One Blood

LoveReading Says

Encompassing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, 1960s civil unrest, and cultural shifts in the 2000s, Denene Millner's One Blood is big-hearted, beautiful book that rings with poetry and emotional depth. Taking in the struggles and spirits of three women, it’s a dazzling ode to Black womanhood, motherhood and fighting to live a free life.

First we meet Grace, who’s being raised by her grandmother Maw Maw Rubelle in segregated Virginia in the mid-sixties. At thirteen, Grace “understood the power of blood” and seems well set to become her grandmother’s midwife apprentice. In Maw Maw’s magical words, midwifery is “the ways of the women who wait on miracles - the ways of her own self.” 

Finding herself alone, Grace becomes more aware of the way white folk “counted on Black body parts — hands for the wash, backs for the breaking of soil, titties for feeding their babies - but they couldn’t stand the actual Black bodies or the souls that inhabited them.” She’s brought to live with her harsh aunt Hattie who teaches etiquette to young ladies in the North. Falling in love and falling pregnant brings shame on Hattie, so she gives Grace’s baby away without her knowing. 

Next we move to Lolo’s story, which covers 1967-1999. Unable to have children, she and her husband adopt a son, and then a girl, Rae, who was found on the stoop of a home for unmarried mothers. While there’s a sense of change in the air, such as hippies “screaming ‘free love’ and ‘revolution’”, at the same time “the wives knew. The men, they were in charge.” As a result, Lolo fears Rae’s impending womanhood, and will fight to the end to protect her daughter.

The third focus of this remarkable novel is Rae herself, a TV producer who wants to uncover her blood family’s roots, and always knew she wanted her own baby: “Her womb would be the soil, her happiness, the fertilizer that would assure her own family tree would bloom.” Notably, Rae’s relationship with her mother improves through adulthood — while in childhood it had been “powered by fear”, now Rae sees how Lolo had “survived an extraordinarily sad, complicated life.” 

With Rae’s vivid dreams connecting her to her ancestral line, to the amulets left with her at the orphanage, and to the women whose blood runs through her veins, One Blood almost comes full circle. Raw with suffering, and radiant with the resilience of its three unforgettable female protagonists, this is a storytelling triumph.

Joanne Owen

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