Belonging to the Air
A Black girl comes of age, refining her conceptions of love and family, in Avery Irons’s incandescent historical novel Belonging to the Air, set amid the Great Migration.
In the early twentieth century, Bird is raised apart from the other children of Bennettsville, a town founded by her free Black ancestors. Cocooned in loving semiprivilege by her blind, light-skinned grandmother and her talented, tough, and isolated mother, she learns how to sew, behave, and not depend on men.
When Bird is thirteen, though, her grandmother has a stroke; her minister father, subject to his wife’s wrath, stops visiting; and her mother dies of cancer. Thereafter, her life shifts. She falls in love with her “first and only friend,” Bessie, but they are separated. Bessie is convinced to marry Bird’s cousin, Ned, and Bird is sent away to her Aunt Vera in St. Louis.
Vera expands Bird’s understandings of the breadth of institutionalized racism—lessons that Bird calls upon in later years. As white violence increases shoulder-to-shoulder with World War I, Vera notes “It’s never good for us when white men aren’t getting what they think is their due.” Vera and her love, Eileen, also nurture Bird’s awareness of the diversity of love, assuring her that “We’re all worthy and have a purpose.”
Bird’s world is fleshed out in wry and mannered prose that takes note of period conventions, the wild delights of country life, the heat of desire, and the perilous excitement of the city. Bird herself is indomitable; her gentle ferocity is tested, but endures, from a young age. At thirteen, she musters the courage to call out her father’s hypocrisy. At seventeen, she does so again on behalf of Vera and Eileen.
As the novel progresses, Bird weathers new betrayals, losses, and disappointments; though she faces rejection for whom and how she loves, each new recurrence is “a bump against an old bruise.” When bold, older Jedda, who smells of rose water, blows into Bennettsville from Chicago, she tests the delicate balance of Bird’s constrained life. Years in Harlem and new loves follow, as do challenges to the Bennettsville clan’s unity. By remaining steadfast and channeling the women who preceded her, though, Bird secures a measure of triumph for all.
A lovely bildungsroman, Belonging to the Air is about family, community bonds, forgiveness, and love.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
