The late, great Dorothy West's trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy, remains presciently relevant almost three-quarters of a century after its initial publication. Racial inequity, police brutality, Black incarceration all haunt West's biting narrative, ready to resonate with a new generation of contemporary readers. Set during the early years of the Great Migration, when African Americans left the rural South seeking opportunities especially in the Northeast and Midwest, West's fiction embedded elements of her own family's peripatetic rise out of Southern enslavement into well-off Black Boston.
As a young girl, Cleo Jericho's mother recognizes the danger of her light-skinned, oldest daughter's "wildness"--being outspoken, fearless--in the South, and sends her north with a "strict-looking spinster." At 18, Cleo marries "Black Banana King" Bart Judson, a wealthy Boston businessman 23 years her senior, and has a single daughter, Judy. As wife, mother, sister, employer, friend, her manipulations are never ending: she skims Bart's money, moves the family into a 10-room mansion, maneuvers her three sisters' relocation at the cost of their marriages, influences and destroys relationships--and eventually manufactures her own downfall. Judy bears witness to all.
As one of the youngest members of the Harlem Renaissance, West's pioneering literary legacy is overdue for a renewal. This enhanced new edition is bookended by an astutely contextualizing foreword by essayist Morgan Jerkins (Wandering in Strange Lands) and an afterword of warm memories and sharp insight from West's friend the late Professor Adelaide M. Cromwell. The living here--for West's characters, the Black community, herself--is hardly easy, but their "wildness" continues to provoke, embolden and inspire. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon