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Bil Wright's stunning debut novel, Sunday You
Learn How to Box, lucidly captures the intimate battles that take place in the life of
Louis and his mother. In a novel that is humorous and heartbreaking, Wright's creates a
very convincing portrait of a boy coming of age in the ghetto, perpetually on the ropes,
mostly unsuccessful in blocking some of life's harshest blows.
The novel takes its name from a suggestion made by Louis' mother that after church, her
husband (and Louis's nemesis) Ben, would teach her son how to box. After witnessing Louis
getting his shiny-new red bike taken by neighborhood thugs, she is struck with the notion
that she must help Louis become more "masculine." Louis couldn't be less
interested in learning to box if he tried. In fact, he believed that the only reason why
his mother wanted to do this in the first place is to give Ben permission to hit him, and
vicariously unload her frustrations on him.
"From sugar to shit," Jeanette would tell her son, "sugar to shit."
This phrase underscores the crushing poverty of single-female headed households, of black
women who missed out on the good life, because they were born black, uneducated and poor.
Jeanette is complex, but she is far from self-aware. She moves from Harlem to a housing
project in Connecticut for a job at Saks Fifth Avenue in Downtown Stratfield. Her prime
motives are to create financial security and home space with lovely, tasteful things. And
although romantic love never appears as an objective, she marries a fellow employee Ben, a
stock person, thinking that ultimately her dreams will come true.
While all this is going on, her child is growing up and immersed in the first stages of a
raging puberty. Part of the novel focuses on Louis' interior changes and his love and
admiration of Ray Anthony, a 17-year old handsome neighborhood tough who is the definition
of cool, circa 1968. Immersed in depression, Louis' grades drop and he is sent to a
therapist to work out his problems. His mother called the hospital "the asylum."
Crammed with enough drama for everybody's mama, Sunday You Learn How to Box is a
wonderful read. It serves as a critical and much needed reminder of the complex, interior
lives of young black boys who no one expects to make it out of the ghetto and their
struggle to do just that.
M
February 2000 |
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