THE story Marsha Hunt tells is both shocking and moving. It exposes the cruelty of people, but also testifies to their humanity, and their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Some 30 years after she left the United States to make her home in Britain and France, an unexpected phone call in June 1991 sent Hunt, singer, actress and novelist, to an old people's home in Memphis, Tennessee, to a reclaim the grandmother she had never met. Seldom mentioned by her family, Ernestine, placed in a mental institution in her early twenties soon after the birth of the third of her three sons, was a shameful secret, a non person believed to be violently and incurably insane.
Born to the blackest of four sisters, Ernestine was also the victim of a cruel genetic trick which gave her the features and colouring of a white woman. So from early in life she must have had to contend with the confusions of race.
By the time Hunt learns that the old lady has been sighted by an acquaintance, it transpires that Ernestine is no longer living in the asylum where she spent 55 years, and had by then been living for over a decade in an old people's home. Hunt decides to go to her and unravel the mystery of a stolen life.
Detective story, family saga, social history, Repossessing Ernestine is above all a remarkable account of a test of character the author's. The strength of this powerful, vividly written narrative lies in Hunt's detached, almost reporter like control of her anger, her despair, her hope and the fact that her entire approach is determined by an abiding practicality, humour and sense of justice. This book so easily could have become an impassioned polemic on the evils which destroyed Einestine's life. It doesn't.
Instead Hunt, while aware of the outrages committed against her grandmother in the mental home and shocked by her family's continuing indifference to the situation, concentrates on practicalities, not score settling. Throughout her account, money is a serious problem. Costly airline tickets, expensive international phone calls, Hunt's own professional commitments and, later, illness, as well as nursing home costs, all feature. Another difficulty is dealing with her grandmother's guardian, the woman who had been Hunt's grandfather's mistress for over 47 years.
In addition to the uncooperative guardian, Hunt must deal with her uncle's reluctance to involve himself with the mother he hardly knew, as well as his resentment at Hunts's interference.
It is a quest which follows the impulsive, likable and resourceful Hunt jetting between Europe and the United States, France, Memphis, Boston, Los Angeles, Maryland, Baltimore, Folkestone and back to Memphis. Investigating and researching, following clues, she must rely on the goodwill of strangers, and discovers even more family secrets, such as the existence of her father's second wife, whom he married only six weeks before his suicide.
Hunt's prose is direct, conversational, exact. She watches and observes everyone while also recording her own feelings, fears, tensions, weariness and final disappointment when, having brought her grandmother to England, she must admit defeat as crippling bills force her to bring the old lady back to the States.
Personal and controlled, this intelligently moving, unsentimental narrative operates on many levels as the story of a forgotten woman whose life was taken from her. Ernestine emerges as an oddly lucid presence, the one person who knows exactly what happened. When asked about the most important experience of her life, the old lady says simply "I was killed." Hunt is making a powerful statement, not only about how black people, particularly women, were treated in the past and the humiliations they are still subjected to, but also about the helplessness of the mentally ill in the days before Freud and Jung decreed that depression is not insanity.
Early in her quest, she is rebuked by her own mother, who reminds her "That's not your family It's not your business to get involved in that." Hunt's response is simple "She's got nobody." Luckily, she did have a kind granddaughter.
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