You know, girl, we come from a history of magical people.” Oil Moss, a widowed father and carpenter-artist trying to raise his two kids in Taos, worries about his young daughter, Zarra, who talks to trees.
Zarra has always known she has a special gift that allows her to channel the language of trees, and one in particular beckons her, named Grandmother Shiloah. Called crazy in school and teased for her wild, frizzy hair, Zarra senses a great deal and has her own worries — concerning her angry, adolescent big brother, Aye, who defends her by striking another boy and gets punished for it.
In this complicated fantasy novel, Taos mixed-media artist and jazz singer Christine Autumn (“All That I Am” was her 2006 autobiography) fashions a poignant story of an African American family in a rural Hispanic town keeping peace with their “otherness” — their ability to conjure the ancient wisdom of ancestors. Aye, suspended from school for his violence and sent to a reform summer camp in Albuquerque, considers the family’s magical ability a curse, until he recognizes how he can tap into it for what plays out as a political awakening.
Camp Larme, the Black male bonding center where Aye is sent for several weeks in the summer, is ostensibly geared toward imparting “energy, enlightenment, attainment and peace.” However, it quickly appears to the reader the camp is a training base for future leaders of the New Democracy political party (overseeing the Revolution to Correct Racism, or RTCR), modeled on the earlier Black Power movement but allegedly nonviolent — run by the eponymous charismatic shapeshifter, Larme, an unpredictable, autocratic character.
The novel follows the two tenets, political and spiritual, in a parallel fashion, each meticulously developed. One delineates the interior life of Camp Larme, with its rigid rules about Black empowerment involving eating only vegetarian food, wearing a uniform, reading the ancient Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, and practicing daily tai chi. The methods of “indoctrination” (the title of more than one chapter) dictate the young men shun mingling with other races and marry only Black women; the men cannot be homosexual. Files are kept on the young men and drones used to spy on them back at home.
Zarra’s spiritual life with the trees, on the other hand, leads her through a lush portal to other worlds, worlds within worlds, where prehistoric creatures act like timekeepers and impart to the “young sprout” the message that everything in the natural world is connected. Grandmother’s power resides in energy, and she communicates through frequencies: “Our universe holds everything you can imagine, and it is up to you which channel to tune into,” she tells Zarra.
Grandmother Shiloah and her otherworldly council are watching over Larme’s impending racial revolution and warn that, considering the historical foibles of mankind, all might not go as planned.
All of Autumn’s Moss family characters are seeking to find what their “task” in life is. Oil, the unconventional jazz-loving father, tries to navigate the healthy raising of his two strong-willed teenagers while embracing love with the Hispanic neighbor, Miss Jane. Aye wants desperately to belong to Larme’s manly camp and develop his channeling of the ancestors in order to join what he considers — as he struggles with his powers of discernment — the good cause.
And Zarra, with whom the author’s sympathies seem to lie, ventures into metaphysical realms that aid in the Earth’s much-needed healing.
FYI
Reading and Book Launch
Friday (June 27) from 4-6 p.m.
Author Christine Autumn will read from her novel, “Walking with the Ancestors,”
SOMOS Literary Salon, 108 Civic Plaza Drive, Taos.
For more information, go to somostaos.org.