There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden

The little boy, Nathan, is sitting in the Fleetwood following his mother's hearse which is following the route of the peddler's wagon. It glides along DuSable Street, Black Bottom Street, past Abe Weinstein's dog, Wild Helen, on past Douglass "hungover and sunken with cracks deep like the very cavities in Uncle Dupont's bad wisdom teeth," past the gutted building where seven black children played and "plunged down singing...as if even in their looted youth, they were possessed by wings," past the Joe Louis Theater, the Salem Cup-Overflowing Tabernacle. Auntie Breedlove is holding his hand.

And we are there. Moving with this boy through the places, the consciousness, the lives that make up this incredibly beautiful first novel.

We see the smashed melon that coal-black Jamestown throws against the house of the light-skinned Negroes who tell him to use the back door. We listen to Madge describe her mother setting fire to their house in a tidal wave of fury and later lying on the floor of the white woman's kitchen, her "eyeballs rolled up to the sky like she done turned all her visions to the sky after everything else done failed on her." And we are there at the crucifixion that, after a whispered word, becomes a lynching. Also there with Jericho Witherspoon, branded on the shoulder by his own white father and wanted "Dead or Alive" by that father's brother. And while we are there -- watching, listening, flying, falling -- like Nathan, we order the chaos and recognize the matrix of these lives as the black man's moral confrontation with God, land and the "pale ghostlike man with the green coin-shaped eyes and the dripping red rose in his lapel."

Leon Forrest understands the struggle of black people as a massive ethical war fought by the people whose habit was dignity, whose questions were moral ones, who transformed pain itself into the creative and complicated art of survival.

This rich, elegant, deeply moving novel pulls its language, its imagery, its structure from the very wells of black life; the campground, the Black Bottoms, Genesis and Douglass, and outstrips itself and moves beyond a reading experience into epiphany.