Two Strong Women

Nancy Johnson’s second novel, People of Means, like her debut, The Kindest Lie, juggles two narrative voices beautifully to tell the story of two strong women called to action in ways that threaten to upend all of the successes — personal and professional — they worked so hard to achieve. The novel is a story of contrasts: of class and culture, of mothers and daughters, but also of buried secrets and real consequences as the women navigate the tumultuous waters of societal change.

In the fall of 1959, Chicago-born Freda Gilroy is a new student on the campus of Fisk University where she plans to study mathematics and follow in the footsteps of her mother and father, both Fisk alumni. “You will be fine, baby girl,” her father tells her the night before she leaves for Nashville. “You are part of a great tradition of excellence. A Negro Aristocracy.” Freda is also part of a generation of women who were made to “practice becoming ladies” through etiquette classes and a strict code of conduct imposed by society and adhered to by their families, especially those — like Freda’s — with social standing in the community. Newly transplanted to the Jim Crow South, Freda must learn to navigate the many conflicting rules that govern her existence as a woman, a college student, and a member of the Black community.

Three decades later, Freda’s daughter Tulip embarks on a career as a public relations professional in 1992 Chicago, ambitious and eager to prove herself to her mostly white colleagues, while also experiencing the first stirrings of political consciousness in the wake of the Rodney King trial. As her heart pulls her toward helping the Black community on the city’s South Side, she makes a professional decision that could jeopardize all her hard work — and which also unexpectedly sheds light on her mother’s past, challenging everything she thought she knew about her. In a skillful blending of the two women’s stories, Johnson illuminates their struggles in both the evolving fight for racial equality and in their personal ambitions.

As in The Kindest Lie, which took place during the beginning of the Obama era, Johnson creates textured, complicated characters whose lives are set against a historical background that centers the Black American experience. When Freda ventures off campus one day to buy a pair of stockings, she comes face-to-face with Civil Rights Movement as she stumbles upon a sit-in at the downtown Nashville five-and-dime McLellan’s. There she recognizes Darius Moore, a sophomore philosophy major at Fisk whom she had met on campus one day when she heard him playing the saxophone inside the chapel. Their meeting sparks something in her she will not identify until later, something that draws her away from the staid, safe world of numbers and family expectations and toward an exciting world of social activism. Darius is a leader in the fight for civil rights, and he is there that day alongside none other than the great John Lewis. The pivotal moments and real people Johnson sprinkles into her narrative make the novel a delight to read.

In Chicago, Tulip learns to traverse life as a career-minded young woman who wants to be affirmed by her boss and meet her parents’ high expectations. Inevitably, she follows her heart and is pulled in the direction of a young man named Key who doesn’t fit the idea her parents have for her future mate. Tulip’s father Gerald, a “Meharry man” and a doctor, reminds Tulip of her background at every opportunity, the idea of “Black excellence” never far from mind. Key is a bus driver and helps in his family’s hair supply store. After the police officers who beat Rodney King are acquitted, Tulip learns of a plan to protest police brutality and racial inequality, and she decides to get involved. Key doesn’t share her passion. “I refuse to be quiet as much as my parents or you may want me to,” she says. “I’m sick and tired of playing it safe.”

Johnson’s novel is a powerful meditation on love, family, the weight of legacy, and resilience in the face of social change. It is written with the author’s own insightful commentary on racism and resistance across decades and what it means to discover one’s own meaning of justice. A timeless and timely novel for Americans right now.