A nine-year-old girl wakes up on the morning she is to leave her mother’s New Orleans home. Sandrine Miller will spend the summer with her father, and she will visit her grandmother, who she adores most of all, who lets her bring the collard greens in from the garden, teaches her to make jam, takes her to the library for more of the books she loves. Sandrine can already feel the strength in her grandmother’s fingers working cornrows into her hair. Even so, anxiety dilutes Sandrine’s excitement: will her mother discover her? She is standing on a stool, wiping down the tops of the kitchen cabinets, early, before her mother (Sandrine hopes) is awake, righting an oversight, that, if caught, would be considered a grave one. Will her mother keep Sandrine in New Orleans as punishment?

“I stopped in the doorway, my clothes for the drive still on the floor where they had fallen off when Mama picked up the suitcases; I tucked the clothes under my arm. ‘You keep your mouth shut. He asks you about me or this house you just say ‘fine,’ hear me?’ When I left, she was muttering, ‘He don’t want to live with me, he don’t get to know what goes on in my goddamn house…’” (Pg. 3)

So begins Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow, Dedra Johnson's impeccable first novel, hopeful and hurtful by turns, where reader and narrator walk together along a path of prose that wends its way through Sandrine’s troubling childhood.

Through Sandrine we encounter the quandaries of adult authority, explore the specter of loneliness, and observe unusual resilience in the face of trouble, all of which compels us to examine questions of responsibility: of adults to children, of children to themselves, of readers to the characters they learn to love.

“Mama cooked breakfast every morning before work and I ate just enough to stop the pains in my stomach. Soon I’d be eating biscuits and grits and hard-rind bacon and homemade jelly every morning for the rest of my life. In church on Sunday I stood, kneeled, said words without thinking about them until it was time to go home and even though I usually couldn’t wait for Lent each year because once a week our class did the Stations of the Cross and I could look at the stained-glass windows showing the Mysteries up close, the paper-white Jesus, the drops of blood, Mary’s face turned up to heaven, begging God to save her son just for her, no other reason, just because she loved Him and wanted Him, I didn’t even glance at the windows and didn’t care about any of it. (Pgs. 67 – 68)”

We come to know Sandrine as we know the interior angles of our own assumptions. Yet we also know her as we know the child who sits beside our son at school, the girl we see, day in and day out, at the library, the one we caught once out on the sidewalk admonishing her sister. Dedra Johnson has affected a difficult, disconcerting, yet delicious writerly effect: the unreliable narrator. Sandrine tells us what’s happening, accurately renders her encounters, but does so in a voice that reflects a child’s vision of the world. It is us, Dedra Johnson’s readers, who recognize another layer of meaning; we know Sandrine’s challenges should not be hers to face alone. Thus we are bound to her, and to each other, by our concern: Will anyone step in? Are we the one’s who must do our best to help?

It is in this way we recognize the power of fiction—that it compels us to care for those who are, in fact, imagined, that it shows us the most difficult things and makes it possible to look. Fiction is a window through which we view the experience of others, those whose lives may be different from our own, but who we are drawn to through the fact of our mutual humanity. It is this gift that Dedra Johnson gives her readers: a character that elicits our compassion, who reminds us that that the power for change lies in what draws us beyond the borders of the self.

Carlin M. Wragg, Editor
Open Loop Press

I had been having trouble with William Gibson's latest one for weeks, only managing a couple of pages a night before falling asleep. I finally gave up and grabbed the next thing on my pile, one I'd been looking forward to: Dedra Johnson's "Sandrine's Letter To Tomorrow".

I could have read this in one sitting. I had to force myself to put it down at 2am the first night because I had work the next morning, but I read it some more at lunch and finished it the next night. It was like a punch in the stomach to me, the first night my heart was racing, and I'm still not completely over it days later. Others might react differently but if you or a loved one have lived through similar circumstances as Sandrine, it will be an emotional experience to read this that you won't soon forget.

Sandrine is a bookish light-skinned black girl growing up in New Orleans in the 1970's, being handed off between parents and stepparents with varying degrees of parental involvement. It's moving and it's shocking and it's sweet and it's brave, sometimes all at the same time.

This is brilliant and I want more like it. ( )

This book takes place over the course of a year or so; and is a harsh, uncompromising view of growing up in New Orleans as a light-skinned black girl, not accepted by her family or her peers, harassed by men on the street, and unwanted, abused, and lied to by her mother and her mother's family. Sandrine is a bright and motivated child, but there's little she can do to please her mother or earn her love - she apparently only notices Sandrine to criticise her and put her to work, and Sandrine learns early that if she wants to remain safe on the streets of 1970's New Orleans, she has to devise ways to defend herself. Her life is anything but ideal.

Her only refuge is summers with her father's mother, Mamalita; but these are abruptly taken from her when one summer her father remarries, and instead of going to spend the summer with her father and Mamalita, she ends up slaving for her new stepmother and watching out for her younger stepsister, Yolanda. What nobody bothers to tell her, including her distant doctor father, is that Mamalita is sick, and in no shape to have her visit - although given how self-sufficient Sandrine is, if anybody had bothered to mention this to either Sandrine or her Mamalita, I suspect that would have been no barrier to visiting. We learn why Sandrine's lost her only refuge when she does - long after she's given up hope and run away back to New Orleans for the remainder of the summer - when Mamalita dies. Then to make matters worse, her new stepmother sends her new stepsister Yolanda to New Orleans on the bus; and it's obvious very quickly that Sandrine's mother prefers the far-more-disobedient Yolanda to her own daughter. Now Sandrine's left with a bleak existence; left to care for Yolanda, who despite being only a year younger is far less self-sufficient; and with no hope of a way out any more. Unsurprisingly, she starts to rebel.

This is a beautifully written book, but emotionally draining. The setting is a very bleak one; her one friend suffers a fate that could easily have been Sandrine's own, but effectively abandons Sandrine to her own devices in the process. Sandrine however maintains a core of courage and strength through a litany of horrible situations and dawning revelations about herself, her mother, and her life, peaking when she realises that, if she wants to get out of her situation and of New Orleans, then she's just going to have to do it herself.

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is enthralling, and despite the horrific events, manages to impart some good lessons: decide for yourself what you are worth; rely on yourself, but don't lock yourself away from trusting other people; the world can be what you make of it.

It's also one of the most disturbingly racist books I've read in years. Many of Sandrine's problems stem from the fact that she is black, but could 'pass' for white if she chose to - and that everyone (including her mother) then assumes she chooses to, when in fact all she wants is to be allowed to be who and what she is and not be ostracised for it. This part is explicit in the text. More subtle, and therefore more disturbing, is an underlying 'white people are bad' theme, which Sandrine herself - despite mentioning that all she knows of white people is what she's seen on a television she's rarely allowed to watch - subscribes to. One wonders how, with such an attitude so prevalent and unnoticed, our world will ever cease to judge people by the colour of their skin. ( )