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Ellen Isaacs | |
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River, Cross My Heart is the story of a black family in Georgetown, DC in the 1920s. Early in the book, the youngest daughter Clara drowns when she follows her older sister Johnny Mae and friends to the river, where they're forbidden to go. The book is billed as the story of how the family deals with this tragedy. Although that theme plays a role, the book is just as much the story of Johnny Mae growing up, and the life of her mother, Alice Bynum, and her friends and relatives in the neighborhood. Although there were some interesting themes and characters in the book, I found that the story was fairly disjoint. One of the more compelling themes is Johnny Mae's obsession with the white people's pool and her indignation that she's not allowed to swim in it. Another little vignette is about Alice's job as a housekeeper for a white family and her relationship with the woman she works for. We also learn about Johnny Mae's odd friendship with a painfully shy new student, Pearl, and how Pearl gradually develops confidence. We learn of Pearl's mother's expectations about being welcomed by and invited to the church. We get a very brief glimpse of the life of Johnny Mae's father and an even vaguer view of the men of the neighborhood. We meet the neighborhood "medicine woman" who cures people with mysterious concoctions. There is some evolution to the family's acceptance of Clara's death, but again, that theme wove through the story only in the background, and it never seemed to be fully resolved. Although some of these vignettes and personalities kept my interest, in the end, I don't believe they hung together well as a novel.
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