Angela Flournoy’s 2016 debut novel The Turner House begins with a haunting: it is 1958, and Cha-Cha, the eldest of Francis and Viola Turner’s 13 children claims that “a ghost—a haint, if you will—tried to pull (him) out of the big room’s second-story window.” Cha-Cha’s 3-year-old brother Lonnie is the one who draws the house’s whole attention to the incident: he thinks Cha-Cha is sneaking out, and with a white boy, no less. Two other siblings, Quincy and Russell stumble into the hallway; they see Cha-Cha battling the haint, “and each time Cha-Cha’s fists connected with its body the entire thing flickered like a faulty lamp.” Francey, the eldest girl, appears and tells Cha-Cha to let the haint go, but he refuses. She drags her brother into the hallway to try to talk some sense into him. The children are stopped cold by their father, who makes Cha-Cha search high and low for the haint and determinedly ignores the irritated spots around his son’s neck that signal the reality of his attack. “There ain’t no haints in Detroit,” he tells the children.
The incident with the haint lives on in family lore—the children agree it exists and that they have to live with it, but it’s the father’s saying that haunts them as well, persisting in the family’s lingo as a shorthand for an accusation that someone is pulling someone else’s leg. The haint itself largely fades into the background until years later, when Cha-Cha claims it nearly wrecks his 18-wheeler and his entire career after three decades of clean driving. It’s this resurgence of the haint, and the troubles of Cha-Cha’s siblings, who are all haunted in their own ways, that give this novel propulsion and emotional heft. The Turners and their house, which is on the verge of foreclosure, are a mirror of Detroit and its early 2000s crises; they are also intricately-rendered character studies of authentic, imperfect people who are doing their best to make their way in the world under dire circumstances.
Flournoy’s sophomore novel The Wilderness is a marked evolution of the hauntings and the studies in survival so adeptly rendered in The Turner House. The protagonists of this new novel are five young Black women: Desiree is grappling with the desires of her aging grandfather and with her estranged relationship with her older sister Danielle; January is struggling with a career change and a surprise pregnancy; Monique is a librarian and blogger who stumbles into fame by standing up to her employer; and Nakia is trying to launch a new restaurant despite her family’s doubts. From New York to Los Angeles, from the 2000s to the 2020s, these women are each grappling with their own ghosts and struggling with the demands of their own lives in an America in the midst of political, social, and environmental upheaval.
While the characters in Flournoy’s first novel reflected the economic and cultural landscape of both the Great Migration and post-2008 Detroit, her second novel casts its net wider. In addition to honoring the thinking of Black icons such as Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde, June Jordan and others, Flournoy’s meticulous rendering of her characters and their interiority reframes our thinking about wilderness and reinforces its depiction in this novel in the Black intellectual tradition, where it is both a vital energy within a person and the foundation of community and cultural consciousness.
The Wilderness is an expansive, accomplished novel, a portrait both of collapse and its only antidote: found family, friendship, and mutual support. I’m looking forward to discussing it with you throughout the month of October.
Have you started? What are your first impressions?
We will be in conversation with Angela on October 30 at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET. You can register here. And if you need to buy the book, don’t forget about our partnership with Allstora.
Wow I’m so excited for this!
Can’t wait to read this!