BETWEEN THE RIVER AND THE RAILROAD TRACKS

An intelligent, deeply felt memoir for readers of The Yellow House, Paper Girl, and Keeper of My Kin.

Fleetwood, a MacArthur Fellow, follows three works of nonfiction—including National Book Critics Circle award winner Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020)—with this searching, honest, and engaging personal narrative. The book is buttressed by meticulous research into the history of the Second Ward of Hamilton, Ohio, a Black neighborhood created by redlining and exclusion. Born there in 1973 into a family with roots stretching back generations, Fleetwood illuminates, among other things, the divide between the experience of Black men and Black women. “The lore of our ancestral line is of unrealizable dreams and tragic outcomes for our men and boys,” she writes. But despite the comforts of a “women-centered household [built] on comfort, humor, music, and storytelling,” her intellectual and political coming of age revolves around the realization that “the curse of the Fleetwood men was the curse of us women, too.” As the author’s childhood and adolescence unfold, gun violence, mass incarceration, crack addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, and the decline of the Midwestern manufacturing economy cast deep shadows over her extended family—but, at the same time, their lives are greatly enriched by the Ohio funk scene of the 1970s and ’80s. Her maternal uncles, including legendary frontman Roger Troutman, formed the band Zapp, mentored by Bootsy Collins and George Clinton. The author’s own exceptionalism, intellectual star power, and drive served as her ticket out of the Second Ward and into a life of extraordinary achievement—yet contributed to a sense of isolation. For example, in the early 2000s, the author shot dozens of hours of footage for a planned documentary about her grandmother, the family’s beloved matriarch. But after being interviewed, the great-aunts who had participated withdrew from the project, “suspicious of my intention and perspective.” Thankfully, with the current volume, she has returned to the project of documenting her complex and fascinating family history.

A brilliant counternarrative to the 'Hillbilly Elegy' version of southwestern Ohio.