It was one of many trips that we planned for our first-year undergraduate students during fall semester. This one would take us to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. And because the return trip would bring me closer to home than to campus, I did not ride the bus with the students and other faculty but decided instead to drive. Shortly after we started out, however, I somehow got separated from the tour bus. This being prior to GPS apps like Maps and Waze, I phoned back to my campus for someone to provide directions taken from the website of the college we were visiting. As chance would have it, the young white woman who answered my call had recently graduated from that college. After giving me directions, she lapsed into a soliloquy about how I would “love the ride” through the countryside and how the wonderful little town to which I was headed was so “quaint” and “nostalgic.” As she waxed on and on, my stomach got tighter and tighter. She most likely did not know that words like “quaint” and “nostalgic” to describe a rural town could prompt discomfort for a Black woman traveling alone. Instead of matching her feelings of elation, my race and gender consciousness awakened in me the realization that I would feel most safe if I arrived in town before nightfall. For ten minutes, she described what a lovely trip I would have. My impromptu travel guide was excited! As she concluded, I calculated how and where it would be best for me to get food and gas. The last thing I wanted was to be caught unaware under the cover of night in a strange, yet familiar land.
But Smallwood, on the evidence of this one book — and one can only eagerly await more — is a delightfully stylish rambler; a conjurer of a heightened, carefully choreographed version of consciousness. Reading her is like watching an accomplished figure skater doing a freestyle routine. You’re never less than confident in the performance, and often dazzled.
This novel certainly has a gritty feel, but it never exploits darkness or despair for thrills. Instead, even in its most gruesome moments, it has a very real quality to it. Matheson has a fresh voice and perspective, and I'm incredibly excited to see where she takes these characters in future novels — you can bet I'll be reading every book she writes for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps instead of an essayist we should think of her as a poet-naturalist, wedding intuition and observation, and forming from this union something unaccountably yet undeniably real.
It stirs and rises
climbs the stairs
pours the coffee
lights the smoke.