Love Story

By Annalyn Swan

LET THE LION EAT STRAW by Ellease Southerland Scribners; 181 pages; $7.95

The most important thing for a black writer, Novelist Toni Morrison once said, is not to explain but to "bear witness, to record." Ellease Southerland's fine first novel bears witness to the world of her fathers and mothers, a world centered on the family, the community, the Lord. Southerland's account is lyrical and as unabashedly emotional as old-time religion. There is, for example, the author's description of a "testimonial" by the Reverend Brother Daniel A. Torch, given one hot August Sunday at Brooklyn's First Baptist Church: "The South's heat soft in the body of his song . . . His voice wide as the sun, filled with pain. Crying for his dead brother."

Let the Lion Eat Straw is the story of Abeba, the "African Flower," who is born in rural North Carolina to an absentee father and a resentful mother. That mother soon disappears, bound for Brooklyn. Abeba's first six years pass happily with old Mamma Habblesham, a midwife, in this land of makeshift and make-believe.

But then Abeba's "New York Mamma" comes to get her. Backwater Carolina fades into Brooklyn blur, the shabby streets a "tangle of evening voices" and of men who act tough, talk fast, sing scat. Here Abeba, nicknamed the "Piano Girl" for the black and shiny spinet that her ambitious mother buys her, grows up to the accompaniment of Mozart and Mendelssohn. "We looking for you to make it big," her street-corner admirers tell her.

In her own way, she does. Abeba endures the death of her stepfather, and rape by her Uncle CJ, and her mother's bitter anger when she gives up Juilliard to marry Daniel Torch. She survives the horrors of a mental hospital as Daniel battles his recurring madness. Abeba's monuments are her 15 children with African names and with African pride, to carry on after she dies from cancer. "Time. Was in Azzisa's hair, thick and soft. In Zaria's bright eyes. Queenly walk. Kwame's drumming . . . Something had been recovered from The Middle Passage. After twenty-five years of birth."

Southerland's ingredients are familiar. But what she makes of them is remarkable. A lecturer at Pace University and a poet, she compresses a lifetime of births and deaths and suffering and love into just 181 pages. Her prose deftly captures the cadences of ghetto speech (by turns garrulous, captious, earth-smart), and her spare imagery avoids all sentimentality. Instead, as its biblical title suggests, Let the Lion Eat Straw is a graceful hymn of love.

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