BROWN GLASS WINDOWS

Poet and storywriter Major returns, less forcefully, to the extended black family theme of An Open Weave (1995) in her second outing: a tale that conjures up a centuries-old ghost as narrator in detailing the tragic consequences of Vietnam, drugs, racism, and urban renewal in the decline of a once-thriving black community. With a surname like Everman, there’s no avoiding the allegorical intent in what befalls this family in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Ranger, the dad, is a Vietnam vet dragged low by drugs, which end his marriage but not his contact with his now-pregnant sister Dawa or his teenaged son Sketch, a talented graffiti artist already in trouble with the law for his art, with whom Ranger sometimes connects at his mother Lucille’s place. Ranger wants to get clean, but just at the moment when he may have reached his goal he’s gunned down, a bystander in a drive-by witnessed by Sketch. Also witnesses are Victoria, an old woman who paints herself white in order to believe herself invisible in public, and her companion, the ghost-narrator. Victoria befriends Sketch, but he can’t bear to go home again after his dad’s death, living instead with friends and on the street. Ultimately, he’s persuaded to make the trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington that Ranger had promised him—but with his stepfather instead.

Major tells it the way it is with a magical-realist twist, but a tendency to replace dialogue with posturing and speeches undermines her story’s impact.