Grab the Lapels

The Between by Tananarive Due

In this surprising 1995 novel, an early work by Tananarive Due, we meet Hilton, a boy living in Florida raised by his grandmother. One afternoon, he comes home to find her on the floor, and her body is cold. He goes screaming for a neighbor, but when the pair return, grandma is standing there, cooking lunch. Had she only fainted? Was Hilton mistaken? He begins to distrust his grandmother. Later, at a beach party, Hilton is caught in a rip current, and it is his grandmother who saves his life, handing the boy into a fellow rescuer’s arms, before then she is swept away. Hilton is adopted and raised by a couple attending the beach party.

Such a cool cover; you flip it upside down for the other face.

As an adult, Hilton works at a drug rehab center that helps people find housing, quit drugs, and protect themselves from HIV/AIDS. It’s a sad job that involves a lot of failure and people not making it, such as many social work jobs are, but there are successes, too. Some of Hilton’s joy comes from his wife, Dede, and their two children. Author Due takes us back to show us that Hilton’s long hours made Dede think he was cheating, so they attending couple’s therapy. There, Hilton announces he thinks he caused his grandma to die because he wasn’t supposed to swim so far out. From there, Dede has more empathy, and Hilton sees a therapist alone, largely to address his persistent, incessant nightmares. It works.

However, we fast forward five years to Hilton today, and something has triggered the nightmares again. He cannot sleep for fear of the grabbing hands and ominous warnings. In addition, Dede is voted in as a judge in Miami-Dade county, the first Black woman in the county, and that’s when the hate mail begins. The threats are too specific to be someone “just” letting lose anger. Suddenly, Hilton’s lack of sleep and threats on his family send him into a place where he can’t tell what is real and what isn’t. Wasn’t his friend wearing a baseball hat? Did his son just feed the pet bird twice? Hadn’t he already signed the papers from the doctor at work? Each time, readers are swept into what Hilton thinks is real, until someone tells him it wasn’t. Was it? It’s when Hilton is told by an unlikely source that he’s living in “the between” that he develops an alternate theory to sleep deprivation and stress.

This was my first Due novel, and I loved how the author incorporated African traditions, Black American traditions, tense moments, and racism into the story without it being a story about race. The characters appear to shape themselves naturally instead of an agenda shaping the characters. You can tell who on the page is Black, white, or Hispanic just by how Due creates her characters, the way they speak, and the foods and customs they care about. Also, the plot is intriguing. I read this with a book club, and folks agreed: every time Hilton thought something happened and didn’t, we were drawn in. “It never got old,” one book clubber said. What is really happening to Hilton? And will the vile person threatening the family be captured before someone is killed, again? The Between is an excellent novel and a great place to start if you’ve never read Due.

24 comments

  1. I probably won’t read this book just because I have so many books I really want to read. However you have really intrigued me with your write up. It sounds like a really clever book and I do like books that unsettle us. What do you think was her main driver here? Or, did I miss this)

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    • I think it’s really about what happens if we avoid death. What could happen if we continued to live those years that would be lost otherwise. Who would not exist if we died, etc. Then, on the flip side, should we be allowed to go on living past when she should have died, and what are the repercussions. That’s where the haunting dreams come in.

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  3. This must have been fun to discuss in a book group! James has read a number of Due novels, though I don’t know which ones. I’ve not gotten around to any. Maybe one of these days.

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      • James is so much a book person. When we got married we joked that it was actually a marriage of libraries 😀 He managed a Barnes and Noble for 10 years back in their hay day and now he works for a local indie bookstore doing business to business sales. We sometimes read the same thing but not very often, though there are a good many books we have both read at some point in our lives. We do read aloud to each other, mostly poetry, but currently he is reading the Discworld books aloud two times a week while I do my weight/strength workouts. We are doing all of the witch books and are currently almost done with Wintersmith, the third Tiffany Aching book. 🙂

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  4. Sounds interesting, although I gather that the between is alternate reality, rather than something that brings folks back to life (like the grandmother).

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    • She’s really popular right now, and I see she’s also gotten into comic books. I noticed that a lot of popular Black authors are getting involved in Black comic books. I wonder if there was a meeting.

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    • I haven’t seen much of it in fiction, but it’s common in movies. For instance, you’ll notice everyone is on dry land but one character’s hair is floating a bit like they are underwater. In fiction, I now appreciate how tricky it can be without just saying, “oh, by the way, he was dreaming.”

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  8. I’ve never even heard of this author, but it sounds great. I like how it incorporates the struggles of the characters (like racism) but doesn’t make the book ABOUT those struggles. It feels like such a one-dimensional way of presenting BIPOC characters when the entire book is about racism, we only get one piece of their personality, and we miss out on seeing them as a whole person. Plus, I like the sound of this one being a sort of thriller too!

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    • Absolutely, yes, to books about racism. It’s really hard to explain this concept without sounding like I don’t want to read books about racism. I read lots of books about racism. There is just something changing in which fiction often seems like a vehicle for a message in recent years versus books in which the story was tops and it showed us a life that we then analyzed for ourselves. Take for example Kindred by Octavia Butler. A Black woman from the 1970s is accidentally sent back to slavery times where she happens upon a white boy drowning. She saves his life using CPR, and it’s a good thing, because that’s her ancestor. Unfortunately, they’re related because he’s raping his slaves. Save him and save her whole family, or let him die and prevent him from sexual assaulting her foremothers.

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