Carol Roh Spaulding reviews Janet Burroway's novel BRIDGE OF SAND
Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 01:00PM Review of Janet Burroway’s Bridge of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
The personal is political, so the saying goes. But the personal is nevertheless still personal. This is the phrase that comes to mind after reading Janet Burroway’s wonderful 2009 novel, Bridge of Sand.
The novel is in one respect the story of a cross-racial romance, and in another respect the story of a mature woman’s journey toward full personhood when she finds herself in an unlikely situation among a small bayside community on the coast of Florida. After the death of her husband whom she was preparing to leave, 38-year-old Dana Ullman leaves the life she knew in Philadelphia and heads for the Panhandle, where she spent time as a child. Perhaps due to the hugeness of the tragedy of 9-11, which happens on the day of her husband’s death, Dana feels somehow freer to take risks. She contacts a childhood acquaintance, Cassius Huston, a married man with a young daughter, who becomes her lover. The fact that one of them is a black man and the other is a white woman would seem to explain the primary obstacle to their relationship—race. To be sure, race rears its head in expected ways. There are tense moments when Dana and Cassius try to be in public together at a local park. And when alone together, in or out of bed, the unspoken dimension of race (and class) lingers. Yet as much of a challenge as race presents, it is exacerbated by other complications throughout the novel—a threatening and unstable spouse, a young daughter he refuses to abandon, Dana’s wanting to make a home for herself in the little bayside community where she finds herself, and Cassius’s long absences. In some respects, race is the least of their problems.
When Cassius’s wife threatens violence, Dana goes into hiding at a place where Cassius has told her he could find her, in a small coastal town called Pelican Bay. At the corner store where she rents a room out back above the garage, she meets old Solly. For years, Solly has found love with Trudy (Cassius’ aunt), a black woman he did not marry but whom he has supported in a house of her own. The relationship of this older couple serves as a parallel to that of Dana and Cassius: although the reasons may no longer be entirely racial, neither couple is free to love openly.
The geological phenomenon that gives the book its title refers to a karst, a limestone sub-strata fissured by years of underground water flow which eventually cause the surface to collapse in on itself, forming a sinkhole. The metaphor of the bridge of sand or sinkhole, into which Trudy’s house falls after a hurricane, suggests that interracial relationships are troubled by historical fissures, and may easily be sink-holed. But when you look around at the many troubled relationships in the novel, between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between workers and owners at the mill that employs many in the community, we see that there are deep fissures riven by waters of the past running through anything we dare construct for ourselves. The lives we build may or may not crumble from below.
The novel also touches deep cultural currents—again, not just about race. There is the backdrop of 9-11, which haunts Dana as she imagines free-floating scenes of trauma and agony of that day. There are possible literary allusions, as well. Dana’s waiting for Cassius through so much of the book is reminiscent of Penelope waiting for Odysseus. She might also be seen as an interesting take on Edna Pontellier of The Awakening, except that Dana is utterly free to take a lover, where Edna was entrapped by custom. But the racial undercurrent is never very far, even if Dana as a white woman has the privilege of forgetting she has a race. One day, Cassius accuses, “You like it that I’m black. You like it that I’m dark black. You proud of yourself for loving a dark black man.” It occurs to Dana that Cassius might be right. Maybe she hasn’t seen things as clearly as he has. More to the point, she hasn’t thought about it as much. She hasn’t had to; that’s part of the privilege of whiteness.
Sometimes it seems Burroway’s answer to “the race question” is to sidestep it precisely when her comment would be most welcome. For example, during one of the first times they make love, Dana offers to go down on Cassius, who replies, “You don’t have to do that.” It is clearly her call to refuse or not refuse. But this is precisely the moment when this otherwise perspicacious, self-aware and articulate woman has no ironic commentary, no contingent sub-current of thoughts, no intellectual distraction. There are moments later when she does think it may be “a little bit of a failure” that they only satisfy their desire and don’t talk about the tough stuff. But it’s just too hard to buy that at least in this moment they wouldn’t be pulled down by layers of history given the symbolism of a white woman with a black man and the latter’s mythologized sexual organ. Other times, the racially charged moment is more convincing, as when they stand nude together looking in the mirror and she insists, “You’re beautiful.” He corrects, “A beautiful black man.” But Dana gets the last word here, transcending his insistence on skin color: “A beautiful man.”
When she is at her most despairing, Dana has her wry, intelligent friend Phoebe back in Philadelphia who comments at one point, “You thought your love could take you out of history.” The comment suggests that there are some things that love can’t transcend, and prejudice against racial mixing is one of them. But in fact interracial couples can be found throughout history: if they hadn’t believed their love could “take them out of” it, history might never have changed. Not forty years ago, miscegenation was still illegal in 20 states.
Another comment on how history forms the currents of our lives is one Dana comes to realize near the novel’s end: “It’s not whether we have free will, but that our will is so miniscule beside the forces of history and chance that bring us to the point of choice.” As interesting as I find this statement, I think it’s important to contrast it with the awareness of the many risks Dana takes and how little social cost she suffers for any of them. The forces of history act on us all, but it’s pretty clear that these forces have been uneven. We can admire Dana’s striking personal courage to transform her life but still recognize that she enjoys extraordinary freedom of movement and choice as a white American female at the turn of the 21st century. At the same time, we can sympathize with Cassius’s mostly psychic entrapment as a black American male but still see that not all forces work against him (certainly not love) and that his choices, however miniscule, are his to make.
How do we negotiate the relationships in our lives that history threatens to sink? I admire Burroway for taking on the difficult subject of interracial love and for doing so through the voice of a brave, loving, insightful woman. I also admire how she makes the vivid local description integral to the theme of the novel. From the most complex setting to the tiniest facial expression, Burroway’s keen ear and eye put us there through a compelling narrative voice. I trust this narrator to reveal for us the personal side of the political subject of race. She’s the sort of woman I would want as a friend.