When It Burned to the Ground

Yolanda Barnes (paper, 216 pages, Sarabande Books, 2005; $14.95)

In her stunning first novel, When It Burned to the Ground, Yolanda Barnes creates a community in which characters are at once palpably real and mythic in their dimensions. As the novel progresses, its characters take precedence—inside the microcosm of Piedmont Street, Barnes allows her characters to become flesh, to reveal themselves through their own voices— and yet they resonate with the profundity of Biblical martyrs and sinners. At all times these are people outside of history, riddled with marvelously human flaws in their actions toward their community. Although the novel’s inspiration comes from the Los Angeles riots of 1992, it defies categorization as historical fiction. Rather, it is Piedmont Street’s story of what happened when it turned on itself. Myriad characters come together to lend their voices and their differing perspectives on life, events, and even each other. In the end, the reader is left with a woman sweeping ashes from her porch: through her we view the destruction each individual in the community helped to cause.

These characters are remarkable both in their diversity and in their seemingly equal distance from the author. Each voice and perspective is so strikingly different from the others that the central wisdom of the book arises from discrepancies among characters’ perspectives. Barnes masterfully withdraws her presence and moral judgment from the novel, so that, as you read, you are forced to grapple with the indeterminacy of right and wrong, of good and evil: ultimately you can only add your own voice to the many.

In a cast of major and minor characters, several stand out as closely linked to the novel’s prophetic vision. We first meet Daniel, the street preacher who is tolerated, yet ignored and misunderstood, by the community as he warns them that their destruction is coming. The last character to appear is Bernadette, ambitious and unconfined, a not-so-humble seamstress who is able to make a success out of whatever she touches. It is Bernadette’s individualism, her will to succeed for herself alone, that incites destruction in the novel. Her foil is Cecile, a good girl just down on her luck, who at her lowest point of powerlessness discovers her own power to destroy. Bernadette’s mother is named Eve: clearly, in Biblical terms, Cecile and Bernadette are the good and bad daughters of Eve—but, not so clearly, which is which?

If there is a character through whom the author’s voice can be heard, it is perhaps Daniel. As a composite of Old Testament prophets, Daniel ignores his calling and runs from the voice of God, but eventually accepts the call to preach. The people of Piedmont Street sometimes love Daniel, sometimes hate him, and often mock him. Despite their strong feelings towards him, people rarely respond to his call. His sermons sing to the street, not in a call for repentance, but as a warning of their impending doom for not heeding the word of God. They are cursed with disease and other torments, and Daniel even prophesies Bernadette’s loss of sight. It is too late for the street to repent for gambling away its children’s grocery money, for harboring evil, and for loving sin more than virtue. But as readers, we can respond to the call of Barnes’ novel by seeing what we have previously refused to see. Bernadette infuriates the community and excites its jealousy. When the people of Piedmont Street reflect upon their own misfortunes, they attribute them either to Bernadette’s inexplicable success or to her disruption of the status quo. She is irreverent, she disregards the unwritten rules of decency and community-minded action, and she is driven by an intangible force that, for a while, makes her immune to the gossip of the community. Her destruction, however, is first foretold in her childhood. “I been keeping a watch on you, Bernadette,” a “crazy” neighbor tells her:

“I know just what you are. When you played with the other children, shouting and tearing up and down the block, I spotted you. The others here don’t know yet. Just me. I see you. You not really one of us. You never mean to be happy with what we have. But we’ll be the ones to suffer for your misdeeds.”

This prophecy sets the tone for Bernadette’s life; she is repeatedly warned about the dangers of ambition and selfishness. Yet when the community seeks, in this alleged “witch,” a scapegoat for its troubles, it is Piedmont Street that suffers most.

In between sections of the novel devoted to major characters come the voices of various members of the community interacting with one another. These are the supporting players in the destruction of Piedmont Street. Cecile fits in here, as her ability to be good crumbles with the harm dealt to her by thieves. She is the first of the characters to retaliate with fire. What we see, eventually, is that such instances of retaliation are never self-contained, independent acts that befall one person; rather, such apparently individual acts are components in a spirit that sweeps Piedmont Street all at once.

Barnes’ range of language and metaphor is brilliant and purposeful. Several metaphors are woven throughout the novel, and the way Barnes adapts each one to the voices of various characters is simply awe inspiring. Chief among them is the bird of paradise, symbolizing among many other things the duality of human nature.

In addition to the diversity and authenticity of her characters’ voices, Barnes is masterful in bringing the incantatory power and cadence of poetry into her prose. The role of song is at the forefront of the novel, at once structuring the entire text and embedded strategically in individual sections. Daniel’s sermon is reminiscent of, although very different from, James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones. What one expects of Daniel’s sermon is an antiphonal structure between him and his listeners, but the people of Piedmont Street find that they cannot respond to his message. And yet the sermon is beautiful in its use of repetition and in its hortatory lyricism:

Yes, the devil wants to claim this place.
He is on his way!
                                                                        Listen.
Right now his is on the march, the march, the march.
He has much ground to cover, but he moves swiftly.
Oh, the devil goosesteps this way.
His face is set in smugness for victory he presumes.
              Listen to me. Oh, for your own sakes,
                                    you must listen.
My Friends and Neighbors!
What will you do when Satan’s army arrives carrying
torches?

With her debut novel, Yolanda Barnes has secured a place for herself among her literary ancestors and contemporaries. When It Burned to the Ground is a marvel in the authenticity and lyricism of its voices, in structure and theme. Moreover, the novel tells a story that grips us, and does not let go, from its first words to its last: the reader feels its power long after the last word has been read.

Reviewed by Erin Huskey

Erin Huskey is a fourth-year PhD candidate in literature at Western Michigan
University and this issue’s creative nonfiction editor.