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Britt Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers begins, “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.” This secret is one involving a young black girl, thrown into the public eye by her mother’s untimely death.
The novel centers around three young people whose lives intersect at school and in their church community in their hometown in southern California. Nadia, an intelligent senior who is headed off to University of Michigan in the Fall, has lost her mother to suicide just a year before. After her mother’s death, she becomes despondent and begins hanging out in seedy restaurants where she meets Luke Sheppard, the pastor’s son and former football star whose career was ended by a brutal injury before he could play in college, and now he’s stuck at home working as a busboy. Luke and Nadia’s brief romance culminates in an unwanted pregnancy, and an abortion that causes a fallout that tears the couple apart. In the summer before she leaves for college, Nadia befriends Aubrey, a shy girl who spends her free time volunteering at the church. Aubrey is escaping some demons of her own: she lives with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend after moving out of the home she shared with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend who sexually abused her. As the three grow up, the narrative finds them all returning to their hometown and entering into a tumultuous love triangle that wreaks havoc on their lives and the church community.
In The Mothers, Bennett addresses the complicated role that the socially conservative black church plays in the lives of these young people growing up in it. For Nadia, the church is a place of shame, where the gossiping ladies whisper about her mother’s suicide while offering her superficial condolences. Later, when the church mothers find out about her abortion, their worst assumptions about Nadia’s moral depravity are confirmed in their minds—they have only ever offered her judgement instead of support. But for Aubrey, the church offers solace, a safe harbor for her to reclaim her dignity after the abuse she suffered. The church mothers function as a sort of Greek chorus in the novel, interjecting with their thoughts and reactions to the various twists and turns that befall the young people in the community. Their narration offers a similar mix of compassion and condescension, and their contributions reflect both the joy and the ugliness that coexist in such a devout community.
Bennett’s novel addresses that ways that trauma is inherited through generations. She writes of the ways that mothers can destroy their daughters—Nadia’s mother makes her feel guilty for being born and getting in the way of her plans, then kills herself and abandons her, while Aubrey’s mother turns a blind eye to the sexual victimization of her daughter by a man that she has brought into their home. Both girls are consistently haunted by the pain inflicted by their mothers, always seeking care and support where they are missing it. Bennett captures the complicated nature of motherhood, of what it means to have responsibility for another life, and the pressures that it puts on women.
The Mothers is a smartly written debut that weaves together three lives and incorporates the fabric of their community. The trifold coming-of-age narrative speaks to the many challenges of overcoming childhood traumas and carving out space for themselves in the real world. Each character struggles with deeply personal traumas, and the ways that they respond to them shape their relationships with the people around them. Bennett has crafted a sensitive portrayal of what it looks like to strive to meet the expectations of success in contemporary black America, whether those expectations are of a parent, church, or community. The Mothers is a moving and deeply sad portrayal of how these expectations, coupled with systematic racism, can tear individuals and communities at the seams.
Further Reading: Bennett’s second novel, The Vanishing Half, has been out for only a couple days and is already a NYT bestseller! Bennett has written plenty of excellent essays, but this viral piece she wrote for Jezebel in 2014 is my favorite: “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People“.