Book Review: Redwood Court by DéLana R.A. Dameron
By Simon Demetriou
I’ve remarked before that getting hold of a poet’s debut novel is a pretty safe bet that you’ll have something good to read, and DéLana R.A. Dameron’s addition to this subset of my personal library does nothing to prove me wrong. In Redwood Court, Dameron weaves together a story that is all about connection and all about the everyday in which those connections that really matter are formed.
The book’s focus on interconnectedness starts before the story begins, since Dameron includes a character list, in which every main character is described relative to two planes of connection: how they link to ‘matriarch’ and ‘patriarch’ Weesie and Teeta Mosby; and how they link to Redwood Court, the housing development in Columbia, SC, that Weesie and Teeta have called home since the early days of their marriage.
The voice of the novel is Mika, Weesie and Teeta’s granddaughter, but the novel’s soul of Teeta, so it is fitting that the book opens with Mika reporting Teeta’s words in the face of Mika’s homework assignment to construct a family tree and procure an artefact that ties back to her origins. Teeta’s assertions that ‘it’s not a matter of blood relations so much as a matter of who brought up who? Who protected who? Who survived with who?’, that ‘waving somebody else’s flag ain’t gone give me more purpose than the one I waved in the wars I fought’, and that Mika has ‘all these stories inside you – that’s what we have to pass on’ set the emotional and ideological touchstones for the rest of the novel.
Whether it’s Weesie’s passions for gossip and for supporting those in the Redwood Court community, or Major – Mika’s father – realising that ‘Mr Mosby [Teeta] had called me “son” for more years than my own father was in my life”, the love binding family and community together is consistently moving in Dameron’s tenderly understated writing. Of course, this love matters more for the fact that Redwood Court was designed as an all-black subdivision, and every one of Dameron’s characters lives with the micro-aggressions (and straight-up aggressions) that permeate their lives in America. When a distant cousin asks of Redwood Court, ‘Is it our corner of the world or a ghetto that white folks want to corral us into like them concentration camps?’, we’re forced to reckon with the deeper question of whether finding joy in what you’re allowed in a system that is built to contain and oppress you, makes you part of the problem. The question is never answered, but it lingers as we refocus on the sheer necessity of the joy that connection brings, no matter the cost or context, is a powerful literary achievement.