Roadwalkers [Hardcover]

Shirley Ann Grau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 1994

Chronicles the lives and fortunes of two extraordinary black women--Baby and her daughter, Nanda--as they struggle to make places for themselves in the South, from the Depression to the era of the civil rights movement. By the author of The Keepers of the House. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Two narratives uneasily coexist in this latest novel by Grau, one absorbing and potentially riveting, the other curiously dry and flat. The book's first half is as powerful as anything this talented writer ( Nine Women ) has ever produced. Her rhythmic prose accommodates precise yet incandescent descriptions of the natural world, and she evokes the patterns of daily farm life. Abandoned by their parents during the Depression, six young black children become homeless "roadwalkers" in the South. Eventually only Baby and her older brother Joseph remain, desperately foraging and stealing in order to survive. Possessed by inchoate anger, Joseph sets fires on a restored plantation; he escapes from a hunting party, but Baby is caught and sent to an orphanage by the farm's kind owner. There the feral child is named Mary Woods and treated with compassion, until she turns her back on those who succored her. Grau interweaves Baby's story with that of the plantation's white manager, Charles Wilson, drawing a moving comparison. Charles, too, loses his mother at a young age, but he has the safety net of family to sustain him. To this point, the narrative is luminous and involving, although Grau does spell out the spiritual bonds between her characters with some heavy-handedness, proclaiming empathies that are facile and devised. But when, in the book's second half, Mary's daughter, Nanda, becomes the protagonist, the narrative loses its way. Nanda's experiences at boarding school, where she is a pariah in a white world, are meant to explain her bitterness, fury and self-centeredness. But though Grau means to demonstrate how survivors suffer, learn and endure, Nanda and her mother are opaque and charmless; neither has a soul. One wishes that Grau had continued the path on which the first half of the book is so firmly placed.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In her first novel in 18 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Grau incorporates the story "The Beginning" from Nine Women (LJ 1/86), moving far beyond her original concept. Grau relates the experiences of Baby, a homeless African American child during the Depression, whose seemingly endless travels eventually bring her success and respectability, and Nanda, Baby's daughter, whose magical relationship with her mother gives her the strength to integrate an exclusive convent school. This is quintessential Grau: the vivid descriptions of the South, the multiple perspectives, the unblinking lack of sentimentality, and the strong female characters, whose amazing inner strength allows them to rise above the most dreadful and degrading experiences, turning them into victories. The first half of the book, chronicling Baby's experiences wandering the back roads of the South, is particularly moving, while the second half-which tells Nanda's story-is less compelling. Nonetheless, Grau's many admirers will be delighted at long last to have a new work by one of the novel's finest practitioners.
Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 292 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 2nd edition (July 19, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679432337
• ISBN-13: 978-0679432333
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,004,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Roadwalking Redux, February 22, 2005

By 

D. A. Hamilton (Las Cruces, NM USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roadwalkers (Voices of the South) (Paperback)

Some reviewers on this page praise Grau's strong prose, strong feminine characters, and powerful beginning. There is indeed all that. Others find some of the story "flat" or "lost." Perhaps so. Yet all miss the point, which is really rather uncomplicated, and for which the title Roadwalkers supplies the only clue needed. "Baby" never stops being a roadwalker, her daughter Nanda becomes a roadwalker, and the whites of the story become dislodged from their stable homelife to become roadwalkers themselves. Always lurking behind the economic circumstances that forced all the walkers to take to the roads was an unhinged social and moral world. Once Nanda and her mother achieve success in the white world, we see that the successful whites they meet also wander in a scatterbrained society aptly reflected in how quickly and irrationally fashions in clothing change. If this doesn't ring true, think how many times you yourself, your family and your friends have moved in the last ten years, seeking a "good" education, a "better" job, a "better" place to live, and then decide if you have found a better, more secure, and happier you. Or do you even now want to "move on" and walk down yet one more road?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LUMINOUS PROSE AND TELLING NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION, May 2, 2005

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roadwalkers (Voices of the South) (Paperback)

The luminous prose of Pulitzer Prize winning Shirley Ann Grau is enchanting to read. In this, her sixth novel, she brings each scene to vivid life with her prodigious gifts of narrative description.

Six young black children are left homeless after their parents abandon them during the Depression. They become transients, "roadwalkers" or, as some call them "frog spawn," trudging their way across the South.

Before too long, Baby and her brother, Joseph, are the only ones left. They do whatever is necessary to survive until refuge is found in an old plantation. The landowner captures Baby and sends her to an orphanage, where she is given the name of Mary Woods.

Some 40 years later, Nanda, Baby's daughter tells the story. Baby has become a seamstress and then a dress designer, thus providing an insulated, privileged existence for her daughter. It is only when Nanda integrates a white Catholic school in the East that she finds herself an outcast in an unfriendly world.

"Roadwalkers" is not only the story of the black experience in the South, it is an account of adjustment, acceptance, and survival.

- Gail Cooke