The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson is proving to be one of those novels that I am going to read slowly, just to savor the voice in it.
The novel is the story of two young sisters sent from Brooklyn by their ailing mother to live with their grandmother in Barbados. Dionne is a teen on the cusp of heady discoveries about boys. Younger Phaedra is fascinated by their midwife/obeah-practicing grandmother.
In the early going, neither is fitting in well. They may not have had the best life in Brooklyn after their father was gone and now that their mother has given up on life, but they knew what to do and had made accommodations. Now, that’s all gone and they are not automatically part of the Bird Hill neighborhood.
Usually, I read for the experience of who the characters are, how they react to their circumstances and how that changes them. Language can make any of these storytelling aspects more vibrant. Sometimes, the language is so writerly that it gets in the way of story.
In the case of Jackson’s novel, this is one of the few times I’m more interested in how she tells what is going on than what is actually going on.
It’s a book made for close reading.
In public education right now, close reading may be best known, for good or ill, as part of the structure of Common Core standards. According to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (the Gates-influenced group that creates the standardized testing that hangs over everything that happens in school these days), close reading is emphasized so students will be able to read ever more complex text. PARCC defines close reading as:
Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining its meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole. Close, analytic reading entails the careful gathering of observations about a text and careful consideration about what those observations taken together add up to — from the smallest linguistic matters to larger issues of overall understanding and judgment.
With the right kind of book, close reading means nothing more, and nothing less, than falling in love with the words and how they are used to convey the world within that book.
A few examples from Naomi Jackson’s novel:
“Dionne was sixteen going on a bitter, if beautiful, forty-five.” Right on the second page, I know because of this, her skillful use of makeup and a local boy who wants her affections, she is unhappy with her present circumstances. But she is not going to let them stop her from doing as she is accustomed to, especially if that includes makeup and boys.
A couple pages later, a brief description of her young sister shows what her life is like on the island:
She wore her hair in a French braid, its length tucked away from the girls who threatened her after reading about Samson and Delilah in Sunday school. Glimpses of Phaedra’s future beauty peeked out from behind, her pink, heart-shaped glasses, which were held together with Scotch tape.
This tells me Phaedra is not accepted by the local clique, that the local girls are quick to turn something from a story into a weapon, that they may be jealous of their victim because she is going to be a beauty and that she may either be a bit of a tomboy or clumsy if her glasses are taped-up. The heart shape of her glasses also has the connotation that Phaedra is someone to care about.
The way Dionne sees the world as a bitter, if busy, teen who has to stay in looking after her sister is a forceful description of how eternal and confining a situation can seem:
Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.
Even with the early introduction into Dionne’s mindset, Phaedra may be the sister to keep an eye on. Here’s what she thinks about the routines her grandmother has established for her:
… but she did like the routines and rituals they had, the way they made a kind of container so her mind could wander to the things she thought and felt and dreamed about. The sameness of the days in Bird Hill comforted Phaedra as much as it rattled Dionne.
Already I’m wondering how Phaedra finding some comfort with her grandmother and her sister’s chafing at their new life will separate them. I find the idea of her mind wandering to hopes and dreams to be a foreshadowing of something sorrowful to come.
Barbados
Dionne has been responsible for Phaedra for some time. In this novel set in the 1980s, their mother has been nursing men dying of AIDS. It’s taking everything out of her. But she wouldn’t stop:
...being surrounded by the remains of other people’s lives in the hospital made a fitting place to mourn the person she thought she’d become in the States, the family she thought she would have, the husband she thought would love her unconditionally, the children she thought she would raise.
Damn, now that’s stubborn. And at least one of her daughters noticed:
A lifetime of watching her mother closely had been nothing if not a tutorial in resignation and making do.
Maybe I’m wrong, but at this stage, I’m thinking Dionne is a character that will be able to make do and survive.
As Phaedra begins to help her grandmother with her herbs, she learns her mother may have tried to abort her. Her grandmother has an odd way of offering comfort:
“One day you will see that what must be born will be born. Everything else will find another way.”
“Why would you tell me that?”
“Sweetness, the only thing that has power over you is what you can’t say, even to yourself.”
More foreshadowing. These girls have far more ahead of them, and it doesn’t look bright, even in the sunshine of the island. But even knowing that, I am drawn to find out what does happen because of the way Jackson has already told me about them.
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