The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

[Sara]

In 1923 Hattie Shepherd and her family escape Georgia and go north to live in Philadelphia and have a better life. She gets married to a man that isn’t a good husband and she ends up having two twins babies that die after just a couple of months because they got sick and Hattie and her husband were too poor to afford medicine, and Hattie was too prideful to get help from anyone. After the twins dies she ends up having nine more kids that are all very different and end up doing different things in life, and the chapter takes you through each kids life one chapter at a time. The life that Hattie thought she would have in the north is nothing like it actually ends up to be. She faces many trials and tribulations and so do her kids. Nothing really goes like she thought it would and she and her family are faced with many challenges that they have to learn to overcome.

I didn't like this book very much. I thought that it was pretty boring. The author took a too long to get into what the point of the book was and what it was supposed to be about. I also thought that it was very confusing; the point of view in the book changed every chapter, and sometimes I forgot what character in the book I was reading about and forgot who had experienced what.

[Joanrabrams]

I grew up in Phila. during the years that Mathis wrote about but did not live. There was very strong de facto segregation there and she made it sound like one could live anywhere if you had the money. You could not live on Tulpehocken until at least the mid 50's when someone "broke" the neighborhood by selling to "colored people." Germantown was a peacefully integrated community but I don't don't think that any black people lived there iin 194o. Where did August go every night all dressed up. I thought that Phila had only one black restaurant, Swann's,
and they were not served at other places. West Phila was where a lot of working black people lived and N. was mainily non-working people.

What I got out of t he book the difficultly of a normal family with all the povverty and overcrowding and it seems that one can't have any children who grow up normal with this dysfunctional background.

[Ann]

I found The Twelve Tribes rough going. To me this is not so much a novel as a collection of short stories centered on one family's trials and dysfunction. In some ways the character of the cold, disconnected mother Mathis developed in Hattie reminded me some of my own mother and drew no sympathy or empathy from me. Quite the opposite. Interestingly the only child of Hattie and August's union who was sympathetic was Floyd, who was desperately and unsuccessfully trying to suppress his sexuality. The terrible bigotry surrounding homosexuality in those days caused gays and lesbians to be not only alienated from society but also from themselves. Otherwise the suffering of each of the other children is a bit over the top. It also strikes me that Mathis is exceptionally critical of the men in her stories; she portrays most of the males as irresponsible losers, alcoholics, womanizers, or criminals. And one way or the other the women are mostly victims. Surely African American communities are not the complete spiritual wasteland that Mathis portrays, or am I missing something here?