After her father vanishes when she is 9 years old, Diamond Newberry is the only remaining Black person in her small New England mill town, left with her increasingly despondent White mother. She is so isolated that when her Aunt Lena first contacts her seven years later, Diamond has to picture her as Thelma Evans, the cool older sister from the sitcom “Good Times,” just to imagine what a Black woman might look like.
In Essie Chambers’s absorbing coming-of-age novel, “Swift River,” mostly set during the summer when Diamond is 16, the fictional Evans family and other Black folks who appeared in 1970s Norman Lear-produced TV shows are the only Black or Brown people Diamond has ever “known”; apart from her father, the only images of Blackness she can conjure. When the idea of Aunt Lena as Thelma doesn’t stick, Diamond envisions Louise “Weezy” Jefferson.
This merging of sitcoms, sadness and generational trauma is emblematic of how Chambers weaves irony and gut-punch emotion throughout this gorgeous debut. With the smart and curious Diamond at its vibrant center, “Swift River” has a real sense of humor. Absurdity and loss sit side by side in her mental gymnastics. Her pain can be crushing, but she is defiant. When she looks up her father in a pay phone’s public directory (it’s 1987), she sees that he is still listed and that someone has scribbled what they thought was an epithet next to his name. The vandal spelled the most infamous word in American history wrong, scribbling “NIGER,” and prompting Diamond to “pull a pen out of my purse and finish the sentence: — The third longest river in Africa!” Many moments are like this, tense and unexpectedly, irreverently wry.
Diamond feels like there’s something wrong with her, that she’s too much, but the truth is she’s just too much for her small town — too big, too brown and too bright, “lit with a shine like armor.” And her feelings and doubts are too big to be soothed by sitcom characters. When she gets the letter from Lena, a relative she’s never known of, questions start flying, “circling around her face like a bunch of angry villagers”: “Why didn’t you show up for the wedding? Do you know what really happened to my dad? What’s your problem with my mom? Where have you been all this time?” Above all: “Why didn’t you help us?”
In 1987, Diamond’s father has been gone seven years and long presumed dead. Legally, though, Robert Newberry is just missing, leaving his wife and child in a precarious position. He had life insurance, but his uncertain fate has the family in limbo, unable to cash it. More than strained finances, though, her and her mother’s isolation weighs heaviest on Diamond.
The book brims with gemlike sentences, striking imagery, metaphors and juxtapositions. One symbolic and evocative tableau appears on the first page — “my Pop’s sneakers: worn-out and mud-caked from gardening, neatly positioned on the riverbank where the grass meets the sand” — and then returns later in the novel, as an image from a news story about her father that Diamond can’t forget:
“The newspaper sneakers haunt me. They’re just regular old Pro Keds from The Shoe Barn, but they look like lone, stunned witnesses to a crime. They should belong only to Pop, to us; something private turned inside out.”
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Diamond clings to those remnants of her father like treasure — his wallet “tucked under a sneaker tongue” containing “two dollars, his license, a packet of snapdragon seeds for the garden, a grocery list from Ma, and my school picture.” Diamond had devoured the seeds, maybe hoping to make those parts of him a part of her — “swallowed the whole envelope … hoping a real dragon would sprout up inside me, fire blossoming from my belly.”
“Swift River” shimmers and shines with acute observations and carefully crafted lines like these. It’s easy to get lost in the artistry and sheer volume of those mental images and similes; like poetry, they take time to process. But the novel’s core is Diamond’s emotional journey. Like those seeds she consumes, her yearning is a living thing. Her mother has challenges that cause Diamond to hide even the most natural desires; she forges friendships away from her mother’s watch, even learns to drive in secret. Her “one friend-like person: Fat Betty” is a librarian who has taken her under her wing. Though now half her former self, in their small town medium-size Betty remains “Fat Betty” in perpetuity. For Diamond, facing similar hurdles, Betty is a lifeline, “like a wise person from the future, come to tell me things I’ll need to know, give me things I’ll need to fight my way out of here. ‘Here’ being this town and my body.”
Diamond’s correspondence with her Aunt Lena about long-buried family secrets and mysteries gives the story added momentum and context. After her mother’s death, Lena uses a trove of family letters to help her niece understand the good and bad of where she came from. The Newberrys, her father’s ancestors, once ran the town’s textile mill. But in Lena’s lifetime, “hating that town is like inheriting your granddaddy’s eyes,” Lena writes to her. “It’s in the Newberry DNA.” The first letter is dated “over a year after The Leaving. That’s what they call the night all the Black people left Swift River,” and when Swift River became a sundown town.
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For Diamond, Lena’s box of keepsakes and the family history provide essential pieces of herself and her dad. The knowledge makes her braver. Without the Newberrys, Diamond had been, as her father feared, more than a bit “lost.” And yet, even looking at a photo of her father and mother on their wedding day, it had “never occurred to me to ask Ma, Where are all the people? The friends? The bridesmaids in ugly dresses?” Her parents’ lonely wedding day had somehow closed off inquiry: “Something about the photo makes me feel queasy and embarrassed, and I have to look away. They seem so alone together. At the beginning of so much alone together.”
There and throughout “Swift River,” the story and Chambers’s telling of it are a seamless fit, deceptively naturalistic and lyrical rather than showy. Chambers has produced a rare and rewarding thing: a fast-moving novel that you want to slow down and savor.
Carole V. Bell is a Jamaican-born critic and communication researcher exploring media, culture and politics.
Swift River
By Essie Chambers
Simon & Schuster. 294 pp. $27.99
