Capturing The Bittersweet Tone

Capturing the Bittersweet Tone

There is a particular kind of writing that does not let you stay comfortable. It does not let you sit back at a clean distance and observe. It pulls you in by the collar, plants you at a kitchen table with a cup of Maxwell House coffee going cold at your elbow, and makes you feel the weight of the room.

That is what I was reaching for when I wrote Mama, Me and ‘Em. Not the sanitized, smoothed-over version of a life. The real one, with all of its noise and contradictions, its laughter that arrives in the middle of grief, its grief that shows up without warning in the middle of a good Saturday afternoon. I wanted to write a book that felt true on every page, and to do that, I had to make deliberate choices about voice, language, and the texture of the world I was putting on the page.

Language as Identity

One of the first and most important decisions I made was to let the people in this book speak the way they actually spoke. From time to time throughout the narrative, I employ Black as well as other ethnic vernaculars to give a realistic view and feel for the characters and their lives. Emma Mae does not speak in carefully corrected sentences. Neither do Nanna Jane, Uncle John, or Mabel. They speak in the living dialect of working-class Black Southerners who carried their language North and kept it, not out of ignorance, but out of pride.

There is a moment in the book where Willie John makes the mistake of trying to correct his mother’s grammar at her own kitchen table. She stops him cold. She tells him that she has been talking this way all her life and it has never gotten her into trouble yet. She can hold a proper tongue when she needs to, she says. And then she points to her head and tells him what really matters is what is up there. Not how it comes out.

Willie John deserved the reprimand. And he never forgot it.

The truth is that Ma and her family spoke two dialects at home. Their traditional Black Southern working-class tongue was sharp, emotional, and deeply expressive. Willie John also learned what passed for standard English in New York City schools. He grew up with both, and he was never ashamed of either. The speech patterns in this book are not there to be quaint or colorful for the reader’s benefit. They are there because they are real, because they are the voices he grew up hearing, and because stripping them out would have been a lie.

When Willie John narrates his story about his mother and their lives, a reader may cry, may laugh, and may sometimes become angry. That range of feeling is not an accident. It is what an honest rendering of this life produces.

The World on the Page

Writing about Brooklyn in the late 1940s was a different kind of challenge. It was a matter of reconstruction, of reaching back into the textures of a place and time and putting them down with enough precision that a reader could feel themselves standing there.

Those who grew up in Brooklyn and Manhattan at any point during that era will find these stories particularly familiar, this portrait of a seemingly bygone world of the Brooklyn Dodgers, corner candy and drug stores, delicatessens, childhood street games, public schools, Sunday dinners and Sunday drives, gospel singing, Coney Island, Junior’s Cheesecakes, and of course Nathan’s hotdogs. These were not decorations. They were the architecture of daily life for thousands of Black New Yorkers navigating a city that was, in many ways, far better than the South they had come from, and in other ways just as capable of diminishing them.

I wanted the reader to feel the Saturday afternoon heat coming off the sidewalk on Nostrand Avenue. To hear the crackle and hiss of a seventy-eight spinning on Uncle John’s phonograph, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet pouring into a room full of cigar smoke and laughter. To smell the butter and cane syrup on a stack of Uncle John’s legendary pancakes, the recipe for which he took quietly and triumphantly to his grave. These details matter because they are what a life is made of. Not the headline moments but the ordinary ones, the ones you carry with you and never quite realize you are carrying until years later when they surface whole and vivid, the way memory does when you finally sit down to write.

The Bittersweet as a Way of Seeing

The title of this blog contains the word I kept returning to throughout the writing process: bittersweet. It is the only word that accurately describes the emotional register of this story. Not tragic, though there is tragedy in it. Not triumphant, though there is triumph. Bittersweet. The way a good memory of someone hurts because they are no longer here. The way leaving a place you love feels like both an ending and a beginning at the same time.

That feeling runs through every chapter of this book. It runs through the warmth of Aunt Clara and Uncle John’s Hancock Street apartment, through the jazz records and the dancing in the parlor and the ice cream at the corner drugstore. It runs through the hard conversations Ma had with Willie John about race and survival, through the laughter she and Mabel shared on their way to the clinic, through the Western Union telegram that arrived on a rainy Friday evening and brought news of a death back home.

“This is not a sad book. But it is not a happy one either. It is an honest one. And that, in the end, is the only kind worth writing.”

Those who may have grown up and lived throughout the great boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan at some time or other will find Will Leamon’s stories even more engrossing. And those who did not will find themselves wishing they had. Because the world he builds on these pages is so specific, so alive with texture and feeling, that it does not feel like reading someone else’s history. It feels like remembering your own.