CROSSING OVER JORDAN

By Linda Beatrice Brown
Ballantine Books (1995)
$22.00 290 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

Are Americans becoming increasingly historically ignorant? Scanning the Internet newsgroups, watching tv talk shows, or listening to a Bill Clinton or Bob Dole speech, you could make a good case for it. More and more, it appears as if we are approaching issues with our minds already made up, with little or no tolerance for learning about how we actually ended up in our present condition. If the past does not fit our opinion, more often than not it is the past that must be damned.

And nowhere do we show that ignorance more vividly, or tragically, than on the issue of the capture and enslavement of African-Americans and its continuing effects upon our nation.

The institution of slavery is a source of shame for both European-Americans and African-Americans, something to be acknowledged and alluded to from time to time, but never to be stared directly in the face.

Most white Americans would like to forget the fact that the great wealth of this country flowed with the sweat and spilled blood of African captives, or that a large percentage of the much-revered founders of our great democratic institutions (Washington and Jefferson, for example) forced chained human beings to work their plantations at the point of a gun or under threat of the whip, or that far too many churches approved of, justified, and even profited from it all.

For most African-Americans, the shame of slavery is the shame of victimhood, something we would rather not talk about. Like a raped woman, we have been led to believe that slavery was somehow our fault, that if our ancestors had only fought a little harder we'd have been free people, that it is our characters which are sullied rather than the character of the slaveowners.

And so Scarlett O'Hara, slavemistress, is something of a national heroine, a symbol of American resilience and resistance, while Prissy, whom Scarlett kept in bondage and who "don't know nothing 'bout birthing no baby," is something of a national joke. Told in private, of course. With no reporters around.

And so while the study and commemoration of the Civil War has almost become a national pastime, complete with its own PBS series, we have little or no understanding of the institution of slavery, which was, after all, the cause of that war. And much of the besotted residue of that institution...racial intolerance, street crime, riots, domestic violence, illegal drugs, the brutality of our police against certain of our citizens, the rise of the prison state, the fight over Affirmative Action, the debate over "family values," the seeming slide of American society into chaos...all are treated as if they have no roots deeper than our own personal memories.

In "Crossing Over Jordan," Linda Beatrice Brown attempts to correct a portion of this delusion by illuminating the link between the horrors of slavery and the dysfunction of modern African-Americans (the effects upon European-Americans is not talked about here). If Alex Haley's "Roots" was the story of the "triumph of an American family" in spite of slavery, then "Jordan" is the story of the tragedy of an American family because of slavery. And in the first third of the novel, Brown succeeds remarkably, chillingly, eerily, in making her point.

Early on, Sadie Temple recounts her husband's story of his father's murder just after the end of the Civil War:

"'My daddy dead [Jacob Temple says] 'cause he thought them white folks meant what they say, that we could vote for real, so he went to sign up to vote, and I remember he got all dressed up in his Sunday clothes 'cause he said we was citizens now, and we had business to look like it, and he went to the courthouse to sign up, and I ain't never seen him again with his hands.'

"I looked at Jacob to see if he said what I thought he said. There was tears lappin' over his chin, and he was starin' through the walls of the room and not at me, and he said it again, 'I ain't never seen him again with his hands. They done brought him home to Mammy in them white sheets, come knockin' on the door. Mammy afraid to open it up, and they say, "We got you a votin' nigger here! Let him go vote now!" Mammy, she opened up the door, and they done threw my daddy in on the floor, and all I remember was blood. Blood and white, blood and white sheets, Sunday suit gone. Mammy was screaming and movin' all at the same time, wrappin' up his stumps like she could put them hands back if she just wrapped enough old rags around where the hands used to be, but the life was drainin' out so fast you could see him dyin' by the inch, and 'fore Mammy stopped hollerin', he was cold.'"

Jacob Temple is the dominant force of "Jordan." In him Brown does the seemingly impossible: drawing a portrait so complex that the reader is simultaneously horrified by the man and sympathetic to his great pain. A victim of violence himself, Jacob describes the beating he receives after being falsely accused of looking under a white woman's dress: "Marse David's daddy, he said did I want him, or the Ku Klux beatin' on me, 'cause he wasn't a member but they would find out what I done and come after me and kill me. So I chose him. ... I remember he say the corn was high and I should pluck it after the beatin', cool as he wanna be. ... [H]e strip me and whip my behind till it raw meat, and then he beat me upside my head til my mouth so swollen I couldn't talk. And then I had to pluck that corn hurtin' like I was."

Jacob joins the ministry and finds solace in the Old Testament God of vengeance and release in the oppression of his own family. The entire household stills in fear when he enters. Every transgression, however slight, however innocent, is met with the severest of punishment. Powerless against the white boss-man who rapes his wife, Jacob instead beats his wife mercilessly when she gives birth to the boss-man's child, and later shaves off her hair to mark her as a "fallen woman." He beats Story, his oldest daughter, for the crime of dancing to harmonica music, and Story never dances again.

The life of Jacob's daughter is the focus of "Jordan." Story Temple Greene is a victim/villain, a bitter, vicious, scheming, vindictive woman who thinks nothing of stealing her sister's husband or disowning her own daughter, and who cannot develop a healthy relationship with a man. Given her relationship with her father, it's no wonder. In Story we can see the background and the outlines of the causes of the Black Man/Black Woman angst so prevalent in the work of African-American woman writers, just as it is no great stretch to envision Jacob as the grandfather of today's conscienceless African-American drive-by shootists and miscegenists.

The downside of "Jordan?" Well, somewhere around the middle of its narrative this book just flat falls off the table, and never recovers. In the latter pages Story descends into caricature and spends far too much time recounting her old angers, which she repeats to herself and to the reader by monotone rote. At this point, the vivid sharpness and believability of the earlier passages is lost. One gets the sense, as in so much modern writing, that the end was done in a rush to meet the pressures of a publishing contract deadline. Because of that, the author's woven thread from the violence of slavery to the violence of today is broken. Unfortunately, too, because Linda Beatrice Brown has a damn good point to make.