North Carolina African American Literature
Sisters is a space of economic reinvention for Mae and Jonnie, but this reinvention rests on a pretty lie about their biological relationship, the monetization of a domestic space, and the remnants of another restaurant’s failure. Nearly every domestic space and personal relationship in No One is Coming to Save Us is packed with such layers of refusal and reinvention. As Sylvia explains to JJ, “Whatever you see going on with the very poor is just a few years away for everybody else. People think they outrun it in their little suburbs. You don’t outrun nothing for long” (87). With this pronouncement, Sylvia both accedes to the limitations of her own youthful homemaking – “even then she was grown enough to know she was only buying them all a few years’ time” (87) – and warns JJ of the hollowness of his own dreams for his new home. At the end of their conversation JJ admits, “I’ve got nowhere else. This is it, Mrs. Sylvia.” Sylvia understands what Watt renders again and again: “the inevitability that only appeared to be a choice” (102). Watts has received praise for her empathetic characterization, but to understand her empathy as a matter of doling out redemption to even her most difficult characters would be a mistake. Watts writes exasperation
and anger with an acute sense of its often-misdirected expression. In the first of several sections comprised of message board posts on Mommies2B.com, Ava writes, “I AM SO TIRED OF HEARING PEOPLE’S SUCCESS STORIES! LOL. They don’t help me” (108), which sets off an argument between other users over the appropriate tone of their online conversation. These women, brought together by their desire to conceive and give birth, work through their anger and frustrations with each other, building the kind of messy intimacy Ava awakens to elsewhere in the novel in her off-line life. Like these other women, Ava views her body as an obstacle to her happiness, undergoing fertility treatments and suffering physical pain and changes in appearance in the hopes of something they all fear will never come. “No wonder they made horror movies about damp basements,” Ava thinks, “where the disgraced items of everyday life moldered, not in the bowels, though she could see that metaphor easily, but in the ovaries waiting to reemerge damp and changed” (107). No One is Coming to Save Us churns through thoughts like these, neither rejecting them outright nor acceding to the hopelessness they suggest.
COURTESY OF NC DEPT. OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES
ABOVE Carole Boston Weatherford accepting
the AAUW Young People’s Literature Award, Greenville, NC, 26 Oct. 2018
N C L R ONLINE
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Tying together the novel’s meditations on past and present, domestic and public spaces, desire and despair is the impending closure of another Pinewood restaurant, Simmy’s, a relic of the town’s segregated not-too-distant past. The site of the town’s most public desegregation struggles, Simmy’s closure brings out a final meditation on change from the novel’s collective narrator: “We drive through town, glance over at the empty building, look for the sign we think we remember seeing our whole lives” (323). The fate of Simmy’s is, like the other long-waged battles in the novel, ultimately not reducible to a clear sense of right and wrong. As this relic of Jim Crow segregation comes down, Watts’s characters are left without a clear way forward. No One is Coming to Save Us maps personal disappointments, violations, and injury into the broader scope of economic and social struggle that, like the person standing across from you, moves outside of your control. It nurtures the intimacy of spaces that are as full of the needs of others as they are of our own. If no one is coming to save Watts’s characters, it’s because they are already there to save themselves. n
THREE-TIME 2018 AAUW AWARD WINNER CAROLE BOSTON WEATHERFORD received her third American Association of University Women Award for Young People’s Literature for Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library (Candlewick, 2017). The story is inspired by Arturo Schomburg, a law clerk who dedicated his life to collecting books, letters, music, and art that chronicled the Black history of the diaspora and to illuminating the achievements of people of African descent through the ages. He brought his substantial collection to the New York Public Library, where he created and curated a collection that was the cornerstone of a new Negro Division, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Weatherford received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2010. She holds an MA in publications design from University of Baltimore and an MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro. She is a Professor of English at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina. Read a children's story by her in NCLR 2006. n