Sparked by the gruesome killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, America has seen widespread protest marches and rallies to honor Floyd and to denounce racism and police brutality. Horrified by Floyd’s death, most Americans support these efforts to effect reform in police policies.
Our country has also witnessed looting, the burning of stores, many of them either owned by African-Americans or employing them, acts of vandalism, and calls for revolution. Many ordinary Americans despair over those who have turned a man’s death into something else.
Many look for ways of reconciliation, ways for bringing Americans of all races and creeds together. Some turn to the government, some to political organizations, some to prayer.
And some find hope in a book.
Sometimes such a book finds its way to a reader at exactly the right time, as if fate has taken a hand to deliver a message of hope. Many of these are self-help or inspirational books written to buck up their readers or to show them a pathway of change. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Living, for example, has appealed to many young people, especially males, for the practical wisdom and encouragement it offers.
So it is with Jill McCroskey Coupe’s novel Beginning with Cannonballs.
It’s 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Sophie Norris and her eight-year-old daughter Hanna—short for Susquehanna—are living in the Madison household, where Sophie works as a maid for Miss Bessie and as a caretaker for her daughter, Gail, who is best friends with Hanna. Raised together from infanthood, and despite their racial differences, Hanna and Gail have become as close as sisters. The novel opens with the inseparable girls making cannonballs from the diving board into the Madison’s pool.
Sophie has a husband, Del, a musician and auto mechanic, but a falling out has left them married in name only. Unlike Gail, Hanna also has an older sibling, Jeremiah, who lives with her father.
As children, both Hanna and Gail suffer from the racial segregation surrounding them. Because she is black, Hanna can’t enter certain restaurants and movie theaters with Gail, and must attend a separate school. Meanwhile, some of Gail’s classmates ostracize her for her friendship with Hanna, and Gail can’t understand why she’s not allowed to attend Hanna’s school.
As they grow older, the two girls, especially Hanna, draw apart, mostly because of the demands of segregation, both official and unofficial. Hanna and her family eventually move north to Philadelphia, and the girls lose contact with each other, in part because Gail’s mother hides the letters Hanna has sent to her daughter.
For the rest of the novel, we follow the travails and victories of Hanna and Gail all the way to 1996. Against the backdrop of a country undergoing vast changes—the civil rights movement, the end of segregation, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—Hanna and Gail face their own personal challenges: marriage, motherhood, and work. Hanna eventually graduates from college and works for NASA; Gail becomes a social worker in the public schools. Both women provide care for their elderly parents and deeply love their children.
And their friendship, tenuous as it is at times, remains strong. By the end of Beginning with Cannonballs, that relationship has endured for 50 years. The novel concludes with Hanna and Gail, and their mothers, sharing a meal at the Cannonball Grille north of Richmond. Sophie ends this long day of driving with these thoughts:
Back in Knoxville, Sophie had been Miss Bessie’s maid. Seemed like the two of them had a little more in common now. White hair, for one thing. Grandchildren, for another. Maybe even bunions, since they’d both worn sneakers today.
Did Miss Bessie’s heart ever race for no reason?
Bessie, she wanted to be called.
Sophie would try. Old habits die hard.
In these sad and terrible days when a white police officer’s brutality unnecessarily caused the death of a black man, sparking protests and riots, we’ve learned much about racism, and heard calls for change and social justice, though in truth many of us have no answers as how to institute those changes. Some look to the government or various organizations to bring about equality and harmony among the races, but efforts by such in the past have often brought division more than unification.
We’ve gone down this road plenty of times.
Jill McCroskey Coupe offers us a different way, the only way that will ever bind us together as one people. It is the way of love and friendship. It means looking past the color of a person’s skin and seeing the person. It means opening our eyes, looking inside of people, and perceiving them as human beings rather than as stereotypes.
Two thumbs up for Jill Coupe and Beginning with Cannonballs, a wise novel much needed in a time of fear and foolishness.