(reviewed by Ann Onymous )
“We are bridges made of blood and water, soil and skin.”
Yes, we are bridges: connecting our present to our past and to our future. Cassandra Lane’s great-grandfather was named Burt Bridges. He was lynched in Mississippi in 1904. This event permanently imposed its imprint on Cassandra’s psyche and all the family across the years.
“I am learning that no matter how much you want to divorce yourself from your past – or from one of your parents – both are intrinsically part and parcel of you for the rest of your life.”
“I linked our ancestor’s aborted promises to my own, a kind of quantum entanglement. Iattempted to erase the distance between us, the years, the laws of physics and of man – just papery things really. I’d seen my share of time travel flicks, and it seemed plausible. Scientists say we are not matter but energy. A sheet of paper turns out to be a magic carpet after all, so I hop on, riding it’s electric waves through time.”
The author states that “This story is a hybrid – a romance and a horror, a memoir and a fiction – forged out of what is known and what is unknown.” What I can say is that it is a loving story, and I appreciate the soft progression across the ages. The author takes us back and forth in time, as gently as water flowing downstream, as we travel over a hundred years. I was expecting this to be a contemporary “story of me” book. I should not have been surprised because life doesn’t begin with just “us”. We all have roots. Ms. Lane takes us through the life of her grandfather, who was born after his father had been murdered. Her great grandmother raised her son with the story of his father’s death prevalent every day. The family name became “Buckley” but it started as “Bridges”. The bridges that cross through these lives are sturdy and strong, like Grandpa Burt was.
We have to know our roots, to know where we come from to understand who we are. This well-crafted book is Ms. Lane’s journey of discovery. This work is a love story to the elders. This history is bringing them to life, keeping them alive, letting them live on. They are not forgotten. They are living, breathing people who count. These lives matter. Addressing past accounts of the Klan and the Jim Crow South, Ms. Lane weaves in the contemporary challenges of today.
Ms. Lane bears witness to the murder of George Floyd and needing to have ‘the talk’ with our children. This memoir is a labor of love for the family. She takes us through her childhood to her own labor and delivery of her son in 2007. This is during which she finds herself “stuck in the middle of a bridge that felt impossible to cross.”
This memoir has us all in the middle of the bridge, looking back a century and wanting to cross over to the future, let’s not stop in 2007 or even 2021. Let’s keep pushing forward.
*** In 2020, Cassandra Lane’s debut work won the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize***
