Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
by Alice Anderson, Saint Martin’s Press, $25.99
I am one of those dreadful people who dog ear the books. Not the library ones – don’t freak out here. But my own. The best ones look a little scary. Like they might have been to Bosnia in certain years or have traveled up the Amazon on a raft. I find a phrase or passage I find enchanting and there I go, making little triangles on the page tops. And if I really, really love the writing, a pen will find its way into the equation. Then the book will become a super mess, pages fattened by folds and demarcated by my literary liner notes. These are the books I will go back to, time and again, to find a certain phrase, or to try and locate a certain feeling the writer inspired. They are topographical maps of their impression upon me, all bent up and beat by my affections.
This summer, that dog eared, scribbled-up book was Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, a memoir by the poet Alice Anderson. It is a book that fell into my life at the beginning of August, just when I needed a book, from the St. Martin’s publicist’s envelope, like a chip that had broken off from my kind of heaven. The sort with a kick ass story made of words so beautifully arranged they seem infused with light.
The story is particularly timely as much of it takes place in the sodden, broken aftermath of New Orleans, post- Katrina. As I was finishing it, a new fury, Hurricane Harvey, was unleashing on Houston. It was like Anderson’s story had leaked out of its spine and into the world, onto the radio, into the hearts of every person who cares about the other humans of the planet.
But Anderson’s story is about another kind of storm as well. Her life was double-punched. Once by Katrina in New Orleans, a ruined landscape through which she and her three very young children limp into the early part of the book. The second punch came from the wrath and violence of an unstable spouse, who is riddled by the same kind of OCD that makes that scene with the organized can goods in Sleeping With the Enemy one of the most terrifying two minutes of contemporary cinema.
Anderson’s husband, an alcoholic physician and the children’s father, is so scary in this book that the reader may be tempted to put the book down sometimes, exhausted by the pace of his rages. Not only does he list a terrifying battery of options should she ever try to leave him, including losing her kids forever, being locked up in a psych ward, and being “good ‘ol boyd right out of Mississippi,” but there is also what he calls Plan B: “Which is I’ll kill you. Without a second thought.”
On top of this, he alphabetizes the pantry. (The Sleeping with the Enemy moment.)
It is an exciting story. I don’t want to give away too much, but I will divulge here that the author and what she calls her “sweet three,” a little girl and little boy and another baby boy, still in diapers, have to hide out in a borrowed FEMA trailer on a remote farm and then run to California to escape this nutjob. Furthermore, there are crooked and dishonest social workers who figure into the story. I don’t know about you, but crooked social workers are on my most feared and reviled list. They sign up for good and then turn to the dark side. You don’t expect it.
But this is one of those books where the excitement of the fast-paced and completely freak-a-minute plot is upstaged by the writing. Because Alice Anderson is a poet, she infuses her prose with glorious and astonishing imagery. Whether she is writing about her early teens and twenties, when she was a model in Paris (“tourist barges pass like lazy hippos”) or getting the crap beat out of her (resulting in a “candy necklace of bruises), she writes in the luminous mode.
Anderson is also really smack-talking funny. You can almost hear her southern drawl as she talks about the look her father gives her just before he teaches her how to shoot a gun, the same “one your daddy gives before he shoves you off the lake cliff, or guns the boat motor, or buys you your first shot in a dive bar down to Bayou a Bartre.”
I love a book that can gracefully toggle terror, humor and beauty and Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away does just this.
I will confess here, in the interest of open disclosure, that I know Alice Anderson a bit. The magazine I edit published some of her poetry a couple years back and we added one another on FaceBook. But I never knew in detail what she had been through. I had previously admired her beautiful words, but now, to that I have to add in her major league moxy. I won’t give away the ending here, but I will say she is one bad ass. I would not want to get on her wrong side.
This memoir comes with a great philosophy and suggestion, as a sort of bonus. One I think I will carry with me, as I move along in my own life. In the introduction Anderson says “we make chapels of our scars,” something I have seen her write in her FaceBook posts before and that is clearly her life credo. I am not sure all people do this, but memoirists sure have a penchant for it. If One Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is such a chapel, sign me up for that religion. I believe in this kind of woman-strong message of survival against storms and evil incarnate. I believe in this kind of writing, too. Making beauty from darkness; and finding the way to fly away, up into the blue, kiddos in tow.
Elizabeth Cohen teaches creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh and through Gotham Writer’s Workshops in New York. She is the author of The Hypothetical Girl, a collection of short stories, The Family on Beartown Road and four books of poetry, including What the Trees Said. She lives in upstate New York with her daughter, Ava, and way too many cats.