Hauntings

Photo by Eva Bronzini via Pexels

In Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s novel, Promise, the Kindred sisters are on the cusp of change, bounding toward and through adolescence. The small New England community where they live — as one of only two Black families — is also on the cusp. It’s 1957, and as the country changes, so will the sisters’ feelings of belonging, safety, and friendship in their almost-all-white neighborhood — even among their closest white friends. But the Kindred family, unbeknownst to their neighbors, is not new to resilience.

There’s so much to admire about the voice and story in this book, but I’d feel remiss not to mention the heart-song unleashed by where it begins, not only as a text or a matter of plot, but as a point of view: in the rich abundance of love that surrounds Cinthy and her sister Ezra. Not all of that love can survive unchanged by the tectonic shifts in the world around them, but it, too, is inheritance.

—Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

I am named for my mother’s favorite flower – hyacinth. It is my mother’s favorite scent. Ezra is the one who came up with Cinthy. When I was very small, I loved how my sister used to sing my name to me. So I am much more like a Cinthy than a flower. My sister is named after a prophet and because Mama believed that she was having a boy. There was no doctor to tell her the facts and my mother would not have necessarily been partial to a doctor’s opinion. She disliked science slightly more than she disliked religion. Mama had been raised in a convent. While reading in the library there, which is where she spent much of her time when she was not cleaning and praying, she discovered that the word Ezra also means Help. Unlike me, Ezra was born in Damascus. Our parents left as quickly as possible after Ezra was born in our grandmother’s house.

Being a Cinthy feels

I begged Ezra to let me follow her to the bluffs, having no day-before-school adventure of my own. This is often the plight of baby sisters all over the world and I had settled into the idea. The pond beyond our house on our property bored me by now and I knew better than to ask Mama if I could bicycle down into the village alone. Though I risked Ezra changing her mind about inviting me to go with her, I slid down our bannister from the top of our stairs. Ezra, bare-footed and clutching her leather sandals against her chest, stepped lightly down the front staircase, careful to mind the places where the wood would give us away. Our back staircase led directly into the kitchen where we could hear Mama moving around beneath a slow ballad that was playing from the radio. I pulled back from the door because I loved Sam Cooke and when he sang You Send Me it was like being under a spell.