Swift River by Essie Chambers

Picture an obesely overweight black girl and her skinny white mother walking beside a busy highway in the heat, and you have Diamond and her mother Anna. When Diamond’s fat legs won’t carry her any further, her mother commandeers a broken shopping trolley to load up the 16 year-old and push her along to the legal appointment she hopes will change their lives.

Diamond is the only black girl in the town of Swift River. Her father Rob has disappeared, his shoes and wallet found beside the river. Seven years after his disappearance her mother hopes to finally have him officially declared dead for the purposes of claiming his life insurance, despite both of them longing for his return.

The central character Diamond is an engaging one. Although she is an isolated, solitary figure she has gumption and drive. She determines to save up for driving lessons and then she is going to leave that town. Gradually through correspondence with a never-met relative she learns the history of her family and the town, and much of it is not good. Readers learn of the 'sundown towns', towns in America that excluded black people, often with road signs warning that people of colour had to leave by sundown or face harassment, threats, and violence including lynching.

Chambers’s story of Diamond shifts between current 1987 and her childhood in 1980, but letters from cousin Lena, and saved letters from her grandmother Clara from 1915, fill in the history. It is a technique that allows the reader to gradually piece together a picture of racial discrimination in America, and understand the ramifications that continue on to present day.

This is a very powerful novel that helps readers to understand inter-generational trauma and the long enduring barriers that persist across generations. It is a history that needs to be recognised and acknowledged. At the same time, we are offered the story of a strong-willed survivor who doesn’t magically become thin and socially acceptable at the end of the story, but is appreciated for her own self. An amazing debut novel, highly recommended.

Themes: Missing person, Racism, Discrimination, Identity, Overeating.

Helen Eddy