Blessings and disasters A story of Alabama

New Yorker staff writer Okeowo (A Moonless, Starless Sky) offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of her home state. Her motivation, she writes, is partly that, upon telling acquaintances she's from Alabama, she's often met with a "dumbstruck" response of "What was that like?" Surveying Alabama history, from slavery and Indian removal through the Confederacy's defeat to the civil rights movement and mass incarceration, she notes that it's a "land that has been turned over so many times, changed character depending on the circumstances, been in dispute as to who owns it." According to Okeowo, an unresolved, backward-looking, and still tense atmosphere of ownership-in-dispute characterizes the modern state. During her interviews with a host of figures, from a white woman who endured childhood sexual abuse to a Black survivor of a Klan "night rider" attack, she explores and at times attempts to bridge this divide (recounting a discussion with a white historian who argues that the Confederacy can't be judged by "today's moral standards," Okeowo, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, highlights that he is open to her disagreement on that claim, and that overall the conversation is productive). To do so, she draws on an ingrained neighborliness that, as a sort of counterpoint, also permeates her depiction of Alabamans. Probing and sumptuously written, this makes for an entrancingly ground-level and empathetic view of Alabama's past and present. (Aug.)

A native daughter returns to Alabama, a state much misunderstood--and for plentiful reasons.New Yorker staff writer Okeowo was born in Houston and lived there for her first six years, but her parents, Nigerian immigrants, felt more at home in Alabama. So does she: "Montgomery is the only place I consider my hometown, the place where the bare bones of my self grew and fused together and gently solidified." Having reported for years in Africa, she finds Alabama a place similarly both "stereotyped and neglected." There's cause for that stereotyping, for Alabama harbors sharply antagonistic racial divides--as she wryly notes, every time her aspirational parents moved into a white neighborhood, the whites moved elsewhere, only to find that "Black people followed them there, too." The divides are real and persistent. One of Okeowo's chief interlocutors is a descendant of secessionists who "has an unrelenting pride in his story…the kind of pride that still revered the indecency of his elders." Even so, he tries to connect with her and she with him, "because that's what you do down here." Such connections are not always easy to make: By Okeowo's account, many of Alabama's Native Americans, few but politically astute and relatively affluent, seem as wary of their Black neighbors as of their white ones, while the white mayor of Montgomery permitted the erection of historical markers relating to slavery only because he reckoned that they would draw tourist dollars. Okeowo ventures theses that Alabamians and others will find fascinating and provocative, among them the thought that the Lost Cause myth was in good part crafted by "certain white women" and that much of the ugliness of Alabama's past--"Indian removal, the slave trade, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow"--is absent by design from official histories and "public stories." Okeowo delivers a portrait of a past-haunted place that is at once empathetic, sad, and troubling. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.