Four Spirits

parts of this were wonderful and i so appreciate how she was moved to write about this. it's a little hard to come to this more than 20 years later and be critical by today's standards (that this is a story much better told by people of color - she does acknowledge this in her afterword) but honestly would it have been published, even 20 years ago, by a writer of color? but i digress. i'm not sure the voices of the characters of color are what they should be, but i also know she did her level best to depict people as authentically as possible. i just prefer to read stories like this from the people who are tied to it; a luxury that we often actually have now that we didn't 20 years ago. as a white person myself, i think this is the kind show more of book i'd want to write, so i can't fault her for doing that. it just makes me uncomfortable these days.

about the book itself - this was much longer than i felt it needed to be. whole swaths could have been eliminated and i probably didn't pay nearly as much attention to as i meant to. but parts of this were also beautifully written and so well thought out.it was a hard mix of both lovely and a slog at times. and it had a more "controversial" or nuanced take on martin luther king than i'd read before, which was interesting. show less

Stella Silver, at five years old, stands with a gun in her hand. Her father, over her shoulder, teaches her how to pull the trigger. He wants her to know "what happens to a bullet fired" (p 4). Welcome to Four Spirits. Sena Jeter Naslund sets out to tell the story of a group of ordinary people trying to live their lives in the deep south during one of the most tumultuous times in our country's history, the early 1960s. Amid the pages of Four Spirits you will meet civil rights activists, racists, musicians, students, families. You will watch relationships fall apart while others thrive. Sacrifices made, lives taken, hope clung to, and most importantly, resilience take root. There is power in courage as the characters of Four Spirits will show more show you. Five year old Stella grows up to be a passionate intelligent young woman whose world is rocked when President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Texas. But, she is just one character in a host of others who will break your heart. Amidst the turmoil and violence, people went about doing ordinary things, trying to live ordinary lives.
This is a tough book to read. For me, the domestic violence between Ryder and his wife was the hardest to take in, but be warned, his violence as a Ku Klux Klan member is far worse. The Klan is one of those realities of Birmingham, Alabama; their existence is something you wish you could pretend was not part of the historical fabric of our nation, but there they are.
As an aside, it gave me great joy that Ryder was afraid of Dracula. show less

Four Spirits is dedicated to the four little girls who were killed in a church bombing on September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley's memories are a constant sorrow and motivation for all of the characters in this novel by the beautiful writer Sena Jeter Naslund, who grew up in Birmingham and promised herself, at the time, that she would one day write about the scary and sad events that engulfed Birmingham during the 1960s.

We meet a variety of people from Birmingham's black community up close, as well as a few white students, a Klan member and his abused spouse, and a young man from New York who has come to the South to help people register to vote. Naslund is a show more painterly writer; she has the ability to make her audience feel for her characters and mourn or celebrate their fates.

Since I don't remember the events of 1963-65, this book was a bit of an education for me. For one thing, I didn't realize just how many people in the South were actually gleeful about the news of President Kennedy's assassination. It was shocking for me to read that there were people in Birmingham that were not ashamed of being glad that someone was dead--and not just in private, but openly.

Everything that went on--The KKK's violent attacks that were ignored by police, the segregation, the random bombings, the various tactics of keeping black people from voting, and the poor employment choices for minorities all came together to create hell on earth. This city earned the nickname Bombingham.

Part of this novel involves a night school for people who need to study for their GED test, and it welcomes everyone, even though all the students are black. However, one day, the two main white characters, Stella and Cat, have decided to help out as teachers there. They have both just graduated from college, and have been brought up in homes where bigotry did not exist. Along the way, Stella and Cat face their own challenges; Stella has some lack of freedom that came with being a young woman (I didn't know a single woman couldn't get birth control pills without telling your doctor when the wedding was), and Cat is physically handicapped in a world when it was okay not to hire someone for that reason. The other teachers at the school are black, and thus they are--integrated. Gloria, Christine, Arcola, Stella, and Cat. It's a very small night school, they aren't even funded, yet they face harassment and bomb threats. It's hard to imagine the level of hatred, and why a few people couldn't even congregate in a hot room on a summer night without any books. And even if every one of them were to get his GED, it's not like good jobs would suddenly be open to them. The spirit and motivation behind teaching and learning in this kind of environment was incredible.

Part of the motivation is the hope that one's children will live in a better world. And of course one's parents are everything, they set the example in both good and bad ways. Christine desperately wanted her children to better themselves, to be kind to everyone, to take care of themselves, and to be respected in the community. The flip side was Ryder, the Klansman, the uneducated bigot and wife-abuser. The Klan was depicted as a familial thing--how sad, to be brought up in the tradition of dressing like a white cone head and maiming and killing innocent people.
The theme of the book is hope. In the end, we hope that the people who survived these days can look back and say that everything they did was worth it, that the friends and family they lost did not die in vain. I decided to pick up this book because of its author; Sena Jeter Naslund wrote Ahab's Wife, a book I consider to be one of my favorites of all time. And, for those who read that earlier novel, there is a nod to it, around page 142, where we learn that Gloria is a great-great granddaughter of a certain escaped slave named Susan. This novel is another example of Naslund's talent, and I would recommend it to anyone. show less

Sena Jeter Naslund knows how to craft a very beautiful sentence. There is a cadence to the words she puts together that can be no accident. And though Four Spirits suffers from being the follow-up to Naslund's brilliant Ahab's Wife, it is this beautiful rhythm coupled with her heart for the subject that provide this novel with its strongest qualities.

What harms Four Spirits most, I believe, is the author's attempt to present so many perspectives. It works, but it doesn't necessarily add to the story. It's like adding all kinds of gears and levers and such to a machine that works great without them. Naslund does a masterful job writing from the viewpoint of so many characters, but their stories add nothing to little to the story.

Powerful book, set in Birmingham in the racial-torn 60's. The story is told from several points of view, including white students from Birmingham Southern College, liberal in their hearts but with no real understanding about how to make changes in their lives; black women determined to make a stand, as well as some just as willing to sit by quietly. The violence is told matter-of-factly, which makes it even more horrifying. The "Four Spirits" are the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and they serve as a thematic element in the story as their spirits appear and reappear at different time. As a Birmingham native, I can attest that Naslund sets an excellent and accurate sense of place. I can't say that it was show more really an enjoyable book, but one that put my mind and my heart to work. show less

This is a novel of The Civil Rights Movement. In particular, it deals with the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four little girls, and the effect this had on many people, especially the main character, Stella Silver. Stella Silver is a young, white college student for whom the bombing created a conflict between the compulsion to act on her conscience and concern for her personal safety and the safety of her friends.

The stories of so many others tie in as well. Naslund does an outstanding job of fully embodying each character, so that no character seems just a one-dimensional sillhouette, trivial, or unimportant to the whole of the story.

I wouldn't list this book among my favorites, but I am glad I read it.

Very contextually rich, especially for someone with little civil rights history in my background. However, I found the sheer number of characters overwhelming and slightly unnecessary. Plus the writing style is often heavy handed. This book could have been magnificent. Instead, I found it readable.