Kirkus Reviews QR Code
DEAD ABOVE GROUND by Jervey Tervalon

DEAD ABOVE GROUND

by Jervey Tervalon

Pub Date: Jan. 11th, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-03468-8
Publisher: Pocket

67103468.500 Tervalon, Jervey DEAD ABOVE GROUND Gripping melodrama about Creoles in New Orleans in 1946, by the author of Understand This (1994), winner of QPB’s 1994 New Voices Award. Plenty of violence washes through these pages, but it never seems overdone, even with a villain who’s a handsome, well-dressed, sociopathic pimp who used to sew up boxers before he took to beating up his six whores. The story is told through the eyes of 17-year-old Lita Du Champ who, along with her wild mother Helen and beautiful sister Adele, could pass for white. —Mother raised us to be what we were—colored and proud, never wanting to be something we weren’t.” The story’s crisis comes when Adele, who has married well-paid Rene, a seaman, falls for cruelly attractive Lucien FaurÇ, a respected pimp proud of the women he’s murdered. Rene has been at sea for six months and Lucien has a special reason for pursuing and capturing Adele. Some years ago, in his teens, he had a whore named Ruby whom he was particularly fond of and loved to beat even when she got pregnant. Lita’s mother took pity on Ruby, had a white cop beat Lucien and send him to prison for a few years. As it happens, Ruby’s daughter, Adele, may be Lucien’s child. Back then, in any case, Helen boarded Ruby and fell in love with Adele; and, when the time came that a white man wanted to marry Ruby and take her to Canada, Ruby gave Adele to Helen to raise as her own daughter. Lucien, out of prison and back in business with three whores, now wants Adele as his more or less permanent mistress. She returns to Rene briefly, but then gets pregnant—violently—by Lucien. Helen has never explained to Adele the background of her birth, and Adele can’t understand why her “mother” is so set against her loving Lucien. None of this turns out well. Strongly sustained, with well-weighted characters that avoid stereotyping—even in the case of Lucien.