Title: A Cakewalk to Memphis

Author: Brenda C. Wilson

Genre: Women’s Fiction

 

Set in the segregated South in the late 1950s, A Cakewalk to Memphis unfolds the story of “Big” Sallie Morning, a black cleaner from Memphis, as she searches for her pregnant niece Rebecca’s runaway husband, Tony, desperate that Rebecca does not repeat Sallie’s mistakes with men.

As she follows his trail through seedy nightspots, juke joints, and boarding houses, Sallie’s suspicions are confirmed that Tony is involved in crime. The discovery makes things even more personal for Sallie, forcing her to revisit a past she’s spent two decades trying to escape from.

Chapter One of Wilson’s powerful little noirish novel plunges the reader directly into the pivotal moment of Sallie Morning’s life, twenty years before the main plot. It’s an intense, claustrophobic opening that promises violence and one that Wilson tightly controls.

Pregnant, seventeen-year-old Sallie is hiding in a closet, and Wilson skillfully uses the confinement and Sallie’s heightened sensory awareness to intensify the overall unease and rising fear. Like much of A Cakewalk to Memphis, this first chapter is emotionally visceral and steeped in tension.

Although Chapter Two moves forward to 1958, it is no less immediate. Sallie has arrived in Reform, Alabama, the town she left twenty years earlier to begin her hunt for Tony. A Cakewalk to Memphis is told primarily through Sallie’s close third-person perspective. Wilson filters events and emotions through the woman’s senses and physical reactions, while ensuring the reader is also privy to her intimate thoughts.

Sallie is a single-minded character, her tenacity shaped by hardship and remorse, a life defined by the consequences of loving the wrong men. As she begins looking for Tony, it’s clear from her familiarity with the sleazy lounges, which she tries to suppress along with her memories, that Sallie has a past and not just the one the reader is aware of.

Wilson’s hotly atmospheric Deep South immerses the reader in a sweaty Southern Gothic cauldron of moral decay, physical volatility, and racial danger. Drizzled with meticulous period detail and authenticity, it makes for darkly compelling reading.

The search for Tony parallels Sallie’s experience with first husband, Albert. Wilson also uses it as a trigger for Sallie to reflect upon her life, the narrative flickering back and forth through the decades as Sallie reminisces, her unpretentious, pragmatic voice heavy with regret and weary acceptance.

It’s an engrossing, layered portrayal whose poignancy never loses sight of the woman’s fierce protective instinct for Rebecca. The unspoken subtext between Sallie and her niece is movingly handled and convincing.

However, it’s Wilson’s painfully well-observed depiction of Walter Price, “Bucky,” a complex, haunted man, that holds the reader’s attention, especially as Wilson toys with his trustworthiness while he helps Sallie. Annabelle, Sallie’s old friend, is a tragi-comic, provocative figure who, despite a brutal backstory, becomes a little irksome at times.

As events spiral, Wilson introduces the glamorous blues singer, Diana Dixon, who serves as a metaphor for Sallie’s previous life, and the seductive dangers threatening Rebecca. Wilson ensures Diana’s ending is satisfyingly ironic.

There are a couple of conveniences. The appearance of Sallie’s second husband, Willie, at the Blue Lights nightclub convolutes the action, causing the narrative to briefly lose focus. In places, Wilson overplots a touch, causing her prose to shed some of its beautiful tautness. Additionally, Bucky’s endgame with Tony threatens to tip into absurdity, but it is consistent with Bucky’s unpredictable nature and hidden capabilities.

A Cakewalk to Memphis is soaked in Southern Noir and replete with moments of poetic magic and flashes of emotional brilliance. Wilson has crafted a raw, affecting, and evocative story with absorbing depth and richness.

 

 

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