Fate had brought Hattie out of Georgia to bear eleven children and keep them alive in the North, but she herself was only a child, profoundly inadequate to the task she had been given

.
She is a Black woman; she left a land of segregation only to find herself in a degraded, impoverished, solitary, and marginalized urban periphery, yet she is determined not to return to the South and to raise her children against all odds, beyond her own strength, beyond her very capacity to love.
The story begins in 1928, when sixteen-year-old Hattie has just given birth to twins.
The cold, malnutrition, and the lack of medical care and medicine lead to the infants' deaths.

Oh, their skin was so soft! She felt their death like a mutilation in her own body

: a wound that leaves her like

a lake of ice, thin and smooth, beneath which nothing could be seen or known

a long January afternoon, the trees are always bare and there is not a single flower

.
Had Hattie been capable of loving more, of worrying less about keeping her children alive, would their lives have been better? The novel revolves around this question, and the author explores it with great skill by recounting episodes from the lives of the eleven children over a span of fifty years, up to 1980.
After the dramatic episode of the twins' death, the narrative continues: Floyd, the eldest son, discovers his homosexuality; Six, another son, severely burned as a boy, finds his calling as a preacher in a Protestant church, but reveals himself to be a false and hypocritical man.
The narrative then returns to Hattie to tell us about the only daughter born out of wedlock, the fruit of a brief and unhappy love affair, and about Ella, whom Hattie decides to give away to a sister in order to offer her a better future than that of her siblings.
In the subsequent chapters, Alice's existential void takes center stage: she has married well and lives in an affluent home, but is condemned to a fragile survival due to her separation from Billups, the brother to whom she is deeply attached.
Franklin, another son, has been abandoned by his wife and in some way courts death in Vietnam.
With the final episodes, narrative tension mounts.
Another daughter, Bell, has severed ties with Hattie ever since the latter discovered she had slept with an old lover of hers; yet Bell did so because as a child she had seen her mother with that man and she was so

beautiful and happy that an afternoon full of light was pale by comparison

(...) whereas Hattie had always been stern and angry with Bell

.
Only in the hospital bed, where Bell is admitted with tuberculosis, do mother and daughter find each other again, but even in this circumstance,

Hattie had that same stern expression, in which Bell saw tenderness, Hattie's tenderness, which was always harsh

.
Finally, we witness the madness of the youngest daughter, Cassie.
Hattie and her husband, now elderly and frail, are forced to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital.
As they take her away, Hattie sees in the rearview mirror her granddaughter, Cassie's daughter, running after the car, calling out and trying to stop them.

She knew Cassie would not have wanted to be seen by her daughter at her worst.
This was Hattie's kindness.
With sorrow she parted daughter from granddaughter."

The lives of Hattie's children are all in pieces, shattered because they never received that maternal love they so desperately needed.
On the other hand, the amount of love a parent can give is finite; in Hattie's case, her social circumstances were far too wretched to leave her with any energy to devote to her children, beyond what was spent keeping them alive and preventing them from dying as the twins did.
Too much suffering can only be endured by steeling oneself, by becoming hard and strong! The novel carries a powerful social dimension, yet it assumes a universal significance that transcends the specific plight of African Americans.
The author addresses parent-child relationships, the difficulty parents face in understanding that material well-being is not enough, that there is something more that must be given: attention and affection.
The failing of Hattie's tribe—and of children in general—is the inability to appreciate parental devotion, the tenderness and love that parents so often cannot or do not know how to express.

The book is exceptionally well-written, with a gripping narrative pace and remarkably well-drawn characters.
In her fateful misery, Hattie is a figure out of Greek tragedy, an African American Medea, harsh yet protective, difficult to forget.
The author acknowledges her debt to Toni Morrison, yet Mathis's style is more straightforward than that of the great African American writer, just as her characters are more firmly anchored in their specific social condition.
The novel displays a lucid narrative realism, a rich yet non-idiomatic vocabulary, and a classical, almost textbook syntax.

Why read it? Dramatic, deeply compelling..

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie