Books I Have Read
Leslie by Omar Tyree
A Book Review
By Obi. O. Akwani, MGV Editor
Omar Tyree is a chronicler of contemporary American tales. He is one of those novelists who are truly capable reaching insights that help us decipher meaning in the often tragic events that account for many African American realities.
It is not possible to tell an African American tale without touching on the racism that impacts people’s lives. Because the power of racist society has been so overwhelming and the influence of the phenomenon continuing, the quality of life for every African American has depended on the individual’s particular responses.
His novel 'Leslie' is an American tale of struggle and hope, of defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. Defiance in this case is inevitably accompanied by violence and death.
The 'Leslie' of the title is the name of the chief protagonist in the novel. The story revolves around four African American female students of Dillard University -- a Black college in New Orleans. The four friends are housemates in an off-campus rented house.
Each of the girls represents a particular -- general type -- response of African America to the conditions in society. In their different characters and relationships they represent aspects of the substance of the internal debates of the African American community.
We see one of those aspects in the opening of the novel in the self-conscious words of Bridget as she makes their introduction to the video camera. She is almost apologetic in announcing the girls’ self-identification as the "Chocolate Crew". One of the consequences of living in a highly color conscious society is the importance placed on skin tone. Because of the dare consequences and immense significance of color prejudice in American society, the emotional pain that accompanies the intra-African American variety (Tyree uses the phrase ‘melanin code’ to identify the undue attention people pay to gradations in skin-tone within the community) have tended to make it appear more important than it truly is or deserves to be.
The girls' backgrounds reflect the different social realities of African American life. Like the Black community in American society, the housemates largely ignore the exclusionary demands of social class structures. The Black community has long understood that the class structure in America is, at least in part, responsible for the plight of African Americans.
Bridget Chancellor is a nursing major from Ann Arbor, Michigan and
the glue that holds the four together. Her medical doctor father is
rich enough to foot the bill for their rented house. The others
contribute as they can to the bill.
Bridget represents the new age of African American children born to
affluent parents who have successfully crossed the threshold of
success in America. These parents are members of the professional
class, well educated and properly adjusted in the American corporate
culture. Some members of this class may have become increasingly
alienated from that part of their African American roots which is
poor, struggling and unreconciled, but Bridget represents a subset
of this class which clearly sympathizes with the poor and still
struggling to 'make it.'
Ayanna Timber comes from one of those still struggling, almost ‘made
it’ group. She represents a strong insistent African American
identity. She wants to 'make it' but remains realistic about the
slimness of her chances in mainstream America. As a result, she has
changed majors a few times but nothing seems to give her the
confidence to believe that it will go well for her. Finally she
decides that she has a better chance as a rap artist. It is as a
rapper that she finds the validation and personal satisfaction that
she seeks. She is one of those people – artists and sportsmen and
women – who rely on their talents to speak for them.
Yula Fredrick, like Bridget her fellow nursing major, is a very
caring person. They share the same philosophy about what it takes to
'make it.' They believe that Ayanna's overly 'black' mannerisms
could pose a hindrance to her progress. Unlike Bridget, however,
Yula does not have the affluence to match her big heart nor the
confidence of her more affluent housemate. Ironically, it is from
the last housemate, Leslie that Yula learns to overcome her lack of
self-confidence and gain a focus on her academic goals.
Leslie Beaude, the most deprived, in terms of family means, happens
also to be the most focused and self-controlled of the four.
However, certain aspects of her attitude to life threaten to ruin
her career prospects and in the end ruin everything for her. She
ends up a murderer and prisoner.
The African American Debate
Since the advent of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, African
Americans have debated the appropriateness of those who have "made
it" to abandon the community that nurtured them in order to escape
into middle class American suburbia. As it turns out, those who make
the argument for remaining with the community have gradually gained
the upper hand. Many African Americans who manage to scale higher on
the American class or income hierarchy make the conscious choice to
remain part of the community and not adopt all the exclusionary
structures of the American class system. Tyree uses the lives of
these housemates to build up this class debate in American society.
Thus we see Bridget, the only one of the girls from a truly well off
family, renting the house and inviting the others to share with her.
Bridget's actions and the reasons behind them make for an acceptance
of the case for remaining part of the struggling community even when
the means is available for escaping it all.
The other girls clearly belong to a still struggling community, some
more so than the others. For instance, Yula Fredrick's mother foots
the bill for her education. She and Ayanna Timber – an unruly
"Black-talking" talkative from South West Houston, who dares to 'say
it as it is' -- are attending school on full tuition, but it is
clear in the novel that the burden of paying for their education
rests heavy on their two families, one of which (Yula's) is probably
a female headed one-parent family.
Leslie’s parents' marriage did not survive the American experience.
Individual members of the family are now dependent the social
service system for their basic support. Leslie is the only one among
three siblings who has managed to make it into college or
university. She is doing it on partial scholarship and must work to
supplement her income while studying. Bridget gives her a break on
the rent in return for being responsible for cooking all their
meals.
A Flawed Protagonist
Most of the novel is the story of Leslie and her family life. Leslie
feels used by others -- her housemates and especially her family
members -- but she is unable or unwilling to remove herself from the
situations that make her feel this way. Her sense of responsibility
and obligation to the very people she feels used by are apparently
stronger than her selfishness. It is instructive that Leslie has a
strong desire for control. She laments her lack of total control
over the circumstances of her life and over others. She wants to
change the situation. Her services and ministrations to others,
especially her younger sister and the latter’s family, become a way
of amassing that control.
As the novel progresses, Leslie’s character becomes less and less
likeable. One of the subtler issues that the novelist raises lies in
a comparison of the girls characters, especially that of Leslie and
Bridget.
Leslie tends to see herself as self-sacrificing, noble and
responsible. But in her sense of commitment and responsibility,
Leslie is not nobler than Bridget. Bridget, in fact, is more
altruistic in her commitments. Bridget is committed to helping total
strangers -- her housemates -- because she sees it as the right
thing to do, her own way of helping the Black community. Leslie's
commitment on the other hand is mainly to her immediate family. Her
actions are spurred on by her desire to justify her father's
ancestral legacy.
A Father's Legacy
Leslie’s actions, even her inner strength, seemed to be instructed by what she has learned or inherited from her father. Part of that inheritance is the voodoo religion and culture from Haiti. We see her gropingly seeking to tap into the power of voodoo in other to reach her goals and take vengeance against a wicked world, but the further she gets into this aspect of things; the more things seem to unravel around her.
This quest for vengeance is a questionable legacy from her father, Jean-Pierre Beaude, a Haitian immigrant who came to America determined to succeed. He does well initially, finding work as a cook and restaurateur. But things soon turn sour and Jean-Pierre is ‘broken by America.’ Both his health and his will to strive on fail. He finds himself unable to find work or do business and must move his family from middle-class gentility into the violent ghetto jungle of poverty. After his marriage fails and members of his family scatter, Jean-Pierre moves into a shelter for the homeless. There some of the other men -- American-born -- mock him in his conceit in believing that he could make it in the white-controlled world where they had failed. This is the same attitude that Ann-Marie, Leslie's American-born mother, has. Being abandoned by her husband and losing her family has broken Ann-Marie. She too had gone into a downward spiral, and seemingly fully succumbed to, and accepted the injustices and unfairness of America as her deprived lot. Still in her thirties and dying of AIDS, Ann-Marie tells her daughter Leslie what has been the lesson of her own life: "... You can work all you wanna work, but if you ain't meant to be rich, you ain't gon' be rich."
But Leslie is not to be discouraged. Her faith is stronger than that. Her response to her mother comes quick, "I'm not like you... and I'm gonna do whatever I need to do to survive, whatever I need to do."
And whatever she needs to do turns out to include murder. Leslie's anger is indiscriminate. She strikes out at everyone she perceives to be in her way or her family's way. A lot of her anger is directed at the poor reactionaries in the ghetto who seek to assuage their own frustrations at their common conditions by taking things out on their fellow riders on the ghetto bus.
When another poor working single mother starts dating her sister
Laetitia's live-in boyfriend and father of her kids, Leslie plans to
kill her sister's rival. When the chance came, she pushes the
unsuspecting woman to her death under the wheels of a vehicle. When
student documentary film-maker Kaiyah becomes, in Leslie's view, a
nuisance, she sends the poor girl to her certain death in the ghetto
and makes doubly sure that she does not come out alive by informing
local gangsters that Kaiyah was an FBI spy. Sure enough the
gangsters kill Kaiyah when she comes in asking questions and filming
scenes with her camera. After she started a secret love affair with
Eugene, her housemate Bridget's boyfriend, Leslie gets possessive
when Eugene wants to end the secret affair and return solely to
Bridget. To get her revenge, Leslie talks her brother, Pierre, into
arranging for Eugene's murder by gangsters. When the gangster leader
tries to blackmail her into having sex with him after the murder,
Leslie agrees but slashes his throat in the heat of passion.
Leslie's murderous streak and her faith in the voodoo religion are
things she has in common with her father, Jean Pierre. Leslie's
father had secretly killed a ghetto boy who had forced an eleven
year-old Leslie into sex while threatening to kill her elder brother
with a gun. Leslie believes herself to be a priestess of the voodoo
religion. She had learned from her mother, while the later was on
the deathbed, that she has a strong resemblance to her paternal
grandmother. Leslie confronts her father about this revelation and
her conscious journey into voodooism begins.
The voodoo religion, which helped the poor slaves of Hispaniola
prevail over their white masters more than two hundred years ago,
may have been founded on a sound foundation, but the faith mishmash
Jean-Pierre imparted to his daughter seemed not quite up to helping
her succeed in America.
Faith As The Foundation of Human Action
Faith is what justifies, and gives backbone to, the actions of men.
The faithful must be given a sound foundation upon which to base
their beliefs and hence, their actions. There is no successful
religion that does not have reasoned basis for its faith. It is
possible for stronger and better-founded faiths, built on sound
ideas, to rout weaker ones. However, the triumph of faith is despite
the political state. Even mighty armies that can easily defeat the
political state will find it near impossible to assail a
well-founded faith.
Leslie’s interpretations of her own faith led her down the path of
violence and murder. In the end she was no better than the rude
teenage bus riders and the gangster drug dealers trapped within the
vicious web of poverty and despair, and against whom she unleashed
most of her violent anger.
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