By CB Campbell
Content warning: violence, racism, suicide
In Gutter Child, Jael Richardson explores complex issues in an easily accessible prose style. She has created a bifurcated society split between haves and have-nots with a (mostly) racial line between the two. There are elements of apartheid South Africa, the antebellum South and Dickens’ England. Like Atwood’s Gilead, Richardson’s world provides a sense of place that feels unpleasantly possible.
Our narrator, Elimina, has grown up with her adoptive mother on the Mainland with its overwhelmingly white settler population. The Gutter is a small island, effectively a reservation. The residents of the Gutter are the Indigenous people of this country, trapped in intergenerational indentured servitude—slavery by economic regulation.
The novel begins when Elimina’s adoptive mother dies and she is sent to a boarding school for Gutter children. She quickly discovers that while her life to this point was hard, she has been sheltered from the reality of the Indigenous people on the Mainland and from the Gutter culture she was taken from. Thanks to her imperfect knowledge of this dystopian world, we take the journey with her.
Richardson explores family, race, gender, colonization and economics. While there is black and white in this world, there is also grey. Is the Gutter a prison to escape or a home to protect? One character says, “I never realized we were trapped in [the Gutter] until I was on the other side,” but it is also a place where Elimina recovers her past and expands her family. The Mainlanders hate and fear Gutter dwellers for reasons clearly driven by racism, but they accept a successful Black settlement on the Mainland. We discover that Elimina was taken from her family in the Gutter as part of a failed experiment to integrate her into the privileged world of the Mainland. The purpose of the experiment is not clear but the failure appears to have been intentional.
Like the world we live in, bad things happen and some people rise to the challenge while others do not. The choices characters face are not always pleasant. Friends are made, lost, and only sometimes found again. This is a book worth reading, because it doesn’t offer easy answers or a fairly tale ending. Multi-generational bias and hatred are not easy to address and should not get resolved in 368 pages.
This is Richardson’s first novel, although she has been writing for a number of years. My first exposure to her work was her 2012 memoir, The Stone Thrower, that explored her life and that of her father Chuck Ealey, a Black man from Ohio who came to Canada to play football in the CFL. Richardson is also the Artistic Director of The Festival of Literary Diversity and a voice we can all look forward to hearing for many years to come.