Rattlebone is an interconnected set of stories set in a Black neighborhood of mid-20th-century Kansas City, Kansas. The setting was part of the attraction for me: my mother grew up in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City at around this time (she's a bit more than a decade younger than Maxine Clair), and it's a place I made regular visits to in my childhood. However, the Black history of Kansas City is largely unknown to me. It was not until 2011, on a road trip to Kansas I took with my dad, that I first visited the part of Kansas City, Missouri that's home to the Negro League Hall of Fame, the Jazz Museum, and Arthur Bryant's BBQ. Kansas City, Kansas was a place I was familiar with only as a distinction from the other Kansas City and a couple exits off the highway. And yet Rattlebone was full of familiar place names.
The way Rattlebone is organized is a little confusing. At first I thought it was a novel – the first couple stories have the same narrator (Irene Wilson, who is definitely the central character of the book, though there are a few stories in which she doesn't feature at all) and seemed to continue one into the next. And then suddenly there was a different voice for one story, and things seemed to jump around in time bit. The final product takes the form of sort of excerpts from lives in the neighborhood. In the main, the book documents Irene's coming of age in a segregated school in a segregated city, but hovering around that center are the changes underway in the wider world. The book captures this very precise moment in time as we know it is about to end.
