Sisterhood

Bridgett Davis’ memoir Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy is both a tribute to Davis’ extraordinary older sister Rita, who died of lupus in 2000 at the age of 44, and a chronicle of the systemic racism that likely hastened her death. It is also an attempt to answer the heartbreaking question Davis raises in the prologue: “Why couldn’t I save her? Why didn’t I?”

Davis — who focused on her mother in her earlier memoir, The World According to Fannie Davis — uses memories, letters, and interviews with Rita’s friends to create a vivid portrait of Rita: her resourcefulness, perseverance, elegance, and unflagging care for her loved ones. A test driver, amateur belly dancer, M.B.A. recipient, and special education teacher, Rita was also the first in the family to graduate from college, moving from Detroit to Nashville, the Davis family’s “ancestral home,” to attend Fisk University.

As an adult, Rita’s resilience was challenged by the racism she experienced in the form of a racially motivated firing and a real estate scam that targeted Black homeowners. In each case, Rita fought back and won. No matter what obstacles she faced, she maintained her generosity and kindness. Of her sister’s remarkable ability to connect with people, Davis writes, “It’s what I envied and admired about Rita, in equal doses…. I think because she had a special quality, this way of really seeing someone, never looking through or past him or her, all kinds of people were naturally drawn to Rita.”

The sisters’ relationship was complex, evolving from childhood jealousy to mutual admiration to the powerful bond that developed as they navigated the deaths of their parents and siblings. When their father was hospitalized for hypertension-related heart disease, the family was confident he would get proper care, and that faith persisted when Rita was diagnosed with lupus: “I thought we were lucky to be that kind of Black family, with resources and access,” Davis recalls. However, their father died in the hospital at the age of 51. Rita and Bridgett’s three other siblings and their mother also died prematurely, all of preventable causes.

To explain how theirs became a “family story of tragedy,” Davis supplements her narrative with research on racism’s effects on the health of Black Americans, especially Dr. Arline T. Geronimus’ Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. Davis posits a connection between her loved ones’ deaths and a systemic lack of curiosity and empathy on the part of the medical establishment toward Black patients, especially those with obesity, addiction, or autoimmune disorders assumed to be controllable through lifestyle changes.

Despite the sisters’ closeness, the burden of caring for and burying their relatives fell on Rita, who returned to Detroit while the author moved to New York to begin her career. Davis speculates that unremitting stress and grief hastened the progression of Rita’s lupus. She also reflects with rigorous honesty on the reasons for her infrequent trips to Detroit during Rita’s decline, as well as her willingness to believe Rita when she downplayed her failing health in their frequent letters and phone calls.

In the final section of the memoir, Davis includes the letters she wrote to Rita after her death, which poignantly reveal her own struggles with loss and grief. About a year after Rita’s death, Davis wrote, “It’s so difficult to live without you. I am not who I was one year ago … So begins my new life, beyond your transition: this is it. It’s going to be like nothing else I’ve lived, and something I can’t even imagine.”

In the end, Love, Rita offers not one but many answers to Davis’ question, “Why couldn’t I save her?” This complexity is fitting in a memoir that celebrates an individual’s life while intertwining it with the discriminatory social and economic forces that cut it short. Thanks to Davis’ vivid portrait of her sister’s grace and courage, the reader is left agreeing with the author’s assertion that “Rita’s life mattered, and it keeps mattering.”