By Alexis J. Pride
[Utour Publishing Co., August 2007. 375 pages. $20.99 paperback]
Reviewed by Micki Leventhal
This debut novel about one woman’s battle with personal demons and societal ills was inspired by the story of controversial Chicago educator, Corla Jean “Momma Hawk” Wilson-Hawkins.
Within the fictional frame, Hawkins’s story is told through the persona of Emma Rivers, a deeply flawed heroine. Growing up, Rivers’s traditional, 1950s working-class African-American family provides well enough for her basic survival needs, but very little in terms of love and nurturing. In this environment, Rivers reaches adolescence with a severely damaged self-image and an inability to control her emotions and anger.
Despite her high intellectual capacity, her pride and unmanageable temper get her thrown out of school, then out of the military. In a page-turning spiral of misadventures and bad choices, Rivers winds up living the low life in New York’s Spanish Harlem.
Ultimately, however, her natural intelligence and survival instincts lead her back toward stability and education. She earns a college degree and lands a job in the Chicago Public Schools, where she finds her path and mission in life as an unconventional education reformer, instituting a controversial program of tough love and high expectations for the “left-behind” children in one of Chicago’s inner-city public schools.
As a June 19, 1997 article in the Chicago Tribune noted, “An imposing woman with a domineering aura, a boisterous laugh and a raucous voice that is intimidating one minute and comforting the next, Momma Hawk, 48, has been described—sometimes in the same breath—as a tyrant, a chameleon and a saint. To her 45 students, she is a lifesaver.”
Pride’s strong and vivid writing creates both a compelling narrative and a central character who is alternately inspiring and infuriating. The depiction of a childhood lived without love is harrowing. Rivers’s clarity of purpose and obsessive dedication to her students contrasts painfully with her blindness to the needs of her own children and the complete muddle she makes of her other personal relationships. One can understand why Rivers is the way she is, while still wanting to slap her upside the head. In Pride’s capable hands, Rivers is a character who is deeply and completely human.
But Where the River Ends is not only a book about one exceptional woman. It is also about racism, classism, gender relationships, bureaucracy, and power politics.
Momma Hawk was fired from the Chicago Public Schools in 2003 under a cloud of accusations of payroll fraud, misconduct, and employee harassment. Poetic license —or “truthiness,” in the parlance of creative nonfiction—or perhaps the deeper truth of Pride’s fictionalized narrative, leads the reader to conclude that all of this was a set up because Rivers/Momma Hawk went too far in challenging the system.
At some level, this detail does not matter. Where the River Ends confronts many of our society’s ills and the ways in which one person can make a difference. It’s also a darn good read.
