The Black Ancestor, novel by Albert Russo    Books by Albert Russo     View all 62 · Ode to Mamica mia, Mother beloved · Mother beloved, Mamica mia · Seven living Splendors · Au naturel / born naked · Venice, Empress of the Seas
Category:	Literary Fiction	Publisher:	Imago Press (Tucson, Arizona)	ISBN-10:	1935437038	Type:	Fiction
Pages:	218	Copyright:	Dec 2009	ISBN-13:	9781935437031

Get your Signed copy today! Buy your copy! Amazon Amazon Barnes & Noble.com booksamillion allbookstores The Black Ancestor A white girl in the former Belgian Congo is told a secret that will change the course of her life: she has a great-grandmother who was an African slave in the south of the United States. The story, set in the Belgian Congo in the years immediately preceding the 1960 post-colonial revolts, tells the story of the coming of age of a young white girl against a backdrop of social and racial prejudices that are sometimes overt and more often concealed, an undercurrent of everyday life that runs beneath the superficial events that form the surface of daily thought and activity.  During this final period of colonial rule by Belgium, Leodine, the daughter of members of the white master class, discovers that she has a black ancestor -- her father, who has since died in an air accident.  The family secret is revealed to her without warning by her uncle Jeff, a beloved family member who is still a youth himself.  Leodine confides her new knowledge to her mother, by now a neurotic and semi-alcoholic widow who has taken a lover, a Flemish national named Piet who holds a management position in the nationally run railroad.  Cautioned to tell no one of the family secret by her mother, Leodine becomes unable to keep it bottled up inside.  She ultimately confides in a school friend, Yolande, who is a mulatto, and who has been permitted to attend school in the white section of town largely because her skin color is light.  In time Leodine meets Yolande's brother, Mario-Tende, who, though a teacher gifted with a keen mind, must live in the section of town reserved for native Congolese.  Mario's skin color renders him too dark to live amidst colonial whites.  Yet Leodine is powerfully drawn to Mario, who she accepts as a tutor in native languages spoken by few during this period when the official tongue of the colony is French.  Mario inevitably makes a sexual advance to his young pupil, which Leodine gently rebuffs, and the next and penultimate scenes of the narrative take Leodine away from her familiar domestic milieu to the lush and often exotic wilderness of central Africa during a vacation trip with her mother and Piet, now her stepfather.  In the course of the trip the family encounters a coworker of Piet's, Rupert, and the coworker's friend, Arnaud, who seduces, or more accurately, date-rapes, Leodine one night.  On the family's return home, Leodine resumes her friendship with Yolande and Mario, whose advances this time succeed, resulting in another date-rape episode. Leodine confides both experiences to her mother with the result that she's sent to live in the United States with distant family members.  The remaining portion of The Black Ancestor ties together the storyline, and we learn that Leodine joins a convent and later   returns to her native Africa to work with the Peace Corps, while Mario (who she never  again sees), having chosen the life of a revolutionary, loses his life in the course of Congolese civil unrest in the wake of national movement for independence.  Excerpt As my mother was stroking my hair with the tips of her fingers, I noticed through my tears that she was growing more and more worried and apprehensive. I bit my lip and, with the back of my hand, wiped my cheeks. “You knew Daddy wasn’t all white, didn’t you?” I hurled at her. There it was; I had finally wrenched the words out of my body, but then I felt empty, totally spent, as if I had suffered an act of exorcism. Still, there was no sense of relief, though it seemed as if my lungs had expelled every bit of air accumulated in them since the minute I was born. And I was burning inside, I could almost smell the still hot cinders, which reminded me of those wildfi res that dotted the savannah during the dry season. I even feared that, with the slightest movement, the slightest breath of wind, my ribcage might become brittle and disintegrate. Meanwhile, my head was reeling like a kaleidoscope suddenly gone berserk. “Who told you that?” my mother asked, ashen-faced. She had to reiterate the question, for my ears were buzzing. Guilt knotted my throat and, in a strangled voice, I said, “I just know. Isn’t that enough for you?”

Paperback

Professional Reviews
David Alexander in The Taj Mahal Review (India, December 2009)
David Alexander in The Taj Mahal Review (India, December 2009)

THE BLACK ANCESTOR a novel by Albert Russo
Imago Press - 218 pages - softcover: $ 15 or GBP 11.99

ISBN-13: 978-1-935437-05-5 (hardcover) - $ 22; GBP 15.99 (online orders only)
ISBN-10: 1-935437-05-4 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-1-935437-03-1 (pbk.) - $ 15; GPB 11.99
ISBN-10: 1-935437-03-8 (pbk.)
1. Americans—Africa—Fiction. 2. Racially mixed children. 3. Identity
(Psychology) 4. Congo (Democratic Republic)

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Novelist Albert Russo's sensitive and distinctive portrait of a lady named Leodine, the central character of The Black Ancestor, shows a depth of insight into the human spirit that invests the story with a poignancy and transcendent quality. Russo's narrative draws the reader into an exploration of the inner life of feeling to witness the tortuous passages taken by the human spirit in its odyssey toward self-realization. Set in Africa, it is the story of a heart of light hestitantly advancing amidst what others have called a heart of darkness.

The story, set in the Belgian Congo in the years immediately preceding the 1960 post-colonial revolts, tells the story of the coming of age of a young white girl against a backdrop of social and racial prejudices that are sometimes overt and more often concealed, an undercurrent of everyday life that runs beneath the superficial events that form the surface of daily thought and activity. During this final period of colonial rule by Belgium, Leodine, the daughter of members of the white master class, discovers that she has a black ancestor -- her father, who has since died in an air accident. The family secret is revealed to her without warning by her uncle Jeff, a beloved family member who is still a youth himself. Leodine confides her new knowledge to her mother, by now a neurotic and semi-alcoholic widow who has taken a lover, a Flemish national named Piet who holds a management position in the nationally run railroad.
Cautioned to tell no one of the family secret by her mother, Leodine becomes unable to keep it bottled up inside. She ultimately confides in a school friend, Yolande, who is a mulatto, and who has been permitted to attend school in the white section of town largely because her skin color is light. In time Leodine meets Yolande's brother, Mario-Tende, who, though a teacher gifted with a keen mind, must live in the section of town reserved for native Congolese. Mario's skin color renders him too dark to live amidst colonial whites. Yet Leodine is powerfully drawn to Mario, who she accepts as a tutor in native languages spoken by few during this period when the official tongue of the colony is French. Mario inevitably makes a sexual advance to his young pupil, which Leodine gently rebuffs, and the next and penultimate scenes of the narrative take Leodine away from her familiar domestic milieu to the lush and often exotic wilderness of central Africa during a vacation trip with her mother and Piet, now her stepfather. In the course of the trip the family encounters a coworker of Piet's, Rupert, and the coworker's friend, Arnaud, who seduces, or more accurately, date-rapes, Leodine one night.
On the family's return home, Leodine resumes her friendship with Yolande and Mario, whose advances this time succeed, resulting in another date-rape episode. Leodine confides both experiences to her mother with the result that she's sent to live in the United States with distant family members. The remaining portion of The Black Ancestor ties together the storyline, and we learn that Leodine joins a convent and later

returns to her native Africa to work with the Peace Corps, while Mario (who she never
again sees), having chosen the life of a revolutionary, loses his life in the course of Congolese civil unrest in the wake of national movement for independence.
The story, which is narrated in the first person by Leodine, is told from the perspective of an adult who is reflecting back on a part of her life that has left a profound and indelible impression, a formative period in which Leodine's personality as an adult was molded, and the directions she would follow in later years set in adamantine. The tale is not one of sound and fury, which may be for the best, as tales of sound and fury often signify nothing. Instead The Black Ancestor weaves a subtle tapestry on narrative's loom, relating the episodic life's journey with a more subdued voice, as if to say that the truly defining turns of our lives come upon us quietly, like thieves in the night; thieves that steal something away from our souls, and leave behind an abominable emptiness that we must somehow fill in order to go on living, and to continue growing into our future selves. This message transcends the more superficial -- because dated -- subject of the main narrative lines dealing with colonial class prejudices based on ethnicity and the artificial biases that throw up color lines that can't be crossed, even by those of
"mixed blood," such as Yolande and Leodine herself, who are inwardly, if not outwardly, bound by the aggregate odium of these culturally determined "blemishes."

In fact, Russo says to us, our upward progress to higher states of self-awareness and being can be thwarted by equally muted yet sinister turns of fate that may steal away one's very life, such as the accidents that claim both Leodine's father and uncle. Beyond this Russo seems to be echoing, in a sense, the highest wisdom espoused by a character, named Candide, created by another author who wrote in French, whose final pronouncement on life, following a series of travails, was that the highest good depended on "cultivating one's garden," a rebuff to the Reverend Pangloss famed for his insistance that this was "the best of all possible worlds." In short, find yourself, and you will find both the answer and the way, even if the world in which you live is hardly Panglossian. Something like this modus vivendi distinguishes the book's more serene characters from those, like Leodine, who is buffeted by life's often painful vicissitudes. Yolande's ethnically mixed parents, the family's long-time servants, and an old Tutsi chieftain and renowned wise man, Mwami Ndeze, who is encountered during the family's African idylls, all seem to possess this Candide-like quality. In short they know themselves, they know their strengths, limitations, and places in the greater scheme of things, and perhaps because of this they emerge from life's tests largely unscathed and relatively content.

Russo's understated but gripping narrative in The Black Ancestor ranks the book, in my opinion, with other great rites-of-passage novels like Hermann Hesse's first novel, Peter Camenzind, or the later fiction of James T. Farrell, such as My Days of Anger, a novel written with a similarly understated literary touch. In addition, Russo gives us some striking scenes of the African landscape, as well as incisive commentary on the social and political forces and events that have formed the continent's recent past and continue to forge its sometimes turbulent present. Albert Russo's The Black Ancestor is another fine work of novelistic storytelling by a master craftsman at the top of his form and is highly recommended for many reasons, including its ability to remind us of the existence of living hearts and souls in a world that all too often teems with darkness.

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