SINGING IN THE COMEBACK CHOIR
By Bebe Moore Campbell
Putnam, 372 pages, $24.95
Notes fly and rant and ring, “When Malindy sings,” the brilliant and short-lived poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in a humorous poem roughly a century ago. In Bebe Moore Campbell’s latest novel,
“Singing in the Comeback Choir,” Malindy Walker wowed audiences years ago when she sent her mellifluous notes flying and ringing through music halls up and down the East Coast, ranking her with the likes of Sarah and Ella and Billie. Lindy isn’t singing anymore. Her voice and her spirit gone, she spends her days smoking and drinking in a depressed Philadelphia neighborhood that, like her musical career, has seen its heyday.
It is this twin decline, of an urban community and Lindy’s humanity, that Campbell juxtaposes in a story that succeeds in making you feel good about the redemptive nature of the human heart. And even though the title gives away the ending, a jazzy underscore and the right mix of music and memory combine to make this book a sensory experience that sustains until the end.
The novel moves between Los Angeles, where Campbell now lives, and Philadelphia, where she grew up. Maxine McCoy, the granddaughter that Lindy has raised after her own daughter died, lives in Los Angeles and is the executive producer for a talk show that is struggling in the ratings. While relishing the news that she and her entertainment-lawyer husband, Satchel, are expecting their first child, Maxine gets a call from Lindy’s care giver, who is resigning to go take care of her own ailing mother. When Maxine learns that Lindy, still recovering from a stroke, has started smoking and drinking, she hurries off to Philadelphia to put out more than a few fires.
Maxine surveys her old block on Sutherland Street, a stark contrast to the hilltop vistas she has become acquainted with in California. “(T)he potholes that had been there for years remained; a broken mailbox on the corner, its heavy metal opening ripped clean off and its iron body covered in Magic Marker hieroglyphics was still there. . . . Three houses proclaimed their vacancy in angry swipes of spray paint across the city’s boards. Maxine sighed. Trash was everywhere, and not one tree, not one flower bloomed.”
As Maxine sets about scouting for a senior-citizen facility for Lindy, Sutherland Street and its inhabitants haunt her. Satchel tells her: ” `Maxine, just deal with your grandmother. There’s nothing you can do about the street.’ ” That’s advice not well taken.
Lindy, recalcitrant and bitter, thwarts Maxine’s initial efforts to lift her spirits. And as Maxine struggles to save her grandmother, her old neighborhood and a marriage still healing the wounds of infidelity, she must also negotiate–long distance–the off-camera politics and back-biting among her talk-show colleagues, all going on during a crucial sweeps week for the program.
Sutherland Street’s crack houses and despair continue to nag Maxine, and one day she grabs a broom in an attempt to ” `sweep away the evil I feel.’ “
The cast of characters on Sutherland Street add color to the otherwise bleak landscape. Two gossipy neighbors, called the Tongues, live next door to Lindy and roam the block in their bedroom slippers. And there’s Mr. Bootsy, Lindy’s former backup drummer and romantic partner, who is still nuts about her and wants her to return to the stage for one last time.
An upcoming music festival promises Lindy this chance, if only she will take it. Maxine, wanting to restore Lindy’s faith in herself and the people around her, employs her TV-production know-how to get Lindy ready to perform again. Of course, this isn’t a certain, or an easy task, because Maxine has to enlist the help of a former musician whom Lindy had called a ” `sawed-off, no-piano-playing sissy’ ” before storming out of Greater New Bethlehem Baptist Church 21 years ago.
While friends and family might want to hear Malindy sing again, Lindy, too stubborn and still resentful toward her former manager, who’s backing the festival, refuses to even consider the idea. Feeling ashamed after her careless smoking sets a pillow on fire, which is evidence that Maxine might be right–Lindy cannot adequately take care of herself–the old woman slowly, but reluctantly, begins to live again.
“Singing in the Comeback Choir” satisfies mostly because Campbell makes you care about the characters. Their humanity is our humanity, their world is everybody’s. Maxine represents the girl who triumphs over unkind odds, the relentless individual who looks at the mountain and envisions the other side. The novel is not without its flaws, however. Transitions between scenes are sometimes too abrupt and disconcerting, and several of the characters are gratuitous at best. Too many times Campbell’s storytelling has the reader projecting the end, which becomes distracting after a while. All in all though, Campbell’s story, like a rousing gospel tune, stirs and satisfies the soul.
