Out of Darkness

author: Ashley Hope Pérez 

Carolrhoda Lab TM, 2015

grades 9-up 

Mexican American

On March 18, 1937, a natural gas leak led to a deadly explosion and collapse of the all-white school in New London, a town in East Texas. Ashley Hope Pérez, who grew up nearby, mined her grandmother’s recollections, archives, and historical narratives to build a complex and memorable novel around this event, a novel that at its core explores love across hard racial lines.

Seventeen-year-old Naomi Vargas, now called Naomi Smith, is a misfit in New London—the dark-complexioned daughter of Mexican-American parents. Shortly after she was born, her father drowned and her mother married a handsome Anglo oil field worker. Henry Smith, though, proved to be a demanding and troubled husband, and when his new wife died after bearing twins Beto and Cari, Henry left the three children with their abuelos in San Antonio. But now sober and an evangelical Christian, he has brought the family to East Texas where they must follow the rules to fit into the white side of a Jim Crow society. They must also renounce their Mexican heritage. Here, Naomi prepares her half-siblings for school:

“That’s enough sass,” Naomi said when they caught up to her. “Let’s hear the rules.”

With a sigh, Cari said, “The main thing is, we don’t talk Spanish in the street or at school or anywhere. Which is stupid, if you ask me.”

“All right, then,” Naomi said. “Just remember. And what else?”

“We call Henry ‘Daddy,’” Cari said. She frowned. “And what about you? Do you have to even though he’s not your daddy?”

“Me, too, and you know it,” Naomi said. She crossed her arms over her chest.

Rule following goes by the wayside when handsome Black teenager Wash Fuller (who is not allowed to attend the Consolidated School but goes to the inferior Colored School, with shorter hours, a shorter school year, and cast off supplies) finds Naomi hiding from bullies in a tree and she introduces him to her seven-year-old half-siblings. Beto and Cari enjoy exploring the piney woods and fishing for their supper with Wash, and Naomi faces down her anxiety about sex—the result of Henry’s sexual abuse of her while her mother was dying—to become intimate with him.

But Henry, who has started drinking again, has designs on Naomi, who is now old enough to legally replace her mother in the marital bed. Surprisingly, most of the town, including the pastor and the Smiths’ churchgoing neighbors, think that such a union is acceptable—certainly far more acceptable to them than a loving, consensual relationship with peers of different races. It is in this volatile racial and sexual mix that the explosion happens.

Pérez’s eloquent third-person omniscient narrative focuses on Naomi, Wash, Beto, Henry, and The Gang, the group of white students who enforce the color line and gossip about Naomi’s beauty and desirability as they stereotype and torment her. Using the third person allows her to comment on her characters whose lives take on the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragedy, and to immerse the reader in a richly drawn setting that is itself a character.

They had been happy for a time, before the rules found them. Before the terrible price was exacted for their transgressions. For the crossing of lines. For friendship, for love.

Ultimately, this powerful novel asks: What are we willing to sacrifice for friendship and love? For defying an unjust society? For working to bring about racial justice? Out of the Darkness is highly recommended.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(published 10/3/16)

An earlier version of this review first appeared in The Pirate Tree (thepiratetree.com). We thank The Pirate Tree for permission.

Editor’s note: Toward the beginning of Out of Darkness, a classmate explains to Naomi his position at the bottom of the town’s social hierarchy: “Nah, I’m a low man on the totem pole.” Debbie Reese, founder and editor of American Indians in Children’s Literature, (https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/) noted this culturally problematic term and called it to the author’s attention. Rather than being defensive, the author thanked Debbie and, in the next printing (paperback), author and editor agreed to replace this line with: “Nah, no suck luck.”

Good Long Way // What Can’t Wait

 

Talented young Latinas who struggle to reconcile their dreams with the demands of their families are featured in two new books by Latino authors. In both What Can’t Wait and A Good Long Way the girls’ families expect them to cook, clean, babysit, or contribute to the family income through part-time jobs that encroach on their time for schoolwork and rest. While responsibility to family is important, these strong girls find ways to overcome the restrictions and limitations and to build the foundation for a better life than that of their mothers and sisters.

author: René Saldaña Jr.

Piñata Books / Arte Publico Press, 2010

grades 6-up

Mexican American

Although Jessy is only one of three point of view characters in A Good Long Way, Saldaña weaves her story in with that of the two brothers, Roelito and Beto, Jr. After a fight with his father, Beto, Jr. runs away to Jessy’s house, hoping she’ll take him in. Jessy refuses, fearing the rage of her alcoholic father if her friend is discovered. The next day, Jessy, an honor student, breaks down in class, remembering her own attempts to run away, while Roelito looks for his older brother at school and Beto Jr. goes to work with his father in order to reconcile with him. Saldaña explores a man’s responsibility—a father for his family, and an older brother for his younger brother—and a girl who has to give up responsibility for her dysfunctional family in order to save herself. Recommended.

A Good Long Way takes place over a single 24-hour period in which the precipitating event leads to new insights and changes for all three characters. Jessy’s strength in facing her difficult family situation helps Beto, Jr. to see the good in his own father’s rules for him, while she decides to bide her time until she can go to college and make her own life. Saldaña uses multiple points of view effectively to tell his characters’ stories and differentiate them. He explores a theme about which he is passionate without being preachy, instead letting his characters come to their own conclusions. The ticking clock adds to the tension and urgency, helping to make this short but profound novel a first choice for reluctant readers.

author: Ashley Hope Pérez

Lerner / Carolrohoda, 2011

grades 7-up 

Mexican American

While Jessy looks forward to college, Marisa, the protagonist of What Can’t Wait, sees her academic achievements belittled by her immigrant parents, neither of whom went beyond the sixth grade in school. The youngest of three children, Marisa, a high school senior with dreams of studying engineering at the University of Texas, is expected to meet the needs of everyone else in her family, including her five-year-old niece because older sister Cecilia’s husband is an abusive alcoholic. When Cecilia’s husband is critically injured in a work accident, Marisa’s father promises that their family will be taken care of. No one will go hungry or become homeless, but everyone will have to make huge sacrifices. For her part, Marisa has to take on more hours of work at the supermarket, as well as caring for her niece. Her schoolwork suffers, and she has to make hard choices about the viability of a relationship with the boy she likes. Attending the University of Texas in Austin means abandoning her troubled family altogether, because they live in Houston and she will only be able to visit occasionally on weekends.

Perez sets up a seemingly intractable conflict between a teenage girl’s loyalty to her family and her quest for individual fulfillment and success.  She shows both sides of the values that have kept Marisa’s impoverished family together and with the bare necessities at the same time as those values reduce the options of its most ambitious members. Like A Good Long Way, Perez’s novel doesn’t preach, and it doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it depicts a strong Latina teenager who seizes control of her life in pursuit of a better future for herself and, in the long run, for her family too. Recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/9/13)

Knife and the Butterfly

author: Ashley Hope Pérez 

Lerner, 2012

grades 7-up 

Salvadoran American

In 2011, I spoke on a panel with four other authors, on the topic of children’s literature and war. My part on children as combatants included G. Neri and Randy DuBurke’s graphic novel Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, about an 11-year-old Chicago boy executed by gang members after he had shot a 14-year-old neighbor to prove himself to the gang.

This theme of gang warfare and the trauma experienced by young combatants in inner cities in the United States appears in Ashley Hope Pérez’s second young adult novel, The Knife and the Butterfly. Fifteen-year-old Azael Arevalo wakes up in an institution following a drug-fueled gang battle near his Houston, Texas, neighborhood. He doesn’t remember how he got there, but he fears he has killed someone and is back in prison. This, however, is an unusual prison, because his only activity appears to be watching a 17-year-old Anglo girl, Lexi Allen, as she writes in her diary and meets with her therapist, her grandmother, and her attorney.

In chapters from the past that alternate with Azael’s present, the reader learns that his mother has died and his alcoholic father has been deported to El Salvador, leaving him and his older brother to fend for themselves. Though he aspires to be an artist, Azael is the tougher and more violent of the two brothers; in fact, he brought his older brother into the notorious MS-13 gang.

A brief digression into the history of MS-13. The gang, originally known as Mara Salvatrucha, formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s with Salvadoran refugees who sought to protect themselves from Mexican-American gangs. The young refugees had fled a bloody civil war in their country between leftist guerrillas and right-wing government and paramilitary forces that enjoyed the support of the US government despite highly publicized human rights abuses such as the assassination of the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, and the killing or disappearance of thousands of clergy, teachers, intellectuals, and others.

In all, more than 70,000 Salvadorans died in the fighting that lasted for two decades until a peace treaty in 1992. Many of the refugees who became gang members were deported following the end of the war, and they established MS-13 in El Salvador; since then, the gang has recruited members throughout Central America and Mexico as well as in the United States. The trauma of one war has given way to the trauma of another.

Pérez’s novel moves into the supernatural as Azael reflects on his violent life. Unable to communicate directly with the mysterious Lexi, he reads her diary and draws her face and surroundings. He establishes a connection to her that moves her to take responsibility for her own role in the gang battle. Pérez has written a fascinating story that explores why young people join gangs and portrays the emotional trauma of taking part in these wars at home. Although Azael has suffered much and taken a dangerous path, readers will ache for his desire to leave some beauty in the world through his art, a goal he clings to even when everything he creates seems to be marred or erased. Recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/7/13)