Winner of a Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the story of Rachel, a biracial adolescent being raised by her African American grandmother, in the wake of a horrific tragedy that left Rachel critically injured and her Danish mother and two siblings dead.
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver, who awarded Durrow the Bellwether, calls this “a breathless telling of a tale we’ve never heard before. Haunting and lovely… this book could not be more timely.”
After finishing the novel, I took issue with this idea that Durrow’s story is one “we’ve never heard before.” But I’ll get back to that in a minute.
It’s difficult to categorize the book: it’s part bildungsroman and part mystery. It succeeds at the former and fails, at least for me, at the latter. The “mystery” of the novel is alluded to in the title. Rachel does, quite literally, fall from the sky (or rather, through the sky: from a rooftop, to the ground). So do her mother, brother, and sister. The question Durrow wants us to ponder, as we read each short chapter, written from a revolving door of characters’ perspectives, is: did they fall or were they pushed?
We get to read several bits of speculation on this: from Laronne (Rachel’s mother, Nella’s, former employer); from Brick, a neighbor who witnessed the fall of the final body; from Roger, Rachel’s absentee father; and from Rachel herself over a series of years. Even the late Nella weighs in, through epistolary micro-chapters, which are to be read as excerpts from her recovered journals.
In the end, the resolution of this “mystery” is an afterthought; the novel’s real focus is Rachel’s frustration with navigating two heritages. Any strong connection to her Danish roots died with her mother, and her African-American father, a GI who met Nella while stationed abroad, hasn’t been spotted since the rooftop tragedy. She’s being raised in a predominantly Black community, and she’s having a really hard time with that.
For one, she doesn’t think black women are as pretty as white women. (There are exceptions, she insists, one of which is her father’s sister, Loretta). And she doesn’t look black, since she has blue eyes and light skin. How will she ever fit in? And she can’t make the gospel from her grandmother’s church “sound right on her lips.” She doesn’t entirely respect her grandmother because she isn’t particularly literate and prioritizes things Rachel deems unimportant, like finding Loretta a husband.
It’s musings like these that stick in my craw, as an African American reader. And this novel is full of them. Take this section, for instance:
“You think I don’t like books, “Grandma says. I never said that. But I do wonder sometimes when she asks me to read her the listings in the TV Guide: Maybe Grandma can’t read.
“Grandma, you just know things.” I say this like I am giving her the pat on the head that she wants.
Then later:
I have a trick figured out, though, so I don’t make mean thoughts about her when she starts to fuss. Thoughts like she’s not so smart, like she’s not as a good a mother as Mor [Nella]. I picture Grandma my age and someone loving her.
It’s jarring to read Rachel’s assessments of her grandmother as unintelligent and classless. For one, she’s about eleven at the time of these judgmental observations. Aren’t good grandparents pretty universally revered at that age? Rachel has no problem making herself her grandmother’s equal in her mind, as though as a biracial child who reads, she’s in a position to declare a Black woman six times her age less than competent.
Note how her immediate assumption is that Grandma can’t read, rather than Grandma’s eyes are bad or Grandma’s misplaced her glasses.
Note how she has to make her grandmother her age in order to imagine someone loving her.
Suffice it to say: Rachel isn’t a sympathetic character. So her successful navigation of the racial divide isn’t a pursuit I’m willing to root for. She spends the bulk of the novel wistfully longing for her white mother who, just before the end of her life, had begun to date a white man who actively called Rachel and her siblings “jigaboos” (though, in Nella’s defense, she had no idea this was a racial slur, and felt such grief, guilt, and chagrin over it that, well… read and see). And she only has admiration for one Black woman she knows: her aunt (who leaves the novel pretty early on). She either sexualizes or condescends to the Black males she encounters. And, in the end, even after all her grandmother’s good intentioned insights and assistance, she considers stealing Grandma’s savings and fleeing her sad, too-Black life.
Now. Back to this idea that this is a “timely” story, one we’ve “never heard before.”
Black-Danish novelist Nella Larsen’s whole oeuvre is about characters like this; Passing even ends with an ambiguous fall/push from a window. Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun centers on a heroine like this, holding her family’s dark skin in contempt, wishing she could rise to whiter heights, then settling into a kind of knowing resignation. Charles Chestnutt trafficked in stories of racial ambiguity. James Weldon Johnson wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Contemporarily, Persia Walker penned Harlem Redux, which features a couple of characters struggling with racial identity and passing.
The point is: biracial literature dates back to this country’s infancy. What makes this novel any timelier than any other, with similar content—that it was written in the Age of Obama?
Could it be that audiences unfamiliar with America’s long bibliography of biracial literature are grateful for the release of this book because they believe that reading it will lend them better insight into their biracial president’s psychology?
Let’s hope not.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, though full of thoughtful and lovely language, is overstuffed with perspectives and burdened by an alienating central character. I still haven’t figured out how it qualifies as Literature for Social Change. But I do think it’s a viable and interesting addition to it’s pre-existent literary subgenre.
