Time dilates for young children, Shannon Sanders writes in The Great Wherever, and also for ghosts. Ghosts can reclaim time in which to grieve, gossip and watch their earthly relatives in horror, pity and love. Sometimes the dead can bridge silences in family lineage too.
If this sounds fanciful, let me convince you otherwise. Ghosts have always been more than mysterious spectres in African American culture and in this novel a plot of land connects the living and the dead in surreal and unexpected ways.
Set in rural Tennessee and Washington DC, this intriguing and moving multi-generational family saga flows seamlessly through its many shifts in place and time. The key moment is 1933 when Thomas Lamb, a successful businessman and quiet architect of rebellion, buys 157 acres of land belonging to the Lanyers, the family that enslaved his ancestors.
Distrustful, Lamb walks the property boundaries to ensure that they are mapped correctly in the paperwork. He does this in the knowledge that mapping a homeplace in African American culture is an act of skill as well as faith because Black southerners have often been disenfranchised and dispossessed of their land.
If there is a main protagonist of The Great Wherever among Sanders’s large cast of characters, it is Aubrey Lamb. She is an erratic young woman living a financially precarious life in contemporary Washington DC’s gig economy while making some poor romantic choices. Aubrey has thought little of cross-generational family bonds and nothing of the responsibilities of land stewardship. But on inheriting a share of the land in Tennessee, she discovers family she did not know existed, relatives who value her despite her flaws and seek to protect her interests.
For Sanders, Black land matters, family matters and the history on which she draws matters. In the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), possession of land became a civil rights imperative, to take control of self and sanctuary, as well as family and legacy.
Black farmers who bought land were critical to the successes of civil rights movement in the 1960s, as seen in the 2016 documentary Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi. However, any instance of Black land ownership in the US South has a difficult, painful backstory as the dispossession of real estate is a deep scar that runs through American history.
From a policy of manifest destiny and the genocidal excision of Indigenous peoples, ritualistic exclusion from land ownership has persisted for marginalised groups. It has persisted through redevelopment programmes where the displacement of Black communities is spun as urban renewal. Social progress has often worked against Black self sufficiency.
In the African American freedom struggle, “blood and soil” has had a dual meaning. It represents the trauma of forced labour and racial exploitation of stolen land. It has also been reclaimed, as scholar of theology, ecology and race Christopher Carter writes, “as a profound testament to ancestral belonging, reparations, and deep ecological connection”.
However, the term has been adopted by white supremacists. “Blood and soil” was a key slogan of Nazi ideology and is used, as it was at the far right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, to promote an ideology of white supremacy.
Entrepreneurship
Viking
As well as exploring historic traumas, Sanders celebrates Black entrepreneurship, from artisan shoemaker Thomas Lamb in the 1930s through to his his great-great nephew Hays Lamb’s canny management of corporate developers today. Hays is aware of how wily developers toss in phrases like “eminent domain”, “heirs’ property” and “tenancy-in-common” when trying to bamboozle a joint owner to sell their section of land. Hays learns which legal loopholes could be exploited to thwart his family’s legacy so he can avoid them. Covert efforts that descendants of the white Lanyer family make to buy back land, almost a century after losing it to a Black family, need to be avoided too.
Lamb family history is largely unwritten. Thomas’s will is just a scrap of paper on his bedside table which indicates his initial decision to bequeath his land to the child he knows would love and care for it.
As a consequence of changing the instruction to name three of his four children, between whom it is divided equally, his land is shared by multiple descendants in perpetuity. At least one descendant is tempted by the chance of selling up and making a profit on their inheritance. But most are intent on cementing his legacy by keeping the farm. And ghosts need the farm to be kept in the family, as readers will learn.
This novel’s structure is a feat of imaginative plotting for how expertly Sanders balances the many lives of the Lambs down the centuries while ensuring this is still a very contemporary story. It is a richly researched text but Sanders has a light touch.
A dry humour edges into her character-driven novel. It is clever and often funny. This is especially true of the narrator, whose name and backstory readers learn only toward the novel’s end. The narrator is a young, funny and smart member of the Lamb family. She is a wry observer of human frailty who tries to resist judging her relatives, whether dead or alive. Sanders achieves a similarly satisfying balance with the characters who populate this highly original debut novel.
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