44 pages • 1 hour read
Ayana MathisThe Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Identity Transcends Categories
Although each chapter focuses on one (or two) of Hattie’s children, the novel as a whole can be read as a study of Hattie. Narrative access into Hattie’s consciousness is largely limited to two chapters about infant children (Chapters 1 and 5), so the reader’s understanding of her identity depends largely on her children’s perceptions of her. Again and again, Hattie’s children note that she was never tender, often angry, and always inscrutable, “like a lake of smooth, silvered ice, under which nothing could be seen or known” (237). They know anger consumes Hattie, but they don’t really know why, except that August infuriates her.
With the benefit of information gleaned from Chapter 1 (information Hattie’s children don’t seem to have), the reader can surmise that Hattie’s anger stems partly from the deaths of her father and her twins. There may be other causes for her rage, but they are not apparent, and the reasons for her lack of tenderness are also not clearly defined. This narrative refusal to reveal Hattie’s “true” identity, or what makes her tick, corresponds with the theme that an individual’s identity can never be fully explained by categories, labels, or even words. As a function of ever-changing internal and external conditions and experiences, identity always exceeds what can be said about it.
While members of any given community may use socially established racial, gender, or class categories (among others) to make assumptions or set expectations for individuals, Mathis’s novel explores the hazards of such reductive approaches to understanding identity. As a child in Georgia, Hattie’s sense of self-worth suffers because she is socially defined by a racial category that is devalued. Hattie recalls the “astonishing” moment she experienced herself as not simply “a Negro” but as a unique individual: “In Georgia she was one of many, undifferentiated from others, even in her own mind, but on the train to Philadelphia she became acutely aware of what was inviolate in her” (113). Although Philadelphia brings disappointment, the journey frees her mind from restrictions on her identity.
Religion and Personal Responsibility
As a variation on the biblical 12 tribes of Israel, the title of Mathis’s novel signals that it will engage with Christian ideas in significant ways. In the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, Abraham’s grandson Jacob, later called Israel, has 12 sons. After drought compels them to migrate from their homeland into Egypt, Israel’s family is forced into bondage by the Pharaoh. Moses frees the enslaved Israelites. Following their “Exodus” from Egypt and a 40-year purgatorial period in the wilderness, the 12 tribes of Israel reach the “Promised Land,” that which God promised to them.
African American slaves, leaders, and activists have used the biblical image of the Promised Land to symbolize their hope for the realization of a society free of racial injustices and oppression. In his 1968 speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” The fictional Georgia preacher in Mathis’s novel also invokes the idea of the Promised Land when he speaks about the North, and 15-year-old Hattie carries this image and all its hope with her to Philadelphia.
Hattie reaches Philadelphia, but it’s not the land of deliverance and prosperity she had envisioned. For two years her fortunes seemingly improve: She marries August; they rent a house in a nice neighborhood; the twins are born; and Hattie is “in such a high spirits that she giggles all of the time” (3). Then, in 1925, the babies develop pneumonia. She prays to God for mercy, but God is not “responsive” or “sympathetic” (236).
Her twins’ deaths extinguish Hattie’s hopes for a better life in the “promised land” (10) of the North. She becomes angry at the world and at those who, like God, fail her, yet she also resigns herself to her misery as a fated, unalterable condition. While Hattie does attempt to improve her lot by running off with Lawrence, she considers the venture doomed from the start, and she says to Lawrence, “‘As the sparks fly upward…’ […] It’s from the Bible” (77). She doesn’t remember the rest of the passage.
Nearly 30 years later, while Hattie sits with Sala in church, the preacher cites the book of Job: “Yet man is born into trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (238). Ever since Philadelphia and Jubilee died, Hattie has accepted that she and her children were “born into trouble” and were doomed to suffer, as surely “as the sparks fly upward.” While this conviction of predetermined wretchedness made Hattie bitter, it also provided some comfort, inasmuch as it released her from responsibility for her misery and happiness. Now she knows, however, that penicillin “was all that was needed to save” (237) her twins, not God’s mercy. She could have saved her children herself, regardless of God’s sympathy.
In the novel’s final pages, as she watches her “broken” granddaughter turn to God for mercy, Hattie realizes that “the same wounding and the same pain” continue to afflict her family despite appeals to God (243). Although Hattie “didn’t know how to save her granddaughter” (242), she resolves to assume that responsibility. With newfound hope for change of her own making, Hattie begins to shed her anger and embraces Sala.
Motherhood, Class, and Race
Perhaps more than any of her siblings, Bell suffers from Hattie’s brusque approach to mothering. When she thinks about her childhood, she remembers Hattie as “a miserable woman who heaped punishment on her children” (212). Her mother’s seeming hatred for her family haunts Bell even as an adult, making her feel “defective in some vital way, incapable of doing the right thing” (212). At age 40 Bell wonders, “Maybe Mother didn’t know she was supposed to love us” (212).
Hattie does love her children profoundly. It is arguably the wounding from the loss of her first babies that has scarred her softer self. Hattie’s personal history aside, however, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie suggests that love may well take different forms at the different intersections of race, class, and motherhood. Hattie is a low-income mother with numerous children to care for, and “all the love she had was taken up with feeding them and clothing them” (236). As a black mother, she also must concern herself with “preparing them to meet the world. The world would not love them; the world would not be kind” (236).
Hattie’s vast love for her children consumes her and contributes to her rage. Indeed, she tells Lawrence her family is “eating her alive,” but this is because she depletes herself fighting for their survival. Although there may be many reasons for her anger, the reader can surmise that Hattie is furious, in no small part, on behalf of her children, who want things “she did not think it would be possible for them to have” (212) because of their race. For better or for worse, Hattie’s love for her children is not tender but ferocious.
Racial Injustice in 20th-Century America
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie opens in 1925, within the larger socioeconomic context of the Great Migration, and ends in 1980, when the election of Ronald Reagan registered the white majority’s anxieties over the civil rights movement. Significant upheavals in race relations occurred during this 55-year span of American history, yet the novel acknowledges them only indirectly, if at all. There is no reference to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in the 1950s that mandated school desegregation, nor any mention of the civil rights struggles that erupted in the 1960s. In fact, as the narrative unfolds by decades, it recognizes almost none of the gains made toward racial equality in American society.
Instead of directly engaging with the fight for racial justice in the 20th century, Mathis’s novel depicts the particular experiences of the Shepard family. Their individual stories often foreground failed personal relationships, struggles with self-esteem, or, more collectively, the consequences of poverty. One way or another, however, systemic racial oppression always informs their experiences. Hattie blames their money shortage on August’s financial irresponsibility, but he gestures toward a larger system that works against black economic advancement. Both Franklin and Bell have no respect for themselves, but Benny and Pearl’s harassment during their picnic underscores how dominant social forces undermine African Americans’ self-esteem. Moreover, the origins of Hattie’s personal migration story are found in the South’s oppressive Jim Crow laws, which allowed white men to freely kill her father.
