FAMILY SPIRIT

A Black novelist in present-day Philadelphia, struggling with illness and betrayal, weaves a story around multiple generations of a Philly family that must contend with their ancestral gift of foresight.

Nona, a Philly-based writer whose voice opens McKinney-Whetstone’s novel, has pancreatic cancer, and when she sits down to start a novel, her first draft revolves around a mesmerizing, dying woman, which is unsettling to her. She tries again, and before long she’s written a scene in which a girl named Ayana and her mother, Lorna, survive a car crashing into the store where they’ve been shopping. When 6-year-old Ayana confesses that she was able to avoid the wreckage because she’d had a vision of it minutes earlier, Lorna realizes that her daughter has inherited “the gift” from her paternal family. The Maces trace this trait back to Luda, whose parents were freed in Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act. In the late 18th century, Luda saw a rainbow invisible to everyone else, and since then, the Mace women—many of whom retain their name even after marriage—have honored what they call Knowing. They hold regular meetings during which they counsel community members who have problems, and then share “after-feasts” complete with dances, chanting, and elaborate hand-sewn gowns that incorporate talismans like a pearl owned by Luda. Nona’s story then swerves from Lorna and Ayana to Ayana’s Aunt Lil, granddaughter of powerful Mace matriarch GG. As a young woman in the 1970s, Lil was banished from family meetings because she revealed the gift of Knowing to an outsider in her bid to build a career in media (she starts with an appearance on the era’s real-life Philadelphia hit, The Mike Douglas Show). Lil’s section sparkles with authenticity, as does a section about Ayana when she’s 22, torn between easy delights with two very different men and buckling down in her undergraduate studies. As Ayana wavers, Aunt Lil returns to Philadelphia. She has a personal reason for this visit, and a Knowing of her own that leads to her reconciliation with the family. As Nona builds the story of the Mace women, she also makes some choices—but it’s difficult to understand what links her actions with those of her characters. Is the titular spirit affecting her? Is she also related to the Mace family? It isn’t clear, and even a tiny glimmer of her ties to them might have held the book together the way Luda’s cherished pearl secures Lil’s long-abandoned ceremonial gown.

A vibrant, if structurally flawed, look into the power and spirituality of a multigenerational Black family.