Everybody's Son by Thrity Umrigar

 

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Aug. 7, 2021 in a hybrid set-up! Six of us met in person at the Wilson Library, after sixteen months of only meeting virtually. Two of our book club members opted to meet over Zoom. The Branch Manager at Wilson graciously set us up with a big screen so that we could see and hear Nancy and Sarah clearly, and they could see us.

 We discussed Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar.  Nine-year-old Anton was left in a hot apartment with no air condition and no food for seven days during a heat wave in 1991. His mother only meant to stay out for a short while, but her drug dealer held her captive, forcing her to perform sexual acts as a way to pay off her drug debt. The police discovered Anton walking along the street all bloody from breaking out of the apartment’s first floor window. Anton’s mother had locked the door from the outside, for his protection.  

 A well-connected and powerful judge adopted Anton and provided him with every privilege a wealthy family can provide. Anton went to the best schools and by the end of the book, he is running for governor. During the campaign, Anton learns that his adoptive father tricked his birth mother into severing her parental rights and had lied, saying it had been her choice.  

 

I shared with the group that I had watched a video of an interview with the author in which she said that these characters and this story just dropped into her spirit. I have no reason to doubt her story, at any rate; I truly believe that she truly believes that this happened.

 

The first person in our group to speak about this was Nancy, who spoke over Zoom. She said she wished the characters were more fleshed out. Nancy found that the incident in which Anton ran away from his adoptive home while he was still a boy and tried to go back to find his mom very believable.

 

Sarah, also on Zoom, told us that her career was in child welfare for 40 years. She said the book misrepresents (or basically ignores) the changes in social services over the years. She said that having David use his privilege to take Anton from his mom reflects outdated social services practices. She said that there would have been a social worker meeting with all the parties weekly and the goal (especially during that time) would have been to reunite the child with his birth mother.

 

I had also mentioned to the group that Umrigar (who was born and reared in India) mentioned in her interview that she studied for a year at Harvard under Skip Gates and Cornell West. Our group member, Shelara said, “I don’t like it when people preface their authority on Blackness by associating themselves with a prominent Black person. There were things in her descriptions that were just wrong: the idea that the jokes the white kids in school were more sophisticated that the jokes Anton heard at his own school; the description of Carine’s hair as ‘sometimes in dreadlocks,’ which is impossible unless the dreadlocks are fake.” Shelara did concede that David took Anton because he loved him.

 

Meghan said, “I hated David as I moved throughout the book… I thought Dolores hated David too but near the end I saw that she was on board.”

 

Marsha: I do not know why, but I wasn’t expecting the book to be good. I found Anton’s integration into his new life to be unbelievable. Would David have insisted on keeping Anton if he had darker skin? Also, the whole scenario in which he skips out on his political campaign was unrealistic. When former President Obama was on the campaign trail, he faced constant criticism. Why wasn’t Anton facing criticism in this book? Was Anton ever culturally sound?

 

Shelara answered that the author didn’t see the value of culture in Anton’s old community. She only wrote about the crack use and the parties.

 

Marsha chimed in again with, “the other thing that rings false is that when he had gone back to try to find his mother, he had on those expensive clothes, walking to the phone booth, walking from the bus stop. Wouldn’t he have been robbed?"

 

Jezrie said, “I think this book was written exactly the way it was meant to be written. The author used her immigrant privilege. I didn’t like the way the book ended. I thought it was a cop-out. I am not going to pretend that I grew up as Black, presenting the “wrong other,” I always say, “Oh no, I’m not Black I’m Puerto Rican.” The author’s understanding of Blackness comes from her “otherness.”

 

Bonnie gave us a good contribution when she mentioned that Isabel Wilkerson in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, showed a true understanding of Jewish history even though she’s not Jewish. “I viewed this book through the lens of capitalism,” Bonnie continued, “If Juanita was rich, this couldn’t have happened to her.”

 

Shelara agreed with Bonnie in that anyone who is a writer can write about another race. “I believe in writers. I’m not saying she didn’t have the right to write this story. I’m saying in this case, it doesn’t ring true. David loves this boy so much yet calls the boy’s mother an animal."

 

Wendy, who hadn’t yet spoken, finally said, “The author has these political ideas that she wants to express. I felt that each character wasn’t believable, for example, Carine left her kids in the house with Anton while she went out. They didn’t even know him. Also, the change to present tense on page 334 was very jarring.

 

Shelara: “When he was approached by the cop, I really thought he was going to get shot. That actually would have been a more powerful ending. As it was, the ending was too much of Anton in his own head.”

 

Marsha: Did he find the only kind sympathetic cop in the United States?

Wendy: There’s no way the press wouldn’t have found out about Juanita.

Marsha: The press didn’t even talk about Carine. I’m still pissed off that these powerful white men pulled this flim-flam and there were no repercussions.

Nancy agreed with Wendy, saying, the author had points she wanted to make.

 

Thrity Umrigar in a virtual interview with the Lima Public Library (Lima, OH)

Joanna circled back to what I said about the author “receiving these characters,” adding, “If the author received this muse, she still needed to do her homework and make sure she represented the characters properly.

 

Shelara also mentioned the glaring error in the conversation about calling soda “pop.” It’s people in the country that say “pop”, not northern city people. This is just an example of not fully knowing American colloquialisms. The one thing the author was right about was in her treatment of white liberalism: David was so willing to change Anton’s life, but unwilling to change policies that kept people like Anton’s mother in poverty.

Anton considered his mother while waiting for the cop to bring back his license.

p.323 “How had she done it, kicked her drug addiction and stayed sober in a world that seemed designed to break down women like her: A world where perhaps the sanest response was to lose yourself in a drugged stupor? What an iron will she must possess, what pools of courage must lie behind those gentle brown eyes. And the worst part was her reward for a lifetime of self-discipline and hard work was so paltry. Pappy and David had worked hard, and so did Anton. But their efforts had such enormous payoffs – good salaries, wealth that reproduced itself, luxury cars, beautiful homes. What had Juanita Vesper earned in exchange for kicking a drug habit, for twenty-five years of sobriety, for decades of working in a small, hot restaurant kitchen?” A free lunch hurriedly eaten between customers. A small house on the outskirts of town that had been left to her by her blind mother. A car that ran but could stop any day…”

 

David had a fleeting thought the night he”stole” Anton from his mother. He had a vision of him and Delores becoming a type of godparents to both Anton and his mom. Once he noticed Juanita staring at him from across the table, he dismissed the thought completely and further justified his actions based on his competitive nature:

p. 86 “Juanita and he could never be friends. They were natural rivals. Whether this woman was aware of it or not, they were competing for the same prize.”