Robin Lee Lovelace evokes a world in which the mystical intertwines with the everyday in Savonne, Not Vonny, a coming-of-age story set in rural Louisiana.
Nine-year-old Savonne lives in a small room at the back of Mama Gwen’s whorehouse, in Indianapolis in the ’60s. Her mama is one of the working girls, and her father is Mama Gwen’s own son. Savonne’s daddy dotes on her, and Mama Gwen loves Savonne like the daughter she never had; the two of them together make a loving home for Savonne, in the midst of their raucous brothel.
By contrast, Savonne’s birth mother rarely pays her any mind. A “crazy-ass woman” with a temper “as hot as a Mississippi afternoon,” Coco is not at all opposed to beating the bejesus out of someone. In a fury one night, she does something that cannot be undone, and in her headlong flight out of town, she takes Savonne with her.
And so it is that Savonne is forced from the only home she’s ever known and left in the care of her mysterious and reclusive great-grandfather, Pompey.
With Pompey, Savonne enters another world, one of casual acquaintance with hoodoo and root work, a world where Papa Legba guards the crossroads and serves as an intermediary between the human and the spirit world, a world where an enemy might cast a subtle spell or command the serpents, or shapeshift into another form himself. However, as long as Pompey is there to guard her, Savonne is safe. She takes after her great-grandfather, and he recognizes that she too has the gift, the ability to conjure, “the natural.”
But the day will come when Savonne is left to face the forces that would undo her, with only Leatha, Pompey’s old black dog all gone now to gray and stiff-boned, by her side. Before her journey home is over, Savonne must outwit an enemy far more powerful than she — and rely on help from the most unlikely of allies.
Robin Lee Lovelace has conjured a world in which the seen and the unseen alike direct our days, in which the divine intermingles with the mundane, with characters so rich and fully realized they fairly leap off the page.
Pick this story up for the delicious experience of diving headlong into a landscape reminiscent of those spun by the finest Southern writers in the American canon.
Readers may find themselves racing through this novella to see how it all comes out for Savonne in the end, and likely wanting more of Savonne and her world (and maybe those allies too) in her full short story collection, A Wild Region, is available now!
Homegoing by Toni Ann Johnson is an intimate portrait of a middle-aged African-American woman dragging herself hand over hand out of grief and despair.
