Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

Book Overview

During the Depression, Baby and her abandoned siblings are roadwalkers, homeless wanderers foraging for existence across the rural South. Rescued by a kindly white man and placed with nuns in New... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679432337
• ISBN13: 9780679432333
• Release Date: July 1994
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

LUMINOUS PROSE AND TELLING NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION

The luminous prose of Pulitzer Prize winning Shirley Ann Grau is enchanting to read. In this, her sixth novel, she brings each scene to vivid life with her prodigious gifts of narrative description. Six young black children are left homeless after their parents abandon them during the Depression. They become transients, "roadwalkers" or, as some call them "frog spawn," trudging their way across the South. Before too long, Baby and her brother, Joseph, are the only ones left. They do whatever is necessary to survive until refuge is found in an old plantation. The landowner captures Baby and sends her to an orphanage, where she is given the name of Mary Woods. Some 40 years later, Nanda, Baby's daughter tells the story. Baby has become a seamstress and then a dress designer, thus providing an insulated, privileged existence for her daughter. It is only when Nanda integrates a white Catholic school in the East that she finds herself an outcast in an unfriendly world. "Roadwalkers" is not only the story of the black experience in the South, it is an account of adjustment, acceptance, and survival. - Gail Cooke

Roadwalking Redux

Some reviewers on this page praise Grau's strong prose, strong feminine characters, and powerful beginning. There is indeed all that. Others find some of the story "flat" or "lost." Perhaps so. Yet all miss the point, which is really rather uncomplicated, and for which the title Roadwalkers supplies the only clue needed. "Baby" never stops being a roadwalker, her daughter Nanda becomes a roadwalker, and the whites of the story become dislodged from their stable homelife to become roadwalkers themselves. Always lurking behind the economic circumstances that forced all the walkers to take to the roads was an unhinged social and moral world. Once Nanda and her mother achieve success in the white world, we see that the successful whites they meet also wander in a scatterbrained society aptly reflected in how quickly and irrationally fashions in clothing change. If this doesn't ring true, think how many times you yourself, your family and your friends have moved in the last ten years, seeking a "good" education, a "better" job, a "better" place to live, and then decide if you have found a better, more secure, and happier you. Or do you even now want to "move on" and walk down yet one more road?