The Big Chill

There is a style of African American literature that might be called the “Ghetto Gothic” school of fiction, consisting typically of coming-of-age-stories of the black underclass that employ a vernacular and worldview unfamiliar to most readers. Publishers brought these often first-time authors’ works to print in the latter half of the 20th century with stunning and sometimes controversial results. Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land,” Louise Meriwether’s “Daddy Was a Number Runner” and, more recently, A. J. Verdelle’s “The Good Negress” and Sapphire’s “Push” are classic examples of tales in which young protagonists’ depressing circumstances are described in vivid detail before they escape, usually through the portal of education, to the world beyond their ghetto experience.

Sister Souljah, in her fictional debut, both extends and breaks away from this tradition in the raw-to-the-bone “The Coldest Winter Ever.” But rather than living in the poverty of these other narratives, Winter Santiaga and her family live in a gadget-laden, “dipped” apartment, courtesy of the activities of handsome drug-dealing patriarch Ricky Santiaga. As a consequence, 16-year-old Winter, who has been sexually active since she was 12, sizes up her conquests by their looks, visible signals of sexual endowment and the kinds of watch, car and sneakers they’re sporting. “The money man,” she tells us, “is the guy who knows how to provide, knows how to bring home the goodness and bless his woman with everything she wants.”

By Winter’s standards, her father Ricky is a hero, a king, and Winter’s mother, who gave birth to Winter at 14, is a queen to be emulated for her perfectly arranged clothes, artfully positioned false eyelashes and ability to “hook the big money fish.” There are no second thoughts for this family, no lingering doubts or midnight confessions as in the modern-day godfather saga, cable television’s “The Sopranos.”

Like the Sopranos, the Santiagas opt for the suburbs, Long Island in this case, where Ricky Santiaga secures a corner of the American dream for his family, but Winter feels imprisoned, isolated from her crew of girlfriends and the happenings in her Brooklyn projects. The isolation proves to be Ricky Santiaga’s undoing as well, contributing to his loss of control of drug activities on the streets and a harrowing attack on the family. The retaliation by Santiaga’s crew brings heat from the feds and precipitates not only the drug lord’s arrest and the confiscation of the suburban mansion and its contents under the RICO laws but the breakup of the family and Winter’s long downward spiral, aided and abetted by her own callousness toward the people in her life.

It is this lack of remorse for the drugs they sell and people they hurt that makes the rise and fall of Winter and the Santiaga clan chilling reading. Littered with references to the Lexuses the drug dealers “push” (drive) or the designer clothes Winter and her homegirls “rock” (wear), at times the novel seems like an extended rap video, full of talk of living large, being “bad bitches” and having it all. For readers whose only contact with the Santiagas’ world is through music videos or rap music, “The Coldest Winter Ever” may bring an uncomfortable recognition of the connection between rap’s bodacious “Big Willies” and the commercialism to which we’ve subjected ourselves and our children for the last 30 years. At times Winter’s voracious consumerism seem different only in degree from that of the monied offspring of Silicon Valley or other corporate high-rollers.

In this way Sister Souljah critiques a society that nurtures such behavior, although that message is less compelling than the story of Winter’s excesses and unraveling fortunes. This may be because Souljah, a hip-hop singer and social activist who works with young people not unlike Winter Santiaga and her friends, chooses to drive home her point in the novel by making herself a character, which is occasionally a distraction from the main tale she tells. Moreover, when Winter dismisses the character Souljah as an overweight, underdressed con artist whose community outreach programs are merely a scam, we despair of any hope of salvation for this tough-as-nails, round-the-way girl and must wonder if Souljah the writer shares that feeling. “It was obvious that there’s money in [Souljah’s] house. . ,” Winter says. “I wasn’t sure how I would get a piece of Souljah’s hustle. I was sure that I would.”

That the help Souljah offers is rejected, even exploited, by Winter contributes to this young woman’s fall from what little grace has been afforded her. For readers who manage to stick with this often bleak narrative, Winter’s ultimate fate collides with the hopeful ending one might expect from the Ghetto Gothic school, but it will indelibly distinguish the Santiagas and their millennial milieu from anything that has come before.