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For most of her life, Louise Langdon hated the color of her
skin.
Growing up in Grenada in the late 1800s, she was surrounded
by the dark-skinned children of former slaves but Louise's
father was a white man who raped her barely-teenage mother,
leaving Louise with a pale complexion. For the rest of her
life she held deep anger at the supremacy that white people
assumed, from her migration north to her marriage to Earl
Little and her activism, the latter of which she passed to
her son, Malcolm.
As a part of the Great Migration, Berdis Jones got caught up
in the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance and some months
after landing in New York City, Berdis gave birth to a son
whose father was uninterested. For much of young Jimmy's
early life, then, it was just him and his mother, and she
worked long nights at a cleaning job to ensure that he had
what he needed. What he didn't need was a new
stepfather, David Baldwin, who suffered from an undiagnosed
mental illness.
The Reverend and First Lady of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist
Church wanted only the best for their daughter, Alberta. The
Williams gave Alberta the finest education, music lessons,
all that an upper-class Black young lady would need. When an
itinerant, uneducated preacher, Michael King, came calling
on Miss Alberta, the Williams were dead-set against the
romance. Alberta, however, saw a good heart in Michael – one
that later inspired their son, Martin.
The Three Mothers
is one of those books that you really want to like but doing
so is a challenge. It's a very good book that's in very bad
need of an editor.
Format-wise, it starts where all good biographies do. Author
Anna Malaika Tubbs tells why she wrote this book before she
plunges into a brief account of the ancestry of her main
subjects. This immediately begins to build the layers of
story that ultimately explain the work behind three great
men.
At issue, however, is that each section of the women's lives
is woven very loosely around Black history of their era.
That contributes to a confusion of timeline, and
out-of-place points that reduce the smoothness of a history
that's otherwise riveting. It's like trying to watch three
TV shows at once; add contradictions and a
confidently-stated point-as-fact that experts still aren't
sure about, and you may be left frequently scratching your
head.
If you overlook the scatteredness and don't mind frequent
side-trips, The Three Mothers is a great examination
of a rarely-told triple story and you'll love it. If you
like your books more linear and straightforward, though,
just put this one aside.
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