I remember it seems a long time ago now reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance on the train from NYC to North Carolina and the experience of that novel’s unrelenting injustice. Kim Coleman Foote’s Coleman Hill similarly never lets up, just compacting the suffering into fewer pages. The work addresses the multiple intergenerational traumas that stem from slavery and racism and set pieces address murder, assault and rape at regular intervals and across the generations whose story Coleman Foote tells. The narrative is frequently non-linear as the Coleman family’s story is told from Florida and sweeping north during the Great Migration to New Jersey.
It’s a poignant work and its frequent brutality is never presented for shock. Readers shouldn’t be dissuaded from the journey by the violence. There’s no real resolution in the end, and we’re left to ponder the fate of all of us if the racist patriarchy of North American society is left to continue.