My favorite photograph of my grandfather depicts a little boy, three or four, dressed in tattered clothes beside a dusty Model T Ford. He looks grim and determined. My grandmother said the first time she saw the picture it made her cry.
There were many reasons my grandfather left Arkansas for San Francisco, and there are myriad reasons he hasn’t picked a boll of cotton since.
Children know when something is wrong with their world. And the little boy in the picture knows something’s not right, as small as he is. You can see it in his little face, the frown in his forehead.
Children — before they learn that it makes adults uncomfortable — can’t ignore when something is not right. They pose simple questions: why do some people think one person isn’t as good as another, because of the color of their skin? Why hasn’t a woman been president? Why did my grandpa die? The simplicity that kills me, because my convoluted answers are never as good as their questions.
Children are so direct. When they see something wrong, they can’t figure out why the adults in their world — who they see as all-powerful — won’t fix it. I’m drawn to stories of children who take matters into their own hands, and Bayou is such a story.
What happens when you cross Jim-Crow-era racial tension, two little girls, and a Southern mythology as creative and beautiful as it is terrifying?
You get Bayou.
A deservedly acclaimed graphic novel, told from the perspective of a little black girl in 1930s Mississippi, Bayou is equal parts beauty and horror. Bayou contrasts the very real and terrifying world — in which a little boy can be lynched for whistling at a white woman — with an equally chilling fantasy world, in which benevolent spirits and talking animals flee from bloodthirsty golliwogs and murderous Jim Crows. It’s not always clear which world is scarier.
Little Lee, growing up on the banks of the bayou, must descend into its malevolent waters to save her best friend, a white girl, and, in the process, free her father from a trumped-up kidnapping charge. So far, it’s touched on racism, “good hair,” religion, gender roles, and provided new looks at a whole host of stereotypes and problematic representations of Africans and African-Americans. If it weren’t a big spoiler, I would add — jumping up and down in my seat — that a major character is the demonic personification of one of my favorite Blues tropes.
Lee is strong, smart, and unflinchingly committed to the task of saving her father, no matter how frightening the journey may be. I loved her at once, and have added her to my small, growing collection of tough-cookie little girl heroines.
The first five chapters (and a bit of the sixth) are available online; Vol. 1, comprising the first four, is currently for sale, and Vol. 2, offering the conclusion, will be published next summer. In the meantime, the website keeps posting updates to the story, and I, for one, am completely hooked.
Bayou is just lovely and harrowing and deeply upsetting, and most emphatically not for children.
If you haven’t read it yet, you should. (If you have, feel free to read it again.) But be warned: you won’t accomplish much until you fetch up, full of questions and predictions, at the beginning of chapter 6. And you’ll probably make a childish sound of disappointment when you realize you’re going to have to wait months to find out how it all ends.
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