Angel Of Harlem: A Novel Based On The Life Of Dr. May Chinn - Hardcover

Haulsey, Kuwana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375508708 ISBN 13: 9780375508707

Verlag: One World, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A historical novel based on the life of Dr. May Chinn, the first black female physician in New York City, chronicles her odyssey from aspiring musician, through her struggles against racism to accomplish her goal of becoming a doctor and her friendships with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, to her accomplishments in 1920s New York City. 14,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Kuwana Haulsey is the author of The Red Moon, which was a 2002 finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Born and raised in New York City, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Rutgers University magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Kuwana has led seminars for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, D.C., and at Rutgers University. She’s taught writing at UCLA and Agape International. She is an actress and currently lives in North Hollywood.

Kuwana Hausley has led seminars for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, D. C., and at Rutgers University. She has also taught writing at UCLA and Agape International.

Aus dem Klappentext

Inspired by the extraordinary events of Dr. May Chinn s life, Angel of Harlem is a deeply affecting story of love and transcendence. Weaving seamlessly scenes from the battlefields of the Civil War, during which her father escaped from slavery, to the Harlem living rooms and kitchen tables where May is sometimes forced to operate on her patients, this fascinating novel lays bare the heart of a woman who changed the face of medicine.

A gifted, beautiful young woman in the 1920s, May Edward Chinn dreams only of music. For years she accompanies the famed singer Paul Robeson. However, a racist professor ends her hopes of becoming a concert pianist. But from one dashed dream blooms another: May would become a doctor instead -the first black female physician in all of New York.

Giddy with the wonder of the Harlem Renaissance and fueled by firebrand friends like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, May doggedly pursues her ambitions while striving to overcome the pains of her past: the death of a fiancé, a lost child, and a distant father ravished by the legacy of slavery. With every grief she encounters, a resilient piece of herself locks into place. At times risking her life attending to men stabbed in their homes and women left to die in filthy alleys May struggles to carve out a place for herself within a medical world that still teaches that a Negro brain is not anatomically wired for higher thinking. Yet against the odds, she achieves her goal, starts her own practice, and becomes one of the first cancer specialists in the city.

Alive with the pulse of black unrest in 1920s New York, this beautifully textured novel moves with fearlessness and grace through a history that is by turns ugly and sublime. With Angel of Harlem, critically acclaimed author Kuwana Haulsey gives poetic voice to the story of a remarkable woman who had the courage to dream and live beyond her era s limitations.

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Chapter 1

It took seventy-three years for my father to die. He held on, cloaked beneath a broad quilt of memories, peering out his window onto the wide basin of winter below. Memory had creased his face with fresh gullies and markers that ran east, toward the river. When memory escaped him, he searched it out, skating his eyes along the sagging white rooftops outside until he found what he was looking for. Papa refused to wade into the drifts of his understanding, though, to get thick into it like he could have, deep enough to allow for release.

So stubborn, that old man. Just tiring.

And I am nothing but his daughter.

My papa managed to make it all the way to the outskirts of spring in 1936. February and March had been humbling throughout the city, but especially in Harlem. Gutters hardened into icy spillboxes. Streets drained of color and smell, except the heavy, spoiled odor of snow.

Months before, when it still sparkled, I’d plunged into the snow stacks with the neighborhood children, flinging it at little pecan-colored boys with wild hair and hatless heads. They’d scatter and re-form, creeping up like bright-eyed kittens, wiggling and ready to pounce. The children all wore patched sackcloth coats; some had mufflers, some had gloves, but none had both. If I’d taken off their shoes, I’d have found soles tattooed with newspaper ink and tiny, ashy toes wrinkled from adventure.

I adored those children, had birthed two or three, the ones who called me Mama May instead of Dr. May or Ma’am.

On those late afternoons, when the sun deepened and lay like sheaves of wheat or, sometimes, like thick cream over the covered roads, those babies reminded me of truth. They taught me that play created gulfs of unintended joy, then unmasked circumstance—not as an adversary, but a coconspirator in the game. I needed with all my heart to remember the wisdom born inside innocence, to see myself in their eyes and maybe find worth in that unspoiled vision.

So I squealed like a young girl when they yelled, “Git her!” and stuffed snowballs down my cotton shirtwaist. I pretended to run so they could foil my escape, sneaking more snow into the pockets of my covert-cloth coat, the first good, new brown coat I’d had in three years. It didn’t matter. I giggled anyway, licking snow off my rose-colored palms before the flakes could melt, while they were still glassy and protruding and round.

But by March, things had changed.

The streets were blackened by spitting trucks and feet and mules and human waste in areas where sewer pipes routinely ballooned with cold and then burst. Weals of mud sprouted through the ice and concrete, snaking along the roads all the way out to the river, which itself was hoary and stiff, poised with frost.

By March, the children had long since trudged home. Now the streets stayed empty unless some kind of work refused to wait. So, things being the way they were, no one came to stand watch at my father’s feet. No old-time friend whispered cures or condolences into my mother’s ear. No nieces or cousins dropped by, donating heaping pans of simmered greens and crisp fried rabbit as a love offering.

Not even his lost daughters returned to see him off. I’d written Irene the month before and she’d written back, “Can’t quite make it. Much to do here. But I’ll pass the word. Tell the old man I said good luck.”

Such carelessness offended Papa in a way that death never could have.

His intention had been to make it back home to Chinn Ridge in Virginia, where all parts of his death would be warm and dusty with road songs, and sweet. He had memories secreted away there, stashed in the swollen, ocher hills like treasure. He had people in those hills too. Most of them were years dead, but some still lingered, telling stories only he could rightly remember and pass judgment on. True or false was his alone to say. My papa yearned to be with people who allowed him his place. In the end, though, he was too weak to make the trip.

Despite his sincere efforts to wait out the last whispers of winter and escape, my papa died cold. He died shivering like the wind in his bed, while my mother, who was the sun, stood by his pil- low playing “Pennies from Heaven” over and over again on the phonograph to warm him. She used burned rum and music on his fever chills because the Depression was so unyielding that year that we hadn’t any extra blankets. Without thinking, I’d given them all away to my patients, every last one. I hadn’t been a good enough daughter to save even one warm, gray blanket on which my father could die.

My selfishness and lack of forethought embarrassed me. To make up for it, I waited on him, trying to get him things he didn’t need—an out-of-season apricot, a bit of soft, sky-blue calico, pinecones to rub against his whiskers and his round, red cheeks and then toss onto the coal in the stove. Then the house would smell of woods, like when he was a boy. He smiled and let me do these things because he loved me more than I’d thought I loved him. All I knew for sure was that I let him down. I’d been distracted by my work, by my own thoughts, hunkered down and birthing other things. I hadn’t stayed aware.

Each time my mother passed his bed, Papa mouthed her name . . . Lulu. His gaze followed her, sucking up what he could—her black eyes, her butternut skin, her silence.

His spirit lingered around just to be near her, long past his physical endurance. Papa’s flesh was bloated by then, fat and ripe with decay. But still he stayed. After a while my mother began to fear, not for the comfort of his body, but for the direction of his soul. Finally, late one evening, she sat on the edge of his bed and took his hand. Leaning in to kiss his eyelids, she whispered, “It’s all right, William. Go ’head now. Go on.”

She released him.

Just like that, after all that waiting, he went.

No more words passed between them, just a look of simple wonder that crossed my father’s face as he let go, a look of gratitude that said he hadn’t known dying could be so easy.

My mother didn’t speak again until we’d laid Papa out in the church. Hair parted, tie straightened, she smoothed him over, readied him for all the hardness of the earth. Even then, the only thing she managed to say was “When shadows fly, they cover the stones below. Remember, May.”

Then the Negro seeped out of her face, and she became a Chickahominy again, so silent that I lost track of her breath, so ancient and wide that her presence suddenly felt as inescapable, as untouchable, as the dusky, violet sky. When she was a black woman, my mother railed and sang and cut her eyes. As a Chickahominy, she was free. Lulu became a Chickahominy every time she got mad at my father. So when she stood at the foot of his coffin with her arms akimbo and got free, that’s how I knew for sure that she missed him, too.

After a while I asked, “What did you mean by that, Mama?”

It’s not so much that I needed to know, but the incredible length of her solitude was too much for me. I wanted to put it away for her, to roll it up like a bolt of cloth over my arms. I wanted to hear its dusty “clap” as it turned and turned, hitting the floor at my feet. But I couldn’t. The space that she held was too vast, too dense, much more like the rolling of river water than some dry piece of cloth.

Standing next to my mother felt like wading through the sand at the bottom of a stream. Her solitude rose, filling the ripening red of the carpet, the velvety creases in the drapes, even the gray lapels of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: One World
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375508708
• ISBN 13: 9780375508707
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 340
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar