THE WATERBEARERS

Honoring Black matriarchs.

Cultural critic Bonét makes her book debut with a fervent homage to Black women—grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and cousins—who have instilled an indelible life force in their families. “I was surrounded by reliable women,” Bonét writes. “The men were peripheral—inefficient and fickle.” Central to her history is her grandmother Betty Jean (b. 1933), the great-granddaughter of enslaved people, who migrated to Houston from Louisiana in 1955 and eventually had 11 children with nine different men. One of those children was Bonét’s mother, Connie (b. 1956), who grew up poor and angry, resenting each new baby who arrived to deplete what little the family had. She fled Houston as soon as she could, landing in Manhattan, where she was a stern, uncompromising mother to her own children. Besides recounting the lives of the women in her family, Bonét looks at other Black women: Betty Davis, enslaved seamstress of George and Martha Washington, whose daughter, Ona Judge, escaped and lived in the north as a fugitive; Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama’s mother, who moved into the White House to care for her granddaughters; and activist Recy Taylor: Raped by white men in 1944, she contributed—along with Rosa Parks and other women—to forming the Committee for Equal Justice, an inspiration for the Civil Rights Movement. There’s Iberia Hampton, who feared for her outspoken son, Fred; he became a Black Panther and was assassinated. There’s artist Camille Billops, who rejected motherhood in favor of pursuing her art. “Each of us are the sum of our grandmother’s prayers,” Bonét writes, “the sum of many moments, of all the care and cruelty we have absorbed.” At times tender, furious, selfish, and sacrificial, these were “complicated women,” whom Bonét portrays with compassion.

A fresh contribution to Black history, rooted in the author’s past.