Majoorie's Blues

This "talky" novel follows the lives of three, very different Arkansas sisters, Majoorie, Annie Mae, and Unofa who wind up together in Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Majoorie, like her older sister, Annie Mae, one of the two main narrators, has already been murdered, yet she narrates her story to Annie Mae whose responsibility is to write it all down, just as she whispers it into her ear. Unofa, the resentful, youngest sister, pridefully considers herself a conjure woman; she is at war with the rest of her family, including her son, Napoleon, who believes he is a dog. The historical and social background of this unusual family is the perilous situation of Black sharecroppers in the South after Emancipation; genocide against the southern Native Americans that resulted in the Trail of Tears; racial turmoil that led to the Great Migration north and west; the moderately positive, economic possibility and opportunity for significant political activity for educated African-Africans in California; the economic and social power of descendants of the elite, Mexican Californios; and the deceptive opportunities afforded by Hollywood and the jazz clubs on Central Avenue and in Watts with their ominous foreshadowing of the heroin epidemic set to strike in those areas. These historical realities are the background of MAJOORIE'S BLUES, but the focus of the novel is directly on the characters, especially the sisters' often humorous, always fraught relationships, as well as on their personal struggles to achieve their individual ideas of success. Along the way, we meet Uncle George, the dog; stoic, religious Mama; brother Willard, the boxer, and his doting, amused girlfriend, Minerva; as well as Majoorie's half-Mexican daughter, Consuela. The different sections are told through the multiple voices of the various characters; thus, it incorporates the communal mode of the oral tradition, in which everyone's story is important.