“Drowning Doesn’t Always Look Like Drowning” — A Discussion of ‘The Twelve Tribes of Hattie’

A Northwest Philadelphia native talks with our Book Club curator about regional identity and race in The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a Philly-based novel by Ayana Mathis.

Germantown in 1948. Credit: Free Library of Philadelphia

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Following up on my review of Ayana Mathis’ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, the newest Philadelphia-based novel to make to the bestseller list, Next City engaged Rev. Aisha Brooks-Lytle to discuss the book with us.

Now an associate pastor at Wayne Presbyterian Church in Wayne, Pa., Brooks-Lytle grew up in West Oak Lane, a neighborhood adjacent to the Twelve Tribe’s Germantown setting. She also pastored Mt. Airy Presbyterian Church from 2009 to 2013, which is another adjacent area with a great deal in common with Germantown.

Some parts of the following chat reveal key events in the book; however, as the novel is more a series of vignettes than a plot-driven narrative, it would be inaccurate to characterize them as “spoilers.” That said, readers sensitive to revelations should consider this a warning.

Next City: So, as a native of Northwest Philadelphia, did you see the Germantown you knew growing up reflected in The Twelve Tribes of Hattie?

Aisha Brooks-Lytle: Yes, but it was more like the Germantown/Northwest I imagined my parents and grandparents to have experienced growing up.

NC: That makes sense. Much of the book takes place quite a long time ago.

Brooks-Lytle: Exactly, but that storyline is the same for so many black families with grandparents from the South. My grandmother was from North Carolina and my grandfather was from South Carolina.

NC: The gravity of the South is a powerful theme in this book. It seems like the characters that really prospered were the ones who got out of Philadelphia and went to the South. At least in part.

Brooks-Lytle: Partly so. Alice marries the doctor but she is overmedicated. Hattie’s sister, Pearl, is well off in the South, but they have their struggles with infertility and the social implications for a women in that time and space.

NC: Billups is, by my count, the only child in the book who gets a moment of triumph.

Brooks-Lytle: Billups does well by being honest about his reality and at ease with his social standing. He is okay with being a working-class Negro trying to make it with his working-class girlfriend.

NC: That’s how I saw it. He doesn’t exactly prosper, but he’s making his own way, gets out of Alice’s clutches, and he stayed right here in Philadelphia.

Brooks-Lytle: Billups may be the only one who got it right. The novel’s story unravels the hopes of those who came North for something better. A life that begins with struggle and trauma (the death of the twins, Hattie and August’s first children) has a ripple effect on their kids.

NC: When you were growing up in Northwest Philadelphia, did you feel this same gravity of the South? Was there an idea that it might be worth leaving Philadelphia and heading to the South to make a career?

Brooks-Lytle: There were opportunities in the South. Growing up in Philly in the ’80s, I loved Philly. The stories of the South were interesting to me. They had good times and bad times. And many black kids always “went down South” to see some relative. I have a love and respect for the South because it is part of our story. I am a Northern Negro for sure. I make no apologies for that, but I was sent down south the summer of 1989, so that I could learn about Black History and culture, on a trip called the Martin Luther King Freedom Ride. I fell in love with the Southern black experience on that trip.

NC: In our previous piece, we wrote about how this is a book about Germantown, not Philadelphia. Is that how you experienced Germantown growing up? That you did most of your living in your neighborhood?

Brooks-Lytle: You could do some of what you wanted in your neighborhood, but there were the malls and Center City. What I did find to be true in the book, which is still true in Philly today, is that each section is telling a story of race and class and status. When the working-class women of Germantown saw that Hattie was receiving “relief” they wouldn’t talk to her. When Alice thought that Eudine, her housekeeper, was from North Philly, Eudine had to correct her, not because she was ashamed but to prove a point that even if she were from North Philly, it did not define her.

To this day, names and locations of neighborhood put our socioeconomic status on blast. Even the slight name changes to places like “Brewerytown,” “The Piazza,” “Center City South” — all this stuff is wrapped in Philadelphia neighborhood code language.

NC: I’ve not spent a lot of time in Germantown, but I’ve spent some. As I understand it, Germantown was, for a long time, the neighborhood for black families that had really succeeded. It was the Upper-Middle Class Place.

Brooks-Lytle: I’ve always described Germantown as have two types: The rich side of Germantown (black middle-class money and old white Germantown money) and the poor side of Germantown. As a kid I would catch the SEPTA bus at the corner of Germantown and Chelten avenues. There is a lot of pride and a bit of poverty on that corner, but if you head down Chelten toward Wayne Avenue, you will see big houses, Penn Charter, the well-to-do School House Lane. Yet, if you come down Chelten Avenue in the opposite direction, you will pass the Whosoever Gospel Mission and other slightly impoverished areas.

NC: Your description fits the book’s depiction, as Alice didn’t have to live that far away from her mom when she married into the doctor’s family and still feel pretty distant from where she came from. Even though physically it wasn’t that far away.

Brooks-Lytle: Alice and Hattie could have lived only seven minutes driving distance from each other. That is what has always seemed to be true to me about pockets of the Northwest. It is really a mixed bag.

NC: Did you come away from the book with a thought on how Mathis views Philadelphia for black Philadelphians? Everyone was so unhappy. Do you think she was placing the blame on the city or on a marriage that started in unhappiness? Was it about the family or the place?

Brooks-Lytle: I thought that Mathis hit the nail on the head for the serious complexities of many families who are the byproduct of the Great Migration). I don’t think Mathis is blaming Philadelphia at all. She is just able to go deep with the class and economic complexities for black folk because that is the way Philadelphia was and still is. Sadness with this family stems from a mixed cultural marriage. Hattie is Southern middle-class stock. August is from poor Southern stock. And that cultural mix, combined with her disdain for his background, add some posttraumatic stress of the death of their first children, leaves you with a recipe for sad.

NC: That makes sense, but just to push the question of place slightly more, when Hattie finally does manage to buy her own little piece of the dream — get a house of her own — she and August move out of Philadelphia, to New Jersey.

Brooks-Lytle: Even in the move, Hattie is chasing the class dream. Does the house in New Jersey make things better? No. She has to institutionalize her adult daughter and muster up some type of love for the granddaughter. I think the “migration mentality” is still part of the black experience. I know some from Northwest who will move to the surrounding suburbs. Abington, Willow Grove, Upper Moreland, you name it. Modern-day migration is usually for things like better schools for kids, and perhaps the pragmatic reality of less visible crime than the city.

NC: And once Hattie has resettled in New Jersey she also still isn’t happy with her husband, August. So while we’re on the question of August/Hattie, let’s bring in the third part of that little triangle: Lawrence, Hattie’s secret lover. When we first meet Lawrence, Hattie is leaving Philadelphia with him and a newborn — his child, not her husband’s. When I first read the part where Hattie left Lawrence at the train station, I thought it was a judgment on Lawrence, because of he made his money by gambling. But then when I got to the chapter with Ella, it made me wonder if her departure had little to do with Lawrence and more to do with returning to her responsibilities. How did you read that moment?

Brooks-Lytle: I think Hattie didn’t want to take a chance on another unstable reality. She has an interesting line about witnessing the drowning of a relative. She says, “Drowning doesn’t always look like drowning.” If she knew that she was miserable with unstable economic conditions with August, why risk that with Lawrence?

NC: So since I am talking with a preacher, I feel like I need to get your reaction to the chapter on Six, the young man sent South to join the Revival Circuit. Six’s story is in the third chapter. He gets in a serious fight and the family pastor takes him to the South to explore his gift for preaching the Gospel. I know this book isn’t an allegory, but I thought it was a little odd that Six got rewarded with a grand Southern tour for putting a kid in the hospital.

Brooks-Lytle: Six got sent down South so he didn’t get killed in an alley by somebody in Germantown. He was sent because both Hattie and August had real fears around the death of any more of their children. I think for black families in that era, it said a lot about the stability of your family if they couldn’t keep you. So it was far from a reward.

NC: Was there a chapter or a child that spoke to you the most?

Brooks-Lytle: I found Alice, the daughter who married the wealthy doctor who medicated her, the most fascinating of the characters.

I thought I would find myself more in it, but I think the author who is the silent observer of this complicated family system is where I would place myself. I have charted out my own family three generations back and there are the same kind of fascinating ripple effect stories. I could see the faces, and hear the voices… all of these characters sound like they were taken out of my family tree or many of the folks in my circle of friends.

A woman in my family, one of my elders, tells the story of her father who died from pneumonia back in the South. She always tells the story as if had he had the right medicine or a better hospital, he wouldn’t have died. Her mother was cold before her father died, and grew colder as she raised her. She was not good at affection because her mother was not good at it. When the woman who told me this story made the move up North, she dated a guy in Philly because she knew his family from the South. The struggle was there to offer a better life, a better way. Work harder, give the kids what they needed.

Of Hattie’s children, perhaps I do identify with Billups. He was ready to make different choices and not be controlled by his past. My mother made some different choices: Affection, faith, honesty.
So I am a different person because she made a clear choice to try things a little differently. And we didn’t have to move out of the neighborhood to do it.

As a native of Philadelphia, I really liked The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. I think it tells a story of the not-so-bright and sunny ideal of black folks coming up North from the South to have a better life. Life is tough no matter what. Even in the pain, Hattie did the best she could with what she had. At the end of the day, I think that’s all we can ask of others.

Also, as one who did not have to make that first migration, it makes me extremely grateful for my ancestors and the serious sacrifices they made for the sake of the generations to come. I am forever grateful for that.

Brady Dale is a writer and podcaster. You can find him on Twitter. He has lived in Philadelphia since 2006, but this spring he will make the transition to Brooklyn.

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Brady Dale is a writer and comedian based in Brooklyn. His reporting on technology appears regularly on Fortune and Technical.ly Brooklyn.

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Tags: philadelphiarace

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