Some Sing, Some Cry

Kaiama L. Glover

A rich mix of storytelling and African-American history…Every one of these women's stories could be a novel on its own; every one has a complexity and scope that keeps readers turning page after page. That said, it's also true that Some Sing, Some Cry is a very long book, one that at times feels too full…[that] suffers from a surfeit of drama, with characters who shine almost too brightly to be entirely credible…And yet, despite such soap-operatic indulgences, this story…is engaging from start to finish. The Mayfield women are hilarious and sexy, gorgeous and strong.
—The New York Times

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. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

Lyrical multigenerational novel by playwright/author Shange (We Troubled the Waters, 2009, etc.) and her playwright/set designer sister Bayeza.

If music be the food of love, it is the staff of life for "the colored Mayfields" and their descendants over the next century and a half. As the story opens, two of those Mayfields, Bette and her granddaughter Eudora, are departing their home, a South Carolina plantation called Sweet Tamarind, displaced by post–Civil War carpetbaggers who "had bought all the land and paid the white Mayfields a smidgeon of what it was worth and left the poor blacks high and dry." It will not be the first indignity the black Mayfields are made to suffer, but they are a resourceful lot—and uncommonly blessed with the gift of song, masters of countless instruments and genres. That gift binds banjo-strumming Bette to seventh-generation descendant Tokyo Walker, a world-traveling singer of our own time who is not spared the task of battling injustices all her own: "Back taxes and a reputation for bad behavior had trailed her all the way to Botswana," write the authors, but redemption of a sort finds her there as well. Shange and Bayeza account song as an instrument of resistance; for the generation of the age of ragtime, it heralds "the New Negro"; for another, it affords a means of escape to less racially fraught places ("America? You can have it," says the expatriate Mitch after having found France a far more welcoming homeland than his native country); for all, it provides a potent means of self-expression. The authors range across centuries and continents, and to all appearances they've enjoyed the work of creating a world and peopling it with "lords, ladies, starlets, gigolos, gangsters, and aldermen—band leaders, bootleggers, and bag men—prophets, pigfoot hawkers, and professional partiers"—to say nothing of the blues shouters and balladeers of the Mayfield line.

Think of it asRootswith a treble clef—a confident, lively account of love, art and what falls between.