THE WATERBEARERS: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters, by Sasha Bonét
Mother love and mother violence form an indivisible braid in Sasha Bonét’s deeply felt memoir, “The Waterbearers.” In it, Bonét considers the ripples that radiate through generations of her matrilineal line and into her own life as a single mother. Through that lens, she tells a profound story about all Black women, and about the effects of racism in all Black lives.
“Water flow,” she writes, “reminds me of my inheritance. The way my mother and grandmother pour into me, and I into my daughter, the valuable and the harmful, the minerals and the mud. Each generation shifting, little by little, closer to freedom without ever defining it aloud. … These waters can tell you the true history of America, how it all really went down, if you just ask.”
Broadening the metaphor, “The Waterbearers” also features what she calls “tributaries,” which detail the lives of Black women linked primarily by the ways in which they pushed back against strictures of sexism and racism. There is Ona Judge, who was enslaved by George Washington but managed to flee and keep her freedom; the trailblazing 1970s singer Betty Davis; Iberia Hampton, the mother of the slain Black Panther Fred Hampton; the visual artist Camille Billops (whom Bonét knew personally); and Recy Taylor, who fought for justice after her 1944 gang rape by a group of white men in Alabama.
This is not a “here is my life” memoir; details of Bonét’s childhood emerge only in the latter half of the book. The source of the river is her grandmother Betty Jean, who left the cotton plantations of Louisiana to raise 11 children in Houston. Betty Jean’s home on the bayou there — always populated not only by immediate family but by any relative in need — was, Bonét writes, “our haven. Our well. A place for gestation.”
But not an easy, cozy haven. The sentence preceding these is, “It is from those closest to us that we learn how to love and how to hate ourselves too.” A few paragraphs later she writes, “But despite it all, joy was at home there.”
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post A Searing Memoir of Black Womanhood, Across Generations appeared first on New York Times.
