Kathya Alexander's 'Keep A'Livin' - a civil rights-era novel in verse

  • by Laura Moreno
  • Sunday July 21, 2024
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Author Kathya Alexander
Author Kathya Alexander

"Keep A'Livin'" is the story of 12-year-old Mandy Anderson and her mother Belle in the rural South during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Kathya Alexander's insightful new novel was recently released by the feminist press Aunt Lute Books in San Francisco.

The opening pages brilliantly frame Belle's story as that of a modern-day Job, faithful to God despite enormous suffering. The story is an incredible journey of healing that strives to transcend the trauma of their mixed-race ancestors as well.

Author Kathya Alexander  

Kathya Alexander served as Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook Writer's Retreat and won the Fringe First Award for "Black to My Roots: African American Tales from the Head and the Heart" in Edinburgh, Scotland among other awards. Her previous book is "Angel in The Outhouse."

The story in "Keep A'Livin'" begins on July 4, 1963, her mother's birthday, in the small town of Uz, Arkansas. Told through the eyes of Mandy, a queer Black student, the book is written in syncopated verse that transports the reader back in time to the sweltering, confusing world of the South in the 1960s. Her mother must make the biscuits for her employer on a hot summer morning, raising the temperature of the house to unbearable levels, instead of enjoying the day off to celebrate, an irony not lost on the young girl.

A work of historical fiction, "Keep A'Livin'" is distinctive in that it can also be considered an oral history of sorts because it captures the local dialect and interpersonal relations within the family, church and community. Kathya Alexander triumphs in bringing the complexities of the civil rights era to life, complete with its injustices, anger, grief and tragedies. This is a very important book for today, as the U.S. potentially again finds itself in the grip of the illusion that violence will ever lead to anything good.

Mandy is full of strength, intelligence and dreams of the future, even as she learns the complexities of her own social status in a world she must learn to navigate, like her father, a goodlooking man with a weakness for the ladies who found favor with his boss the governor:

"Gov. Orville Faubus he really like my daddy.
He take a picture every year with all the janitors.
And he always give my daddy some money
for Good News Gospel Temple every year at Christmas.
This is the same man who everybody know
stood on the doorsteps at Central High
and wouldn't let them nine little colored children in
when they tried to integrate the school that time.
But now Central High School is integrated,
although it's still only a few coloreds who even go there.
So Gov. Faubus hate coloreds but he love my daddy
as long as my daddy stay in his place."


Historical importance
The author does not shy away from presenting the real and raw reality of the times, including the toll activism takes on the lives of those who strive for a better future. In fact, not everyone in Mandy's family agrees that trying to upset the status quo by protesting and ending up in jail is the way to go.

"Keep A'Livin'" includes people like Bayard Rustin, the openly gay advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and fought for gay rights.

To quote from the book directly, "'That Bayard Rustin is one of them funny men, ain't he?'" she whispers under her breath. Daddy say, 'You sound just like that redneck Senator Strom Thurmond.'"

In explaining why she wrote this book, Kathya Alexander said her purpose is "to make people aware of all those ordinary men and women who worked at the local level to make the Civil Rights Movement a success. I want 'Keep A'Livin' to honor and acknowledge the local people, the grassroots activists that are often neglected in the history of that era."

Another excerpt:

"Some gangster who own a nightclub in Dallas
had shot the man who kill President Kennedy.
There was police all around. That didn't make no difference.
Jack Ruby come out of the crowd of reporters
who was covering the trial that was about to start
and just walked right up to Lee Harvey Oswald
and shot him with a pistol one time in the stomach.
And like President Kennedy, they took him to Parkland
Hospital where he died later of his bullet wound.
Folks was clapping they hands when they told the crowd the news.
They got film of the whole thing on television.
I just think again the world done really went crazy
if you can shoot somebody on live TV.
Ever since then I like to have my daddy close to me."

Kathya Alexander's 'Keep A'Livin' $20.95, paperback, Aunt Lute Books
www.auntlute.com 
www.seattlestoryteller.com


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