by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Children of the Waters, by Carleen Brice, One World Books, Random House, 2009,
ISBN 0-345-49907-7
Available at Powell's Books

Who are we? This review is part of a continuing focus on the issues of identity—such as struggling to fit in, having a sense of place, and practicing tolerance.

Mixed roots
When Barack Obama began his campaign for the U.S. presidency, it increased the discussion about what it means to be born into more than one culture in America. Now the topic of multi-racial heritage is no longer a tributary in the national discussion; it has rushed into the mainstream of American thought.

An example of this change is the third annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival to be held June 12 to 13 in Los Angeles. It will feature writers, filmmakers, and performers who festival organizers say are “dedicated to sharing and nurturing storytelling of the Mixed experience.”

One of the authors scheduled in the festival is Colorado’s Carleen Brice, whose first novel, Orange Mint and Honey was transformed into the successful made-for-television movie “Sins of the Mother.” Her second novel, Children of the Waters concerns issues facing mixed-race families.

Brice specializes in stories that sizzle, sear, and then provide a healing ending.

Mixed marriage
In Children of the Waters, Brice focuses on two sisters—one white and the other biracial—who discover each other in adulthood. Their relationship starts out rocky, but ultimately leaves the reader feeling buoyant and hopeful for a better America.

Trish is a laid-back white woman in early middle age whose marriage to her black high school sweetheart has foundered. At the beginning of the story, she has returned home  with their son to Denver where none of the puzzling pieces of her life “seem to fit anymore.”

Priding herself on being racially color blind, Trish is blindsided when her son becomes the focus of racial profiling at the mall. The incident drives a wedge between mother and son.

This rift also makes Trish painfully aware of how alone she and her son are. The adults in her small extended family are long dead.

But Trish is accustomed to little comfort in her life, except for the dogs she brings home from her job as a vet tech. The grandparents who raised her were never particularly kind or demonstrative. And the adoring but drug addled mother, who abandoned her to their harsh care in early childhood, died in a car crash that also killed her only sibling. Or so Trish thinks.

Mixed adoption, mixed emotions
Trish’s soon-to-be-discovered sister, Billie, is an African-American earth mother who works hard at eating right and staying peaceful. A placid existence is the key to staying healthy and avoiding a flare-up of lupus, her dangerous chronic illness.

Billie is also concerned about the health of the planet and refuses to grow a lawn, because she deems it a poor ecological choice. She chooses instead to create a Zen-like yard of hard-packed swept dirt.

“She remembered hearing about how ancestors from West Africa had swept yards in Georgia, where the soil was clay, as it often is in Denver. Nothing appealed more to Billie than picking up a dying tradition of her ancestors.”

Almost nothing appeals less to Billie than ambition. She prefers teaching preschool to following in the footsteps of her financially successful parents and brother. Plus, her parents disapprove of her musician boyfriend, whose day job involves mowing lawns.

A flash flood of difficulties soon disturbs what Billie had viewed as the solid clay of her life. First, she accidentally becomes pregnant—a high-risk situation for someone with lupus— and discovers that her boyfriend is unsupportive. Then she meets Trish and learns what appeals to her least of all. Her parents never told her that she was adopted or that her birth mother was white.

Who are we?
Meanwhile, as Billie rejects Trish’s tentative reunion, Trish’s son begins to reject her as well. Then as Billie begins to grudgingly include Trish and Will in her life, Trish starts becoming uncertain about who she and her son are.

“With Will, [Trish] rarely thought of him as biracial. He was just her son. But around Billie, her white skin felt like a Klansman’s robe.”

Brice is the kind of author whose work is made for discussion. Children of the Waters makes one consider the true nature of race. Is it defined by the color of your skin or the culture in which you are raised? Brice causes us to think about who we are, what America is, and why we need our individual cultural heritage as much as we need our commonalities.

Similar to Matt de la Peña’s young adult novel Mexican Whiteboy, Brice’s book also makes us explore the dangers of hiding family history from children.

As part of Random House’s “Reader’s Circle” program, Children of the Waters contains an insightful interview with the author as well as a useful set of questions for classes and book clubs to consider. It is an ideal book for use in high school literature and social studies classes much the same as Mexican Whiteboy and the memoirs I’m Down by Mishna Wolff and Not a Genuine Black Man by Brian Copeland.

One of the great values of reading—whether fiction or nonfiction—is that it helps us to understand others and ourselves. One of the great values of public libraries is that they are good places to find all these books and to find ourselves.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Unafraid of the Dark, by Rosemary L. Bray, Anchor Books, 1999,
ISBN 0-385-49475-0
Available at Powell's Books

Sometimes you stumble over something important at the library, because you weren't looking for it to begin with. That is what happened when I read Unafraid of the Dark, A Memoir by Rosemary L. Bray, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review.

Bray's story illustrates the importance of public libraries in positively shaping lives and providing sanctuary for those who need respite from difficulties.

Extreme poverty and a violent, alcoholic father deviled Bray's childhood from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s.  Home was usually a place of fear for her, especially at night, when she would lie in the dark listening to her father berate and beat her mother.

Escaping home at the library
However, there were people and places that saved Bray. These included a clever, dedicated mother and the public library.

The author notes that she and her siblings would hurry up and work hard to complete household chores in order to escape home for a bit.

We all knew that when we finished doing what we had to do, we could cajole my mother into taking us to the library, with a trip to the playground afterward. The library was the part I was most interested in.

Once the house was clean, the next step in their library day ritual was for Bray's mother to make sure that all her children were clean and dressed in "decent clothes" for their walk through Hyde Park to Chicago's T.B. Blackstone Library.

But before they stepped out the door, Bray writes, Mama would  "go to the second drawer of the dresser that sat in our kitchen....In the drawer was the old black felt pocketbook....a repository for the really important records of our household." These included the family's library cards.

Libraries rescue us
It was the library that helped Bray to explore the rich worlds of fairytales, mythology, biology, and history. A lonely egghead of a child, she found her friends in fiction rather than on the playground.

This sad yet inspiring story about endurance and resilience is also a story about how libraries can help rescue us.

Reprinted from the Older Archives of Library Mix