Alexis Okeowo has already had a distinguished and productive career. She has a previous book on “extremism in Africa,” pieces in “year’s best” anthologies of travel writing and sports writing and a number of articles written for the “New Yorker.”
Born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, Okeowo is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who came to America separately to study, then met and married and settled in Montgomery where her father is a professor of journalism at Alabama State. As daughter and reporter, Okeowo has visited Alabama many times. This book is a blend of reporting and memoir. Although smoothly written, there are chunks of this book which, for most readers, do not need to be rehearsed. We know most of what we need to know about early statehood, the “Trail of Tears,” The Clotilda, Africatown, or the Selma to Montgomery march, for example.
Okeowo’s important contribution here is in the telling of individual stories, mostly Black but also Native American and Latino Alabamians. As a girl in Montgomery, with Nigerian parents, she found that African-Americans “saw [her] as different, called her ‘African booty-scratcher.’” Her father, as a young student, thought “a lot of African-Americans tend to see Africans as competitors--they think we’re here to take their jobs…opportunities that are set aside for them. They think we’re not really Black.” Of her own childhood, Okeowo writes: “from where I stood, white and black privilege looked like kissing cousins.”
Okeowo writes of the Poarch Creek Indians and their successful struggle to achieve certification as a tribe, and thus operate lucrative casinos, and of the failure of the MOWA Choctaw Indians to do the same, being judged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as not Indian enough. Their applications were opposed by the Poarch Creek tribe, which is now being sued by the Muscogee Nation because they built a casino on holy ground.
There is a moving section in which she reports of a Mexican-American family, undocumented, which has worked hard, followed the rules, risen from back-breaking work harvesting potatoes, peaches, berries to good jobs but now lives in fear.
A subject I thought I had heard the last of was Roy Moore and his scandals and campaigns. Okeowo, however, has come to know Tina, a woman in Gadsden who says that, years ago, she was assaulted by Moore in his office. Tina never told anyone until the 2017 campaign for Senate, when supporters were claiming Moore’s accuser was lying. Tina went to AL.Com with her story. Shortly afterwards, Tina’s house burned down under mysterious circumstances. Life in Alabama is “blessings and disasters,” all right.
Okeowo writes: “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster and it is easier to believe in divine protection than to worry about the things we can’t control, like the tornadoes that strike our state more than almost anywhere else in the country.”
