River Mumma

by Zalika Reid-Benta

Genres: African American; Coming of Age; Magical Realism

Synopsis

"Wholly original, remarkably crafted, and unmatched in voice, atmosphere, and action, River Mumma should be on every must-read list this season. I loved this book!”—Cherie Dimaline, bestselling author of VenCo and Empire of Wild

Issa Rae's Insecure with a magical realist spin: River Mumma is an exhilarating contemporary fantasy novel about a young Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a mythical quest through the streets of Toronto.

Alicia has been out of grad school for months. She has no career prospects and lives with her mom, who won’t stop texting her macabre news stories and reminders to pick up items from the grocery store.

Then, one evening, the Jamaican water deity, River Mumma, appears to Alicia, telling her that she has twenty-four hours to scour the city for her missing comb.

Alicia doesn’t understand why River Mumma would choose her. She can’t remember all the legends her relatives told her, unlike her retail co-worker Heaven, who can reel off Jamaican folklore by heart. She doesn’t know if her childhood visions have returned, or why she feels a strange connection to her other co-worker Mars. But when the trio are chased down by malevolent spirits called duppies, they realize their tenuous bonds to each other may be their only lifelines. With the clock ticking, Alicia’s quest through the city broadens into a journey through time—to find herself and what the river carries.

River Mumma is a powerful portrayal of diasporic identities and a vital examination into ancestral ties. It is a homage to Jamaican storytelling by one of the most invigorating voices in Canadian literature.

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

RIVER

MUMMA

“Wholly original, remarkably crafted, and unmatched in voice, atmosphere, and action, River Mumma should be on every must-read list this season.”

—Cherie Dimaline, bestselling author of VenCo

“River Mumma is a love letter to culture, home, and coming of age—and will spark important, relevant book club conversations, too. What a ride! I loved every moment.” 

—Marissa Stapley, New York Times–bestselling author of Lucky

“Zalika Reid-Benta does magical realism right—with delicious storytelling and characters both relatable and compelling, plus the best parts of Toronto on display. . . . this novel has it all. I enjoyed every page!”

—Uzma Jalaluddin, bestselling author of Much Ado About Nada and Hana Khan Carries On

“[River Mumma] paints a nostalgic image of a Toronto where communities create homes, all while specifically honouring Caribbean wit and magic and joy.”

— Téa Mutonji, award-winning author of Shut Up You’re Pretty

“A page-turner of a novel that is both funny and poignant, River Mumma magically and seamlessly weaves Jamaican folklore and myth with the winter landscape of Toronto to create a compelling fictional landscape.”

—Shyam Selvadurai, author of Mansions of the Moon

“River Mumma is a necessary book about race, gender, ancestry, colonialism, eco-existentialism, and desire. I’ve not read anything like it!”

—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

“Zalika Reid-Benta is a mesmerizing and generous storyteller. I loved this book!”

—Lauren Tamaki, illustrator of Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration

“Luminescent! Where liminality lurks in the crevices of dreams, love, friendship—and water, Zalika Reid-Benta delivers us a layered story that is both urgent and satisfying. River Mumma is a vivid, poetic exploration of identity and all the delicate pieces in between.”

—Chelene Knight, author of the Carol Shields Prize–longlisted novel Junie

EREWHON BOOKS are published by:

Kensington Publishing Corp.119 West 40th StreetNew York, NY 10018

www.erewhonbooks.com

Copyright © 2023 by Zalika Reid-Benta

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fundraising, educational, or institutional use.

Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington sales manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018, attn: Sales Department; phone [phone].

Erewhon and the Erewhon logo Reg. US Pat. & TM Off.

“The River Mumma Wants Out” from Controlling the Silver. Copyright 2005 Lorna Goodison. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN 978-1-64566-135-1 (hardcover)

First Erewhon hardcover printing: March 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request.

Electronic edition: ISBN 978-1-64566-137-5 (ebook)

Edited by Deborah Sun De La Cruz and Diana M. Pho Cover design by Samira Iravani, images courtesy of ShutterstockAuthor photo by Rogene ReidInterior design by Cassandra Farrin Chapter artwork by Rebecca Farrin

To the Afro-Caribbean girls,

the Toronto Black girls.

To the children of the diaspora,

and to those who came before us.

The River Mumma Wants Out

You can’t hear? Everything here is changing.

The bullrushes on the river banks now want

to be palms in the King’s garden. (What king?)

The river is ostriching into the sand.

Is that not obvious? the nurse souls ask.

You can’t take a hint? You can’t read a sign?

Mumma no longer wants to be guardian

of our waters. She want to be Big Mumma,

dancehall queen of the greater Caribbean.

She no longer wants to dispense clean water

to baptize and cleanse (at least not gratis).

She does not give a damn about polluted

Kingston Harbour. She must expose her fish

torso, rock the dance fans, go on tour overseas,

go clubbing with P. Diddy, experience snow,

shop in those underground multiplex malls,

spending her strong dollars. Go away, she will

not be seeing you, for you have no insurance.

—Lorna Goodison

1.

Alicia sat on a couch, watching people laugh and drink and talk in the living room, and wondered if she’d always hated parties. The fireplace boasted a real fire, thawing the winter frost that seeped in through the bay window, and the ska coming from the phone on the mantelpiece wasn’t too loud, keeping the mood mellow but festive. The space was homey, with patterned wallpaper and woollen rugs. Everyone was clustered into groups of three or four, many of them drinking mulled cider, absorbed in their own conversations, saving Alicia from any forced socializing. She wouldn’t know what to say anyway.

The house belonged to Heaven, or well, her parents, but they were in Niagara-on-the-Lake for a few days. Alicia hardly even knew Heaven; they were friendly co-workers but not exactly friends. Shifts at their store were just more tolerable if they worked together. If Heaven was around, a manager wouldn’t have to remind Alicia to, at bare minimum, appear as if she liked working the cash register or the fitting room or the “floor.” She and Heaven were bonded together by the horrors of retail and not much else. Alicia showed up tonight only because her apartment building was ten minutes away, and her mother wouldn’t stop asking if she’d been invited to at least one holiday party by at least one friend.

She took a sip from the bottle of Corona she didn’t want, remembering last year, when a date told her she should be embarrassed for ordering it off the menu with all the other brews available. That same night, she’d deleted Hinge and hadn’t been on since. Over the music, she made out snippets about natal charts and exam schedules and upcoming holiday plans and—

“He’s a sellout!”

“Bredren, he’s a celebrity. There’s a difference.”

Two men next to her were having a heated conversation.

“OK, but who needs walls that high, though?” said the first man, quickly clapping his hands between each word. “Like honestly, fans love him off that bad? Nah.”

“Do you work for the city? Are you getting paid? ’Cause, legit, I would only hate this hard if someone was paying me bare bones.”

Alicia tuned out their conversation, partly annoyed and partly envious that they felt so strongly about a celebrity’s walls, something so plainly trivial, when she couldn’t even care enough to dress up for the party. She had showed up in the grey sweats she’d been wearing all day, with small, December-induced dry patches dotting her hickory-brown face. The only accessory she wore was the one she never took off: a bracelet Grandma Mabel had given her as a child, when the two of them went to Westmoreland to visit family.

“Yuh have nightmares, nuh true? This here is protection from duppy, from the bad spirit that try fi catch yuh in yuh dreams,” she’d said.

They had gone to see an elderly lady who lived down the road from Grandma Mabel’s childhood home. “Even from when I was small, she was old, but she’s trustworthy.”

The bracelet was made of strips of black leather and had a gold clasp with the Roman numeral X engraved on it. The very night Alicia put it on, the nightmares stopped, never to return in fifteen years. Now the bracelet helped to elevate her drab grey appearance.

In the time Alicia referred to as Before, things weren’t like this. She wasn’t like this. Four years of undergrad completed in three, another eighteen months in New York, earning an MA and founding a graduate lit mag, and internships at two boutique literary agencies. She was on her way to becoming the next Toni Morrison of publishing, only to graduate and discover a wasteland in place of the opportunities she’d been promised. She’d returned to Toronto when her money ran out, applied everywhere, and got no interviews. Now everything seemed pointless, including and especially this party.

Alicia resolved that she would leave in thirty minutes. All she’d done was idly check her phone and complete Facebook polls that asked questions like “Do you say plant-IN or plant-AYNE?” (plant-IN, obviously), or online quizzes that guessed her age based on what kind of fries she preferred (McDonald’s and seventeen) or her Blackness by which answers she chose (she barely passed those—the references were American and largely irrelevant to her: for instance, where they put “sweet potato pie,” she’d have put “black cake”).

A couple walked into the living room from the dining room. The man wore a sweater that had a small outline of an owl in the corner, and the woman wore one with “WE THE NORTH” splayed across the chest. They walked up to a cluster of people sitting in front of the fireplace, and a floppy-haired man held out his fist for a bump.

“Wahgwan!”

“Wahgwan, Dennis?”

Alicia rolled her eyes at the exaggerated accents. Thirty minutes was starting to feel like too long a wait. She put her empty bottle on the coffee table and was readying herself to get up and go, when there was a shift in the room. A shift that only she seemed to notice. Her focus was pulled to a leggy woman with a burgundy afro and a hooped nose ring. Alicia hadn’t seen her come in.

The woman was draped in a long blazer bright with African prints, and she was wearing denim shorts over ripped black tights like it wasn’t minus sixteen outside, yet she had a chunky scarf around her neck like it was, in fact, below freezing. She’d joined one of the larger circles in the living room, the one that seemed to talk only about astrology, and Beychella, even though it’d been a while since the performance. Everyone in the group tried to get her attention, but she was too busy looking at Alicia, her eyes bright with recognition like they were old friends.

The woman smiled and pointed to her own tight curls and then to Alicia, mouthing, “Love it!”

Alicia touched her hair, slightly dazed. She’d gone to the salon earlier that day, the one just up the street, on the corner of Church and Weston Road. Weeks of neglect had knotted her hair, and she’d forced herself to shell out the money for a professional to wash and detangle it. She’d decided to get single braids done so she wouldn’t have to think about her hair for another eight weeks. At the salon, she’d responded to Heaven’s “What time you think you’ll be coming thru?” texts with “I don’t know” because she was getting braids in and didn’t know when she’d be finished. Heaven had pressed for details, complained that black was a boring colour to get, and talked her into getting ombré so that her braids would blend from indigo to blue to light purple.

“That’s Oni.”

Alicia turned her head to see Heaven in front of the couch, looking exponentially more stylish than she did. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder sweater dress with leg warmers over her bare copper-brown legs, and her Havana twists were pulled into a high bun. She held a thin black vape pen like she was a flapper girl gripping a cigarette holder. Heaven could make even the most mundane things look glamorous, as if she were practising for a future life of luxury.

“The girl with the Afropunk vibes,” she continued, nodding her head approvingly at the braids. “Her name is Oni. She’s from Saint Catherine.”

“Ontario?” said Alicia.

“No, Jamaica. Catherine, not Ca-tha-rines. She’s in my breadth class, postcolonial lit? I helped her with an essay on the imperial context of the omniscient narrator.” Heaven paused. “Like, the ‘voice of God,’ looking down on everything from above—”

“I know what an omniscient narrator is, Heaven.”

“True, you were an English major.”

Alicia snorted. “I don’t think that’s actually a requirement for knowing that piece of information, just FYI.”

“Touché.” Heaven sucked on her vape pen and exhaled. “Anyway, Oni’s cool,” she said, the vapour billowing out of her mouth with every word. “Does birth charts, readings, some tarot. She inspired me to start learning about that too.”

“So she’s done a reading for you?”

“Me? No. I mean, I like the idea of a reading, but I don’t think I actually want to know what the cards say? I feel like that could fuck me up, and I’m all about the positive vibes, enuh.”

Heaven was really into the idea of things—the idea of starting her own podcast, the idea of a cross-country road trip. She’d detail all the research she’d done on a particular subject and then laugh off any questions about actually following through on it. “Maybe in ten years, when I’m rich and have the time,” she’d say. To which Alicia always asked, “Aren’t you planning on doing a master’s in library sciences or something? Do you know any rich librarians?”

Heaven’s eyes flickered down to Alicia’s bracelet; it was what had got the two of them acquainted in the first place. Heaven was the best employee on staff, and the managers had paired them on Alicia’s first day as a way for her to acclimate to the store. Heaven had asked about her bracelet when they were tidying up shirt-strewn tables during closing.

“A talisman, right?” she’d asked.

Alicia hadn’t answered right away, too surprised that Heaven had noticed something people usually acknowledged only absently.

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. I used to get nightmares. This helps.”

Heaven raised her eyebrows.

“I’d dream about these people, right?” Alicia explained. “They didn’t walk, they’d kind of glide above the ground. They were dead. Had no eyes, feet pointed backward. Sometimes they weren’t even people, just balls of red.”

“Girl, a duppy dat,” said Heaven, easing into an accent.

Alicia smiled slightly, feeling the kind of affinity that came with cultural recognition.

“Yuh sound like mi grandma fi true,” said Alicia. “Talking about ghosts and ting.”

“It’s my thing. It started because of a paper I did for my early Caribbean history class, but when something interests me, I kind of want to know everything I can about it, and this, especially, is something I want to know more about. So you could say me and your grandma have the same interests.”

“Had, anyway. Car crash. Years ago.” Alicia didn’t pause so Heaven could offer her condolences. “She gave this to me when I was ten. It helped,” she said, quickly folding a polo shirt. “Well, it did the trick. I know that there’s nothing to it—it’s just a security blanket.”

Heaven glanced up at Oni now while she pointed to the gold clasp. “You know, Oni might like that. You should go talk to her.”

“And say what? I wear this out of habit more than anything else. I don’t really know what it’s supposed to do or how it’s supposed to work.”

“Then you should listen to one of the podcasts I keep telling you about. Reclamation of spirituality and traditional religions in the diaspora—”

“OK, I don’t want you getting into academic podcast mode. I’m just saying, I’d like to get in touch with a yearly salary before anything else. You’ll get it when you graduate.”

“I swear, one of these days you won’t end a sentence that way. Still, you should talk to Oni. It’s my party. You have to mingle.”

Heaven was the most social person in the store, always suggesting late lunches at the nearby pho restaurant before it turned into a gastropub, or after a closing shift, a few rounds at the gastropub before it was bulldozed for a condo. Sometimes Alicia wondered if anyone wanted to go. Admittedly, part of her did want to walk up to Oni and get a better understanding of what she was feeling, but the other part just wanted the feeling to go away.

“I cyaah friend she up just because she liked my hair and might also like my bracelet.”

“And I can’t help you if you’re determined not to have a good time.”

“I’m having a good time.”

“Lies. Since you got here, you’ve had that look on your face,” said Heaven, taking another hit of her pen. “Don’t bullshit me, you know the look I’m talking about, the one you have when they make you hand out the 40 percent off coupons at the store’s entrance.”

Alicia laughed at that. “But really, though, I don’t even know why they make me do all that greetin’ and ting.”

“It’s just Pradeep trying to shake things up as the new assistant manager, blah-blah-blah.”

“Well, whatever strategy that is, it’s chupid, because I suck at being a greeter.”

“You suck at anything involving people. Yuh nuh skin dem teeth, Leish.” A young man in a cream cable-knit sweater and jeans slunk between Alicia and Heaven like he’d always been a part of the conversation.

“Mars,” said Alicia. “For a second, I thought you were Heaven’s friend Dennis over there.” She pushed her mouth toward to the floppy-haired man, ignoring Heaven’s correction of “guest, not friend.” “That’s how bruk up your accent is.”

“Wow, ’low me, eh?” He paused to listen to Dennis excitedly yell, “Brap! Brap!” and chuckled. “He just appreciates the culture; ’low him too.”

“That’s the wrong A-word,” said Alicia. “But ‘appropriate’ and ‘appreciate’ sound similar, so I understand the confusion.”

“Is it really that deep? When it’s so ingrained in the city?”

“It’s ingrained when he puts the accent on, but when it’s my mother’s natural voice, all she gets is racism? Cool story, Marcus.”

“Why it gotta be all that?” he asked, shaking his head. “Why are you so extreme?”

Before Alicia could respond, Heaven interjected. “Why is Alicia the only one who can call you by your actual name? I’ve known you longer and I can’t. That one time your brother came to the store, even he didn’t call you Marcus.”

He grinned. “Jealous?”

Heaven put up her hand. “Relax yourself. You are a mistake I will not be making, Mars.”

Alicia shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, he’s the only one who calls me Leish.”

Mars—who’d once revealed to her that he was named for Marcus Garvey—was the closest thing Alicia had to a frien. . .