Glorious
Bernice L. McFadden, 2010
Akashic Books
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781936070114
Summary
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice McFadden’s rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.
Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—NYC Fashion College - Laboratory Institute of
Merchandising; Marymount College, Fordham University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including the classic Sugar, Nowhere Is a Place, (a 2006 Washington Post Best Fiction title), and Gathering of Waters in 2012.
She is a two time Hurston/Wright award fiction finalist as well as the recipient of two fiction honor awards from the BCALA. McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)
More
Bernice L. McFadden was born, raised and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the eldest of four children and the mother of one daughter, R'yane Azsa. Ms. McFadden attended grade school at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn and Middle School at Holy Spirit, also in Brooklyn. She attended high school at St. Cyril Academy an all-girls boarding school in Danville, Pa.
In the Fall of 1983 she enrolled in the noted NYC fashion college: Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, with dreams of becoming an international clothing buyer.
She attended LIM for two semesters and then took a position at Bloomingdale's and later with Itokin, a Japanese owned retail company.
Disillusioned and frustrated with her job, she signed up for a Travel & Tourism course at Marymount College where she received a certificate of completion. After the birth of her daughter in 1988, Bernice McFadden obtained a job with Rockresorts a company then owned by the Rockefeller family.
The company was later sold and Ms. McFadden was laid off and unemployed for one year. She sights that year as the turning point in her life because during those twelve months Ms. McFadden began to dedicate herself to the art of writing. During the next nine years she held three jobs, always looking for something exciting and satisfying. Forever frustrated with corporate America and the requirements they put on their employees, Ms. McFadden enrolled at Fordham University. Her intention was to obtain a degree that would enable her to move up another rung on the corporate ladder.
She signed up for courses that concentrated on Afro-American history and literature, as well as creative writing, poetry and journalism. She credits the two years spent under the guidance of her professors as well as the years spent lost in the words of her favorite author's, to the caliber of writer she has become.
During those years, Ms. McFadden made a conscious effort to write as much as possible and began to send out hundreds of query letters to agents and publisher's attempting to sell one of her short stories or the novel she was working on.
In 1997, Ms. McFadden quit her job and dedicated seven months to re-writing the novel that would become, Sugar. In May of 1998, after depleting her savings, she took her last and final position within corporate America.
On Feb 9th, 1999, her daughter's eleventh birthday (and Alice Walker's birthday—one of Ms. McFadden's favorite author's) she sent a query letter to an agent who signed her two weeks later and the rest is literary history!
Bernice L. McFadden also writes racy, humorous fiction under the pseudonym, Geneva Holliday. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
McFadden's lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth.... [She] has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.
Gregory Beyer - New York Times
McFadden, in her powerful seventh novel, tells the story of Easter Bartlett as she journeys from the violent Jim Crow South to the promise of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. Along the way, Easter forms relationships with both products of McFadden's imagination and actual historical figures: Rain, the sensuous and passionate dancer in Slocum's Traveling Brigade, a troupe that traveled the backwoods “entertaining negroes”; Colin, Easter's husband, who is provoked by a duplicitous friend into assassinating the Universal Negro Improvement Association leader, Marcus Garvey; Meredith, Easter's untrustworthy benefactor; and many more, including poet Langston Hughes, pianist Fats Waller, and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard. McFadden (Sugar) weaves rich historical detail with Easter's struggle to find peace in a racially polarized country, and she brings Harlem to astounding life: “The air up there, up south, up in Harlem, was sticky sweet and peppered with perfume, sweat, sex, curry, salt meat, sautéed chicken livers, and fresh baked breads.” Easter's hope for love to overthrow hate—and her intense exposure to both—cogently stands for America's potential, and McFadden's novel is a triumphant portrayal of the ongoing quest.
Publishers Weekly
After her sister's rape and her mother's death of a broken heart, Easter walked away from Waycross, Georgia, and spent most of the rest of her life trying to walk away from pain and hate..... McFadden interweaves fiction with the historic period of the Harlem Renaissance in this novel about a woman's struggle against hate and disappointment. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Why did the author choose to name the protagonist Easter? How does her name relate to the story?
2. Describe the setting of Glorious. Why might the author have chosen to write about this time period and these places and events?
3. Why do you think Easter continuously chooses to walk away from people, places and situations instead of confronting them head-on?
4. McFadden chooses to incorporate historical figures in a fictional context. Who does she include? Does her portrayal of them match historical accounts?
5. What does the historical narrative of Glorious reveal about contemporary society?
6. The quest for love and acceptance is a key theme of Glorious. How does the author use the cast of characters to highlight the complexity of this quest?
7. The characters in Glorious are from different classes, backgrounds, and ethnic groups but they share may commonalities. What are some of those shared characteristics?
8. What imagery does the author use in the prologue to set the scene? Does this imagery appear again in the story?
9. Why is Easter attracted to Mama Rain and then later, Getty Wisdom? Do the two have common qualities that draw Easter to them? Did her husband Colin Gibbs have any of those same qualities?
10. In Harlem, Easter tells Rain that she was writing to "Keep a grip on life." At the end of the book though, when Easter has given up writing, does this mean that she has also given up on life?
11. The author presents many representations of friendship and relationships. Describe some. Which are most successful? Why do you think these relationships are able to endure?
12. The story begins and ends in Waycross, Georgia. Why did the author choose to close the story in a place that held so many bad memories for Easter? Is there symbolism in this?
13. Does Easter Bartlett obtain justice? What does she sacrifice in the process?
14. Why do you think that the author chose the quotations by T.S. Eliot and Zora Neale Hurston as the novel's epigraphs? What do they signify?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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