Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ntozake Shange (Author), Ifa Bayeza (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2010

Award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and real-life sister, award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of the Mayfield family. Opening dramatically at Sweet Tamarind, a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolina's coast, we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow, she heads to Charleston. There, they carve out lives for themselves as fortune-teller and seamstress. Dora will marry, the Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on an journey through the watershed events of America's troubled, vibrant history—from Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day. Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and blazing ahead.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sisters and playwrights Ntozake Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide) and Ifa Bayeza (the play The Ballad of Emmett Till) have composed a sweeping African-American saga animating 200 years of history through the voices of seven generations of the Mayfield family's women, beginning with Elizabeth (Ma Bete), a freed slave, and her granddaughter Eudora. Their fate and that of their progeny follows historical events from the Jim Crow South to the civil rights movement with tragedy and triumph: Eudora is gang raped, giving birth to light-skinned Elma, who grows up and moves to New York followed by her half-sister, Lizzie, a single mother with her own tragic past. Lizzie redefines herself during the Harlem Renaissance, abandoning her daughter, Cinnamon, to become a cabaret legend in Paris. Cinnamon carries the story through the 1940s and the 1960s Chicago busing, but here the novel unravels in a rush to wrap things up with too many characters and no time to develop them. This is a complex poetic treatise on race, culture, love, and family, the use of regional vernacular, dialect, and pure song, resulting in a provocative fictional history.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Revered poet, playwright, and novelist Shange teams up with her award-winning playwright sister Bayeza in this encompassing historical saga of African American life. In its riveting dramatization of the promise of emancipation, the brutality of Reconstruction, the baroque cruelty of the Jim Crow era, all the way to the possibilities of the digital age, this bittersweet tale of seven generations in a family of mixed blood and musical genius weaves together essential historical facts and profound emotional truths. The postbellum exodus of Betty, a woman of spiritual powers, from a decimated South Carolina plantation––where she endured a tragic entanglement with the owner and gave life to children of unusual beauty, talent, and determination—launches this engrossing novel. Each character is magnetizing––from Betty to her ambitious daughter Eudora to her renegade daughter Lizzie to brave Osceola to Cinnamon, Tokyo, and Liberty. Each setting, from Charleston to Harlem, is brilliantly realized, and each social convulsion, most strikingly the violence against black veterans of WWI, is intimately illuminated, while anguished conflicts erupt between men and women in shattering microcosms of larger societal crimes. With music as a sustaining force, Shange and Bayeza's epic of courage, improvisation, and transcendence is glorious in its scope, lyricism, and spectrum of yearnings, convictions, and triumphs. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (September 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031219899X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312198992
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,327 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ntozake Shange, poet, novelist, playwright, and performer, wrote the Broadway-produced and Obie Award-winning For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She has also written numerous works of fiction, including Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, Betsy Brown, and Liliane.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant kaleidoscope of heritage and culture, August 12, 2010

By 

Evelyn Getchell "Evie" (Gulf Coast of Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel (Hardcover)

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In the enduring tradition of great African-American literature reminiscent of such luminary women writers as Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, sisters Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza have blended their voices to sing as one in co-authorship of a brilliant kaleidoscope of heritage and culture ~ Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel.

Never do the authors miss a beat in this factual and fictional account of African-American life spanning seven generations of the Mayfield family. With dialogue which is authentic and convincing and often capturing the innermost thoughts of its colorful characters, the authors deliver a compelling narrative in a single harmonious voice and not once does that voice stray off key. Theirs is a powerful story driven by the rhythm of life, beginning at the emancipation of slavery and proceeding until the present day 21st century. The theme is exemplary ~ "Slavery leaves telling marks lasting generations, still every word out of our mouths is a song."

From the very first pages on, music pulsates from every beautifully composed sentence. The prose is so lyrical it sings. The first chapter, vastly rhapsodic and lushly poetic, is a rainbow of perfectly chosen words in celebration of color and every rich hue of blackness. I was compelled to immediately reread Chapter One over and over again for the shear beauty of its language ~ the sweeping poetic prose is so arresting.

In fact, color and music give solid structure to this very unique novel of African-American history and culture. For me it is was like reading the libretto of a contemporary lyric opera; I thought of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess often. The pacing is cleverly set to a progression in musical tempo, ranging the entire spectrum from primitive rhythms pounded out on hollow gourds and spirited shouts arising from the ancient soul to the gentle Negro spirituals, and on to jazz, R&B, Motown, hip-hop, rock-n-roll, folk music and songs of protest. Even great classical and opera are blended passionately throughout this superb story. Every sentence reads with a musical flow which drives the storyline and causes every page to pulsate with passion, spirit and love.

Half way through Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel when the slow spiritual pace of country life in the Old South explodes during World War I into an undulating new age of city life, fast living and newly born jazz, a very telling conversation takes place between two major characters, Osceola and Europe~

"The world is changing, Osceola. Somehow what has captured it is the music-our music. It changes up, improvises, shines, groans and growls-it speaks to the soul-because it comes from there." The lieutenant's body shook violently as if another spell or frenzy were about to descend upon him, but it was a rapture. "Take away from a man everything that he knows, his family, his name, his land, his language"-Europe drew up his arms as if shackled-"his freedom-what is he to do?-He sings. He dances. He plays duh bones. He wails...It's our path, our way out, Osceola. It is the door and the key. Ain't it grand?"

It seems from this point on in the narrative that the pacing picks up along with the music. The first half, representing the earlier Mayfield generations, is almost a different book. Story is emphasized more, told slowly with more depth and detail. The characters are more deeply developed and more attention is made to them. The second half following World War I is paced more briskly, following the rhythm of a more modern, hurried life with less story and character development but a dizzying amount of musical name dropping. Still, I continued to find the narrative engaging and entertaining.

The story is so factual and the history so authentic and raw that at times I found myself ashamed of my own white skin and the disgraceful part my race played in African-American history. I don't believe that was the point the authors were intending however. Rather that there's a place for every reader inside the skin and the minds of the powerful characters of the Mayfield family. Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeaza have created in seven generations of the Mayfield family a celebration of Black heritage, a novel of affirmation, a story of love. It is really a song of life's joys and sorrows, of identity and pride, of resilience and faith.

It is in the telling of this story that makes it unique and so captivating. I was so completely taken in that I couldn't put it down. Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel is brilliant storytelling and I enthusiastically recommend it!

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Long and rambling, September 22, 2010

By 

MarvelousMarla "MarvyM" (Way down in Dixie) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel (Hardcover)

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This book reads more like a collection of short stories than a cohesive tale about a family. My main problem is that as soon as a character reaches a crucial point in her life, the story jumps ahead by years and decades and moves on to someone else. It happens with Eudora in a couple of instances but most notably after her husband leaves her. She was in dire straights, but we hear nothing about her again until her oldest daughter returns to South Carolina for a funeral. It happens with Eudora's daugher Lizzie who flees the south in hopes of making it in show business only to wind up living with relatives in New York while waiting for her big break. Lizzie comes face to face with a man from her past who hurt her and her family immeasurably, so she leaves the country. We hear bits and pieces about what happened to her once she left America, but it's not nearly enough. The same thing happens with Lizzie's daughter Cinnamon. Cinnamon goes from being enrolled in a graduate opera program at Julliard to being a married woman with three children with very little exploration of how her life evolved.

The writing is very good and the stories are interesting, but I do think that the book suffers for trying to combine all these characters into one book. Also, the ending is pretty anti-climactic.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One Family's Song of History..., September 20, 2010

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delicateflower152 (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel (Hardcover)

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"Some Sing, Some Cry" follows one family from the end of slavery through the events of the Civil Rights Movement and ends in the current century. The novel's text provides a somewhat simplified, yet comprehensive overview of the reasons for the Civil Rights Movement and its impact on lives of both U.S. citizens and expatriates. Music and song play an important role in the lives of the characters - like an aria, some individuals will soar above the obstacles they encounter. However, other characters will withdraw into themselves, shedding tears and giving up on the future, on their dreams, and on life.

Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza have created interesting female characters whose strengths and weaknesses affect not only the particular individual's life, but also the lives of others with whom they come into contact. Bette Mayfield, the family matriarch, influences her family through the seven generations by virtue of her courage and determination. Eudora, her daughter, was initially a strong presence in the story, but was lost as the narrative progressed into her own daughter's lives. Reintroduced in a latter section of the book as a successful businesswoman, it would have been interesting to learn more of the direction her life had taken and of the obstacles she had overcome in order to achieve her success.

Eula Walker, Eudora's daughter, abandons her dreams of an education for family reasons and provides the reader with an overall sense of her resignation to life's circumstances. Her life reflects, in many ways, those of other African-American women whose potential was extinguished by societal dictates. In the next generation, Cinnamon Turner, Eula's niece, must abandon her dream of an operatic career due to health reasons; she also resigns herself to marriage and children. Mayfield Turner and her niece Memphis Walker both refuse to bow to adversity and follow their dream of a musical career; however, both will turn their backs on family to do so. Like her mother Eudora's story, Mayfield Turner's life also deserves to be expanded into a complete novel.

The male characters, by and large, were ineffectual and weak or were engaged in criminal activities. Two male protagonists who stood out and deserved further exploration were Jesse Walker and Deacon Holstein. These men represent the two sides of a coin - Jesse was a minister involved in the Civil Rights Movement and Deacon, a reformed criminal, was a successful Harlem businessman. Osceola Turner, Deacon's brother, and Mayfield's childhood companion was a courageous man who lost his life because of prejudice; he was also a strong presence in the novel and a moving force in the lives of others.

The authors' use of vernacular imparts a real sense of the characters' position in the social hierarchy and of the overall environment in which the story takes place. Further, as the novel progressed, the use of vernacular changed to reflect the changes taking place in a character's life and circumstances. However, I found the carry-over of vernacular into the narrative to be distracting, but not because it was not grammatically correct. That technique was applied inconsistently - the narrative would often switch, on the same page, from vernacular to formal, written English without apparent reason. This technique may have been deliberate, or it may have been the result of the novel's having two authors. It did not, as used, strengthen the overall impact of the story.

I rated "Some Sing, Some Cry" as a four-star read because it was very good, but not so compelling that I could not put it down. Unlike Alice Walker's "The Color Purple," the characters in "Some Sing, Some Cry" did not elicit a strong feeling of empathy for their person or sympathy for the travails they endured. There were points in the narrative that seemed to drone on and on. The novel's ending sections seemed hurried as if there was a publication deadline looming and the authors did not have time to flesh out the storyline. Perhaps a tighter editing of the entire text and rewrite of the concluding section would strengthen the book. While I can recommend this novel to those who enjoy multi-generational stories or those who have an interest in a fictionalized account of the Civil Rights Movement and events leading to it, I am not sure it will appeal to a majority of readers. "Some Sing, Some Cry" is a very good book, but not a great one; it is, however, worth taking the time to read.