River, Cross My Heart [Paperback]

Breena Clarke (Author)

Book Description

Series: Oprah's Book Club | Publication Date: October 13, 1999

A remarkable new writer makes her debut--with a novel of tragedy and triumph in the life of an African American family in Georgetown, circa 1925.

Eight-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of an apparently haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters.

In scenes alive with emotional truth, River, Cross My Heart weighs the effect of Claras absence on the people she has left behind: her parents, Alice and Willie Bynum, torn between the old world of their rural North Carolina home and the new world of the city, to which they have moved in search of a better life for themselves and their children; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family in the Georgetown neighborhood they now call home; and, most especially, Claras sister, twelve-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions sparked by her sisters death as she struggles to decide and discover the kind of woman she will become.

This highly accomplished first novel resonates with ideas, impassioned lyricism, and poignant historical detail as it captures an essential part of the African-American experience in our century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1999: Breena Clarke's first novel takes place in Georgetown in 1925, where a large and close-knit African American community took shape beneath the shadow of segregation. At the center of the story is baby Clara, who is swallowed by the Potomac as her sister, Johnnie Mae, cools off in the brackish water. It's the only place the girls can find relief--they're banned from the new, clean swimming pool the white kids use.

After Clara drowns, the river is never the same, and Johnnie Mae hovers on the edge of womanhood wondering if she'll be able to get past her guilt and emptiness. In an eloquent passage, Clarke writes, "Losing a loved one, a family member, is like losing a tooth. After a while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split the distance between themselves and the other teeth still left, trying to close up spaces."

Bits of wisdom like this are the book's charm. Most remarkable are the church scenes, which Clarke renders almost purely in the give-and-take of voices: the booming preacher's sermon ("The people we love, we only borrowing them"), and the congregation's "Praise Jesus, Amen" exclamations. The author based her novel on stories passed down in Georgetown--tales of that area's first black churches, founded when people decided they wanted their own place of worship, and implicitly their own God. In church the novel takes flight. Elsewhere River, Cross My Heart suffers from clumsy, purple prose, and a plot that moves forward in labored fits and starts. Clarke painstakingly tries to re-create this past world, but sometimes it seems her duty to history is holding her back, bogging her down in period-piece details. In the effortless church scenes, history loses its gravity and is absorbed by grace. --Emily White

From Booklist

Ten-year-old Johnnie Mae Bynum is haunted by the memory of her sister Clara, who drowned in the Potomac River at a point where the neighborhood children had been routinely warned against swimming. Five years older, Johnnie Mae had always been charged with Clara's care, so Clara's death stirs up guilt and confusion. Had she pushed Clara into the water or was she only guilty of neglect? The drowning changes the dynamics within the Bynum family, still coping with the move from South Carolina to the Georgetown area at the insistence of the mother, the strong-willed Alice Bynum, who wants opportunities for her children that she perceives exist in the North of the 1920s. Hence Alice both admires and fears Johnnie Mae's defiant resistance to segregated swimming pools, which chafes her own sense of racial injustice and political expedience. Clarke's first novel beautifully ties together themes of family tensions after the death of a child, a young girl's coming-of-age, and racial animosities in a small community. Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Paperback: 245 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company (October 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316899992
• ISBN-13: 978-0316899994
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (128 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,945,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Breena Clarke's debut novel, "River, Cross My Heart," was an 1999 Oprah Book Club selection. Ms. Clarke, a native of Washington, D.C., received the 1999 award for fiction from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and the Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Association. With "Stand The Storm," Clarke has returned to Georgetown with a bittersweet, lyrical novel that delivers a passionate portrayal of the trials and hopes of the enslaved and newly freed. Breena Clarke lives in Jersey City, NJ.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A few good pages do not make a good book. Sorry, November 18, 1999

By 

"hotnancy" - See all my reviews

This review is from: River, Cross My Heart: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

I felt this book needed more of a plot...some kind of resolution, something to let the reader know that this was not just some train-of-thought mumbo jumbo. Something! Something more!

What I did appreciate about this book was the way in which Clarke dealt with racism. I especially liked the questions that young Johnnie Mae kept asking when confronted with such blatant examples of inequality. It seemed like Johnnie Mae was asking herself the same questions that blacks must ask themselves today when confronted with such a hateful thing as racism. The fact that Johnnie Mae was relentless in her questioning put her at odds with the older, more experienced blacks, many of whom had almost resigned themselves to their place, it seems, until Johnnie Mae infuses them with hope at her swimming competition.

I liked Johnnie Mae's sense of self worth and bravery. I thought the interactions between Johnnie Mae and Pearl were funny and touching; although there were too few of them to make up for the book's shortcomings.

I think the author should re-write this book and concentrate more on the rest of Johnnie Mae and the other Bynums' lives.

Personally, I would have liked to see Johnnie Mae go to Howard University, like her swimming coach, or fall in love and marry Charlie. Aside from Johnnie Mae, Calvin was ripe with possibilities.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dive into "River, Cross My Heart"!, March 9, 2000

By 

cs (Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: River, Cross My Heart: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

Some people like to read. Some people like to think. And some people like to do both. River, Cross My Heart is a book that makes you think as you read. It is a touching story about a black family living in the south in the early 1900s. The family faces racism every day. The black children are not allowed in the town's white pool, and one day Clara, a black girl, drowns when she goes to a nearby river. The novel deals with Clara's sister, Johnnie Mae, and her emotions in dealing with death and racism. The book really makes you think. If Clara would have been allowed to swim in the town pool, she never would have drowned. I kept thinking this over and over in my head. Racism indirectly killed an innocent child. I loved how the book took me back to the times of when it took place. I felt the racsim in the book and related to the black characters in the story. The author, Breena Clarke, does a great job of letting the reader relate to the characters. I really felt like I knew Johnnie Mae. I fell in love with Johnnie's character right away. This girl is so strong-willed and brave. My favorite part of the book is when Johnnie Mae sneaks into the white pool one night to overcome her desire to beat racism. Johnnie is so courageous to do this. The way the author describes Johnnie helps the reader to really know her, predict her actions, and admire her. For those of you reading this review, get the book-that is, if you want to think about what you are reading. You could read the novel as a light story for pleasure, but you really should go in depth with your thinking. This book deals with serious subjects like death and racism-subjects everyone needs to be exposed to. Anyone can read River, Cross My Heart. But I reccommend it to those who will really think-about Johnnie Mae, about the river, about racism, about death---about life. This novel is enjoyable and well-written. Give it a chance. Dive into River, Cross My Heart!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully weird, January 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: River, Cross My Heart: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

Breena Clarke's first novel is like a broken rubber band gradually stretched by fingers that aren't aware of the possible sting that may eventuate if it breaks further or if it is let go. It starts off so slowly that one wonders where it may be headed and then it starts to gather momentum until it totally shifts and finishes about 358 degrees from where it started. What makes it work I think is that the characters develop. We see our young heroine mature and grow amongst the many people around her. Perhaps there are too many. I constantly had to reread sections to try and remember who people were but I found in the end the relationship that existed between our heroines - Johnnie Mae and Pearl - entirely satisfying. It wanders and at times mimics - poorly - Toni Morrison, but Clarke's work here is promising enough to warrant a reading of any further work she may produce.