Book Review: Glorious, Bernice L. McFadden

Glorious, Bernice L. McFadden's latest book, is a glimpse into Black life during the Harlem Renaissance through the eyes of Easter. Although she is a fictional character, McFadden has obviously done her research, placing Easter into a rich historical backdrop that begins to show how complicated the "question of race" was in the period following slavery. On one hand, McFadden describes Harlem in the time of Marcus Garvey, questions of miscegenation, and whiteness and on the other hand in the South little has changed in terms of overt racist thinking about "natural" racial hierarchy. I found it difficult to imagine how Easter after having connections to Marcus Garvey and to the promise of Black rights could have seem so easily to consigned herself to a later life as a white person's maid. McFadden's exploration of race is especially relevant when juxtaposed with the myth of a "post-racial" America. Many of the same attitudes regarding race are played out in such a way that it is easy to forget that this was over 80 years ago.

McFadden's exploration of the whiteness is also especially relevant. Easter is funded by a "benevolent" benefactor whom posits herself as another wealthy white person who is helping Black people. This relationship becomes more and more problematic as the story unfolds. It is obvious that she never sees herself as equals to the Black characters. Other White characters are portrayed as disloyal traitors and naive "white knights." McFadden paints the white liberal as quite the same in days past as today. However, it is interesting that none of the white characters are "good" or even neutral. Each is cast in a harsh, negative light, and while I don't feel like there is any particular need to have white people cast as saints or benevolent friends in a Black novels, McFadden creates white caricatures with no complexity at all.

While, I felt like the novel made me pause and think as I paralleled the world that McFadden recreates to the state of race in America today, I felt like the book in some places felt undeveloped or cliched. A lot of the issues were well thought out: colorism, Black sexuality, white paternalism, etc. but the characters didn't seem as nuanced, and thus the issues weren't brought to maturity the way they could have.

Yet still, I think it was worth reading.

*** Liked it!

The Book List Review/summary is as follows:

After her sister’s rape and her mother’s death of a broken heart, Easter walked away from Waycross, Georgia, and spent most of the rest of her life trying to walk away from pain and hate. She’d witnessed a lynching, joined a traveling vaudeville show, and fallen in love with a heartless woman, before she eventually ended up in Harlem just on the brink of its renaissance. She is there when Marcus Garvey is enthralling crowds of black folks longing for a respite from racism in America, including her West Indian–born husband, and when striving writers are finding white benefactors. She joins in the ebb and flow of life in Harlem, rising and falling, sorting out her emotions and the sundry heartaches of life in her writing, until she is caught in a scandal that ends the glorious if unstructured life she has been living. McFadden interweaves fiction with the historic period of the Harlem Renaissance in this novel about a woman’s struggle against hate and disappointment.