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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Fortunate
Son by Walter Mosley |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Luck Popular novelist Walter Mosley’s latest
work, Fortunate
Son, explores the struggles of relationships, and the meaning of
belonging to a family. Mosley takes two boys, Tommy and Eric, and riffs on
the impact of luck in their lives and the reality that happiness isn’t always
what it appears to be. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3,
pp. 40-47: Ahn set up a cot in Eric’s
room for Thomas — not for the sake
of Branwyn’s son but for the doctor’s boy. Eric was desolate over the death
of the woman who was the only mother he ever knew. He understood that she was
sick, but he never thought about her dying. Thomas, on the other hand,
thought about death all the time. The dead bugs and small animals that he’d
find in the garden fascinated him. And his many months of isolation in the
intensive care unit had often been the topic of conversation between him and
his mother. “What would have happened if Dr. Nolan didn’t say for you
to take me out of there?” he’d ask. “Then you would have stayed small and gotten smaller,”
Branwyn told him. “And if you stayed long enough you would have probably
died.” “And then would you come to the cemetery to visit me?” “Every day for my whole life.” At night Eric sobbed in his bed, and Thomas would come sit
next to him and tell him stories about their mother. “She was always talking about having a small house near
the desert where we could grow watermelons and strawberries,” Thomas said. “Just you and me and her?” Eric asked. “Uh-huh,” Thomas replied.
“And Dr. Nolan too. And maybe Ahn if we were still little.” “How come you don’t call
Daddy ‘Daddy,’ Tommy?” “Because I have a father,
and he’d be sad if I called another man that.” “Are you gonna go live with
your father now that Mama Branwyn’s dead?” Thomas had never thought of
this before. Would they make him go live with the man that taught him the
riddle? He didn’t want to go. And he couldn’t see why they’d make him if he
just said that he wanted to stay with his brother and Dr. Nolan and . “I sure miss Mama Branwyn,”
Eric said. Thomas put his hand on his
brother’s shoulder. “She’s not gone away. . . just in her body, she is. But she’s
still in the world lookin’ at us and smilin’.” The funeral was three days
later. By then Eric had recovered
from his deep sadness. Thomas sat up with him every night telling him all the
things about Branwyn he never knew, or at least never paid attention to. Eric was a strong boy
filled with energy. He loved roughhouse games and running, and though he
could be very sad for short periods, he always came back laughing and running
hard. So when he woke up on the morning of the funeral, he was happy again,
with Branwyn’s death behind him. He told Thomas that he didn’t need him to
sleep in his room anymore. He helped his diminutive pretend sibling carry
the cot back to the attic where Ahn had gotten it. When Thomas went back to
his bedroom, he realized that something was different. It was as if there was
a film over his eyes that made everything just the slightest bit darker, like
a lightbulb dimming when lightning strikes outside or a cloud coming close to
the sun but not enough to make real shadows. Thomas tried to look hard
at things around him, to make them shine as they had done only a few days
before, but the luster was gone. He sat down on the floor in the center of
his room, looking around at the new world he inhabited. He tried to remember
how things had looked before, but slowly the memories of the glitter he’d always
taken for granted dissipated and all that was left was what he could see. After a while he forgot
what he was looking for. When he tried to remember why it was that he sat
there, he thought of what his mother had told him: I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin. And
he thought that he was waiting for his mother to tell him more. Sitting there on his knees
on the floor, Thomas felt the world settling around him. It was completely still,
but he knew that over time all things got heavier and sank into one another
until they became one thing rather than many. He didn’t remember where he’d
learned that — whether it was
from Dr. Nolan or big Ira Fontanot, his mother’s friend. But he knew that it
was true and that if he sat in that room long enough, his knees would bond
with the floor and he’d know everything that happened in the house. And the
house would become part of the ground, and he and the house would be a part
of the whole world. Once this happened he would be joined with everything,
and then he would know where his mother was and they could talk again. So Thomas closed his dimmed
eyes and waited for his knees to become one with the floor. He heard the wind
rattle a loose pane of glass in the window and, every now and then, the hard
thumps of feet through the wood. Dr. Nolan’s measured pace was continual as
he moved around on the distant first floor. ’s tapping footsteps could often
be heard. The loudest footfalls were Eric’s. He would run hard and then stop
and maybe leap, landing with a loud thud that shook the house, if only
slightly. Thomas felt that he was already becoming a part of everything. He
raised his head, expecting his mother to appear to him at any moment. Then
came a quick tapping and the whine of his door opening. “Tommy,” Ahn said in her
clipped voice. “You not ready.” He opened his eyes and saw
her. He wanted to explain that things were not the same and that he was
trying to find his mother in the wide world. But he didn’t have the words or
the heart to try. “Get up,” she said. “Put on
your clothes. We have to go say good-bye to your mother.” The nanny was wearing a
one-piece black dress that buttoned down the front and went all the way to
her feet. She had a boy’s figure and was very short, though still taller than
Thomas. “Hurry, hurry,” the nanny
said. “Did your mommy die one
day, Ahn?” Thomas asked, not moving from his place on the floor. There was a long black
shawl hanging from Ahn’s toothpick-thin shoulders. She came up next to the
boy and descended to her knees. She put her arms around him and hugged him to
her bony chest. After a while Thomas could feel her body shivering, and he
knew that she was crying for his mother. “I was born in a war,
Tommy,” she whispered to him. “I remember being a child. I was very
frightened, and we were running down a dirt road. It was my mother and father
and older brother, Xi’an. There were big bombs falling, and every-where they
fell fire went up like dragons in a child’s storybook. And we ran and ran,
and I wondered, even when I was running, where was I coming from? Where was I
going? “And then my father fell
down. I tried to reach for him, but my mother grabbed me and pushed me to
run. And then my big brother fell and later my mother. And then I was run-fling
all by myself and I didn’t know where I came from and I didn’t know where I
was going. There was blood on the American T—shirt that I wore for a dress.
It was my mother’s blood. I still have it in a chest in my closet, the dress
that has my mother’s blood on the hem.” Then Ahn took Thomas by his
shoulders and brought her face up close to his. “You are like I was,” she
said. “Your mother has fallen and you must go oil. You have to keep on going
even though you do not know where you go. It is all we can do. Do you understand
me?” Thomas understood her
fingers digging into his skin and her desperate eyes still looking for her
mother somewhere in his. And so he nodded and said, “Yes, Ahn I know.” “Then put on your nice clothes
and come down and go to the funeral.” The last time Thomas had
worn nice things was to see his father in the hotel restaurant. He dressed
himself and went downstairs. , he knew, had gone to Eric’s room to help him
dress. Eric didn’t need her, but she always helped him anyway. They all got into a long
black car driven by a black man who wore a cap with a shiny black brim. They
drove to a big church in a neighborhood where there were mostly black people
like him and his mother walking up and down the street, sitting out in front
of their houses laughing and talking, even delivering the mail. Not just
black-skinned people but brown too — all
kinds of browns. Maple-syrup colored and redbrick brown, the brown you find
in every wood from pine to cherry, oak to ebony. There were people that
looked as though they had deep tans and some that shone like gold and copper
and bronze. People of color. The
phrase came into Thomas’s mind. He had heard it in school, and he knew that
it applied to him and the people around his mother’s funeral. The church was big and
cool, with a dozen stained-glass windows that had pictures of Jesus and other
dignitaries from the Bible. Many a black and brown woman came up to him and
called him “poor darling” and “little lamb” while he and Eric walked
together, looking around at the vastness of the house of worship. Most of the people inside
the church were of color too. Thomas wondered if all these people knew his
mother. Most of them he didn’t recognize. But there were a few familiar faces.
He saw his grandmother Madeline, and there was Ira Fontanot, whom he
recognized from the Rib Joint. For a brief moment he saw his father, Elton,
standing along the side of the pews. Ahn rushed the boys along
until they were sitting in the front row. There, before them, was a coffin
set upon a dais under a podium on a pulpit. “Mama Branwyn’s in there,”
Eric whispered, an uncommon awe in his voice. A minister in long black
robes edged in red came up to the podium and said Branwyn’s name and then
sang a little. Then he said things about Thomas’s mother that the boy didn’t
understand. They were nice words, but they had little to do with the mother
he knew. It wasn’t so much what he said but all the things he left out. He
didn’t say, for instance, how Branwyn was so good at seeing faces in the
pitted surfaces of stones. “You see,” she’d say, “there’s the nose arid here’s the
eye.” “But he on’y got one eye,” Thomas had said. “Where’s the
other one?” “He’s standing sideways and you can only see his left
eye.” This made Thomas laugh so much that his mother called him silly. He didn’t talk about when she would pull on his toes when
he was going to sleep at night, counting them — one, two, three, four, five. Or when
she’d pick flowers and put them into her hair and take Dr. Nolan into her
arms and dance him around the kitchen. The minister called her a good mother and devoted
daughter, but he didn’t say how she’d stay up all night with him and Eric when
they were sick. He made her sound like a flat picture in a book rather than
his mother with her warm skin and sweet breath. Somewhere in the middle of the long sermon, Thomas started
crying. He wanted Dr. Nolan to go up there and tell everybody what his mother
was really like. He wanted to go home and let his knees sink into the floor. “Do you want to go up and say good-bye to your mother?”
Minas Nolan asked Thomas when the sermon was over and the organ player had
started her sad song. “No,” Thomas said. “Are you sure? It’s your last chance to see her.” “I can’t,” Thomas said in a high whine. “I can’t.” Dr. Nolan began to cry. He picked up the boy and rushed
out of the church. He brought Tommy to the long black car and got in with him
in the backseat. “To the cemetery, Dr.
Nolan?” the black driver asked. “No, no. Take us to the
restaurant. I’ll, I’ll go see her later. Later.” Tommy buried his face in
the fabric of Dr. Nolan’s jacket. He closed his eyes and held his breath but
nothing would stop him from crying. When they got to the Rib
joint, Tommy and Dr. Nolan sat outside in the car until the boy could sit
back and talk. “It’s okay,” Dr. Nolan told
him. “We’re all very sad.” “How could it be okay to be
so sad?” “Because we all loved her
so much.” Tommy got up on his knees
and put his arms around the doctor’s neck. He held tight but was no longer
crying. They stayed like that, holding each other until the families began to
arrive from the cemetery. While many Walter Mosley fans stick
solely to his Easy Rawlins character, Fortunate
Son, provides a whole new cast of characters. While some of them come
across as caricatures, the main characters have depth that will resonate for
many readers who will enjoy reading Fortunate
Son, and will reflect on which boy was the fortunate one. Steve Hopkins,
June 26, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Fortunate
Son.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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