Prayers of an Igbo Rabbi by Richard Cummings
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan
This baffling, genre-hopping novel sports a blurb by the late Chinua Achebe, whose world famous chronicle of his Igbo people was said to be something of a reaction to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Cummings new book, in part, looks at their descendants in America’s own heart of darkness, the segregated modern South, specifically Sea Islands Georgia. Set in the present, no one appears in this book with a pain-stakingly thorough genealogy, often denied or unrealized.
There may be more people dead than alive as Roger Westerfield, a New England lawyer looking for the perfect out-of-the-way place to work on his novel, opens a 228 page can of worms by trying to buy a run down house in the Gullah community of St. Simons, from a venerable ‘conjure woman.’ Judging by the jacket notes, the author also appears to be a lawyer with literary aspirations but his protagonist faces greater dangers than snarky reviewers. Slavery, the unhealed wound of the birth of our nation, is expiated throughout by nearly every voice, from the Klan to the ghost of Malcolm X.
This book is a fantasy both in it’s supernatural aspect and by virtue of featuring an exotic, libidinous millionaire femme fatale who will bail you out no questions asked.
I’m not sure which is more fantastic.
Either through bad luck, or possibly because of his previously unknown ancestors Westerfield appears to have become set up as the patsy in the elderly woman’s murder, and the only lawyer who will represent him drunkenly insists on his pleading guilty. Awake or sleeping he has dreams that nearly convince him that his death is the required sacrifice for the long ago deaths at Ibo Landing, a hotly disputed event in the locality.
Much of the book is a scholarly but exciting tale of the Igbo race, brought from Nigeria as slaves, some of whom live on through descendants and others who just live on, ghosts of those who drowned themselves rather than accept the yoke. Westerfield navigates his descent into the underworld sometimes unable to tell them apart. The exposition needed to convey the history of the place and its twisted family trees is liable to be delivered suddenly and awkwardly but the voice is solid and the experiences with the shifty inhabitants of coastal Georgia are well told, surprising and fresh. Closer copy editing would not be amiss, it almost seems like an uncorrected proof, but the pages turn quickly. Perhaps it is meant as an echo of Igbo oral tradition which switches freely from narrative to folktale to oratory, but my complaint is that the story can be suddenly seem to be delivered from a soapbox, with rants about everything wrong with the world, from green vegetables to the Resurrection; I almost expected to hear how hard it is to get good help nowadays; one thing is certain, the answer is not to enslave them.