By Angela Jackson-Brown
Harper Muse, 2023
Paper, $17.99
Fiction
Reviewed by Cheryl Carpenter
In the first chapter of Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck reminds those readers who would follow him and his dog on the journey that they didn’t “invent” sin; sin is old. He goes on to compare a journey to a marriage and notes that “the certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” Awareness of such observations would have done little to alleviate Rose Perkins Bourdon’s guilt and shame about sin in Angela Jackson-Brown’s Homeward. She has returned to her parents’ home in Parsons, Georgia, pregnant with a baby conceived while her husband was away serving in the Air Force. Cedric and Opal Perkins have reared their six children to be devout and deeply spiritual, and they are at first outraged by their daughter’s infidelity. When Jasper Bourdon arrives from his home in Mississippi to reunite with Rose and claim the baby as his own, however, forgiveness is granted all around. At the end of his leave, Jasper returns to active duty and is deployed to Vietnam, and Rose remains with her family in Parsons.
The magnitude of her sin continues to trouble her in spite of having been forgiven by her loved ones, and when Jasper is killed in action and the baby is stillborn, she blames herself. Inconsolable in her grief, she spends her days at the cemetery. Desperate to help her find a way to recover, her parents send her to Atlanta to stay with her sister Ellena, a student at Spelman.
Although Ellena and Rose have been close siblings, Ellena is initially unsuccessful in her attempts to relieve Rose’s gloom and convince her sister to leave the house. Her persistence pays off, though, when Rose finally agrees to accompany Ellena to a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting. Led by a charismatic Jewish man near Rose’s age, the group of field workers decides to shake up the quiet Southern town of Parsons by conducting sit-ins at lunch counters and registering people to vote. Simultaneously attracted by the possibility of change and repelled by thoughts of danger to her family, Rose is swept along by Ellena’s vision, enthusiasm, and courage.
In a letter at the end of the book, Angela Jackson-Brown explains that her purpose was to remind older readers of the Civil Rights struggle and to introduce the history and influential figures of the era to young readers. This seems an admirable and timely goal. To achieve it, the author combines romance and religion with history and poses philosophical questions that have, like sin, been around for a very long time. Older readers who have perhaps grappled in their time with cruelty and its consequences indeed need to be reminded of personal and societal sin and atonement, and the generations following them need the historical foundation of the 1960s to try their hand at building a more hopeful future for all humanity.
Angela Jackson-Brown, a graduate of Troy University and Auburn University, is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing in Bloomington, Indiana, and a member of the graduate faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of three previous works, The Light Always Breaks, When Stars Rain Down, and Drinking from a Bitter Cup, and a collection of poetry, House Repairs.
A native of Mississippi, Cheryl Carpenter has lived in Decatur, Alabama since 1987. She is a retired English teacher.
