into money. Mathis peels the layers off of Alice’s life slowly and methodically before leaving us with an enduring image of her: “There was Alice, small and dull in the foreground,” followed by, “She had failed today.”
“Hattie” perhaps suffers from too much failure, too much tragedy and heartbreak; readers may well look at Mathis’s aforementioned article “The Absence of Joy” and wonder whether she was foreshadowing her own work. Mathis is aware of the remarkable amount of trials endured by Hattie Shepherd and her brood; in the book’s last chapter she compares these trials to those inflicted on Job by God to test his faith. Joy does appear in these last passages, somewhere along the line between the religious and the physical, the family and the person, the other and the self.
Certainly there was a joyful buzz around Mathis in the Greenlight Bookstore on that January night. Mathis arrived slightly late, and the audience quieted. She was introduced, talked briefly about her book, read a chapter, and fielded questions. She was asked about historical research, and she told a story about the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones, whom she had heard tell a story about historical research in novels that went like this: if you write well and don’t put cell phones in the year 1853, people will believe you. The audience laughed, and I remembered her telling that same story two years ago in her apartment. I waited on line to get my book signed by her, wondering if she would remember me – she did, and we exchanged pleasantries briefly. I asked her if all of this was crazy. She looked up from signing the book, pursed her lips, relaxed into a smile. “Yes,” she said.
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