“Down Here We Come Up”: A Tale of Growth, Reconnection and Late-Blooming Coming-of-Age https://ift.tt/98KWkZw
Winner of the 2022 Big Moose Prize and forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, Sara Johnson Allen holds no punches in her debut novel, Down Here We Come Up. The novel centers itself around three women, all mothers, who have, one way or another, been separated from their children. Through walls and laws. Through teen birth and adoption. Through poverty and alienation. Taking place in North Carolina in 2006 and touching on themes of motherhood, strained familial love, immigration, the militarized U.S.-Mexico border, socioeconomic instability, human trafficking, privilege, drug and weapons trade and power, Down Here We Come Up is a cross-country journey of self-discovery.
Twenty-six-year-old Kate Jessup is lured home by her ill and dying mother, Jackie, when she realizes that the home she left as a teenager is not as she remembers it. Where old farms once stood, a new neighborhood filled with young families resides. Her childhood home is now the base of operations for a South American and Mexican migrant safe house. Her mother, a lifelong con artist, is on her deathbed fighting an unknown disease she won’t seek medical treatment for. A former teacher separated from her children in Ciudad Juárez named Maribel Reyes now runs her mother’s household and safe house operation in her stead. A lot has changed.
But at the same time, a lot has stayed the same. She believes her mother — who convinced her to come home on the promise of giving Kate the address of the daughter Kate gave away at birth — is playing yet another con of some sort, but Kate can’t figure it out. Her once lover and the father of the daughter she gave away is still trying to grow and sell weed to expand his fortunes in life, and her childhood home is as cluttered and worn as it has always been. Maribel has stepped in as a stand-in daughter for Jackie in Kate’s absence.
Caught up in the allure of finding out where her daughter is, Kate gets wrapped up in her mother’s operation and, although distrusting her mother and Maribel, Kate agrees to help with a crazy plan to retrieve Maribel’s children from Juárez to get the address of the daughter she gave away all those years ago. The three women — Kate, Maribel and Jackie — are all seeking something they have lost touch with, their children, and they will stop at nothing to mend and bridge the barriers that separate them.
Allen writes convincingly of place and the way that place can move a person. As Jackie tells Kate, “Down here we come up when we’re called. We come up to the altar when we’re moved by the spirit. We come up when folks need help… down here, we rise to the occasion. If you know what happened along the border, you would do it,” referencing the plan to retrieve Maribel’s children. In this case, it is both the history of the U.S.-Mexico border and the relative culture of the Southern U.S. that Jackie calls on to ‘move’ Kate into action.
Allen’s book seems somewhat responsive to the criticism directed at American Dirt, which has been criticized for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and has been cited as revealing the racial inequities in publishing houses that allowed for such an inauthentic tale about Mexican and South American immigration to be told by someone outside of that community. Allen’s choice of narrator in Kate — a light-skinned, wealthy-appearing, American woman — shows, perhaps, an acknowledgment of the author’s privileged place in the U.S. compared to the subjects she writes about. The racial, political and social power dynamics along the U.S.-Mexico Border, and throughout the U.S., are made visible by Kate’s physical appearance and the plot that Jackie and Maribel plan, which relies on these power dynamics to succeed. Allen’s novel doesn’t shy away from the fact that people who look a certain way in the U.S. are treated differently than those who don’t, even if Kate’s character sometimes does. In the words of Maribel, Kate has “what those [border patrol] guards are looking for.”
Ultimately, readers are carried through a tale of growth, reconnection and a late-blooming coming-of-age story through the eyes of Kate. For readers of drama, feminist narratives, coming-of-age stories, motherhood, finding what was once lost, familial bonds or what makes a home a home, Down Here We Come Up should be added to your summer reading list.
FICTION Down Here We Come Up By Sara Johnson Allen
Black Lawrence Press
Published on August 1, 2023
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