MALAWI'S SISTERS

A family’s attempts to cope with loss are complicated when their
personal tragedy forms the seed of a larger movement.

Malawi Walker, the youngest of three daughters of a prominent
upper-middle-class black family from Washington, D.C., has recently moved to
Florida to work as a teacher and be closer to a man she’s dating. On her way
home after a long evening spent hanging out with a fellow teacher, Malawi
crashes her car and, with no cellphone service to call for help, walks up to
the home of Jeffrey Davies, a white man, who shoots her twice after she knocks
on his door. When she succumbs to her injuries, the Walker family quickly
unravels, each remaining member coping with Malawi’s death in his or her own
sometimes-destructive way: Malawi’s father and mother, Malcolm and Bet, rely on
substances to deal with their pain, while Malawi’s two sisters, Kenya and
Ghana, are forced to confront the realities of their relationships with their
romantic partners, their parents, Malawi, and each other. Several of the
characters will be immediately recognizable to readers—the high-achieving but
unsatisfied older sister, the hippie middle sister—and at times Hatter (The
Color of My Soul, 2011) seems to want to shoehorn other storylines into the
novel, such as the coming-of-age of Malawi’s nephew, Junior. Hatter does try to
make her characters more than stock types, and she generally succeeds, weaving
the events of the story with the characters’ pasts, unveiling their
motivations, and encouraging readers to regard them with compassion, all while
attempting to capture the energy of a larger social moment. But in an effort to
seem evenhanded and tie a neat bow on an otherwise difficult and complicated
story, Hatter defangs the movement she attempts to fictionalize and portray
with respect.

Though it’s a nice effort, Hatter falls short of giving Black
Lives Matter the literary treatment it deserves.