DANCING TO THE LYRICS

In this coming-of-age novel, a gay Black man looks back on his childhood on the mean streets of Baltimore in the 1960s—and in an even meaner home, haunted by domestic violence.

It’s 1964, and 5-year-old Grant and his two younger sisters move from the small town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, to Baltimore with their 21-year-old mother, Carol, and her new husband, David. During Grant’s first night in the city, bunking at David’s mother’s home, he’s beaten by David’s heroin-addict brother, Axel, just before the police storm in to arrest his attacker for theft. Things get worse when David moves the family into their own house and starts violently abusing Carol and, soon, Grant. Outdoors, Grant and his sisters navigate a neighborhood besieged by drugs and crime and where they discover more than one corpse. Despite these traumas, Grant feels part of a vibrant, if sketchy, community, with charismatic figures such as David’s Uncle Ike, a feared drug dealer who takes care of his own, and Mister Willy, a sightless neighborhood griot who subtly validates Grant’s queerness, telling him, “don’t ever explain yourself, just be yourself.” Ratleff’s meandering narrative luxuriates in period detail and historical events that slowly build in the protagonist’s young mind into a racial consciousness that erupts with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and tense encounters with White National Guardsmen during Baltimore’s ensuing riots. The author’s sometimes-gritty, other times lyrical prose conveys Grant’s terror at the violence surrounding him with memorable imagery—“Without warning my stepfather had both his hands around my mother’s throat, choking her,” Grant observes at one point, likening David’s pose to “a tango dancer dipping his partner”—but also registers quieter currents of family anguish: “She no longer loved him,” he writes of Grant’s Aunt Porch as she tends her dying husband, but “After months of tending bedpans and holding a hand that withered with each day, her hate faded to pity, and pity flirted with forgiveness.” The result is a gripping tale of a child trying to assert himself against a cruel but enticing world.

A richly textured portrait full of tension and desperate hope.