Coleman Hill

August 1, 2023
Writing fellow and essayist Foote's striking debut, a "biomythography," is a winding trip down memory lane that spans over seven decades, depicting two families unified and divided over shared trauma. In 1916, Lucy Grimes and Celia Coleman join the Great Migration, moving from Alabama to the Promised Land of Vauxhall, New Jersey, with their young families, seeking better opportunities away from the Jim Crow South. When both women are widowed within 10 years of arriving, they draw close but are later driven apart when two of their children commit a youthful transgression with lasting repercussions. A chorus of nine voices narrates this richly layered multigenerational tale, delving into complex family relationships, patterns of alcoholism and abuse, and the blurred lines of memory and truth. Asking "why should written words always trump spoken ones?" Foote draws upon her own family's lore for this memorable saga that graciously captures the baton of African American family fiction from Alice Walker and Honor�e Fanonne Jeffers.

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Starred review from August 14, 2023
Foote debuts with a gleaming, partly fictionalized account of her family’s history. At the center are Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes, who meet in the early 1900s on a train leaving the Jim Crow South for New Jersey and become caught in a tragic cycle of domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and poverty. Celia’s husband, Jim, left Alabama and, after establishing himself, sent for Celia and their children to join him. But Jim soon dies, leaving Celia to support her children on a maid’s salary. Celia takes up Jim’s whiskey habit to cope with the cold winters and her own grief, rage, and exhaustion. Lucy—similarly widowed and deeply religious—has a daughter who becomes pregnant by Celia’s son, Jeb—who “unlike Jim, took out his woes on his wife, not his two little sons”—resulting in a marriage that tenuously unites the two families. The women’s will to survive sustains the generations, despite the many dangers they endure—and the ones they themselves inflict. Gripping, poetic, and with a big heart, it’s a memorable work of grim determination and surprising optimism. This is book club gold. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME.

Starred review from September 1, 2023
A dark "biomythography"--to use a word coined by Audre Lorde, as Foote does--about the Great Migration. Around 1916, the families of Lucy Grimes and Celia Coleman decide they've had enough of the South. Sick of living on and farming land that belongs to white people, they opt to move north, lured by letters from friends and neighbors who have relocated: "Us women could stay at home all day, baking blackberry pie for our husbands and children. We could have hands like the lily-white ladies in the Sears Roebuck catalog--real soft and smooth, cuz we'd cream em every night. The only cotton we'd touch would be our dresses and gloves and the babies' diapers." Lucy and Celia meet on a train to New Jersey, where they hope for better things. The two are unlikely friends: Lucy is gentle and retiring; Celia is "coarse" and "abrasive." Both become widowed and are forced to raise their children alone; Celia turns to the bottle for comfort. Their relationship is destroyed after Celia catches her son, Jebbie, playing doctor with Lucy's daughter Bertha. Jebbie and Bertha grow up to have children together, but Bertha loses a pregnancy after Celia shoves her down the stairs. The rest of Foote's debut novel--inspired by her own family--traces the intergenerational trauma of the entwined families over the ensuing decades. There's a great deal of focus on Celia, who is revealed to be so mean and drunk that some of her own grandchildren plot to murder her. Though this is a brutal novel, devoid of anything approaching light, Foote's prose is excellent and her dialogue rings true. She paints a vivid picture of the community of Vauxhall, New Jersey, and sticks the landing at the end of the book. The structure is a bit scattered, and one wishes the stories that make up the novel cohered a little more, but that's mostly nitpicking--this is a promising debut from a clearly gifted writer. A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.

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