The Inland Empire’s Divine Groove

To each their own reading habits, but there’s something about listening to the Temptations while you read Susan Straight’s books that will set you on a wavelength long enough to stretch across her expansive narratives and landscapes. Looking at over three decades and 10 books, you’ll need all of Art Laboe’s “oldies but goodies” to ride across the Inland Empire and Riverside County. You’ll need Little Willie G and Thee Midniters to take you through the nooks and crannies of every canyon, arroyo, and freeway. “Angel Baby,” by Rosie and the Originals, can carry you high into the date palms of the Coachella Valley to find the jeweled fruit. If you’re in a crunch (or facing a writing deadline), crank up War’s “Low Rider” to get you through.

What’s the right song for a deathbed in a hospital in San Bernardino? This is where Susan Straight’s newest novel, Sacrament, begins: with Larette, an ICU nurse, at the bedside of her patient and dear friend Rudy Magana. Larette has been asked by Magana’s family to soothe him by singing Mary Wells’s rendition of “What Love Has Joined Together” as he succumbs to COVID. The song, smooth, sweet, and a little wistful, sets the tone and sends us into the lives of Straight’s characters as they rise to answer the call of this catastrophic time. While many of us may flinch at the memory of the first terrifying years of the pandemic, the author plants readers right in the heart of that calamitous time in this novel, which focuses on a crew of nurses working to save lives and keep their own lives intact.

Although the coronavirus pandemic was an emergency unlike any other in the past century, the characters in many of Straight’s novels are no strangers to hardship. They have already endured generations of struggle in the face of racism and poverty, as well as familial conflict and personal losses. When you read Sacrament alongside Straight’s earliest published novel, Aquaboogie, and her more recent Mecca, the fictive universe that her characters inhabit expands and deepens across her body of work.

While Straight’s novels often sprawl to encompass vast geographies, history, and lives of diverse characters, Sacrament braids narratives around Cherrise, a night shift ICU nurse and mother of a teenage daughter, Raquel. Cherrise works alongside her cousin Larette and a tight-knit crew of other nurses to do the backbreaking and heartbreaking work of caring for sick and dying patients during the pandemic.

Sacrament is also linked to previous books, such as Mecca, by recurring characters like Larette and the swaggering motorcycle cop Johnny Frías. A true vaquero and descendent of Mexican Californios who rides both a motorcycle and a horse, Frías knows the highways as well as he knows the canyon back roads. Like Frías, the other characters know their environment so intimately well that they can read shifting textures in the air and humidity in the ground. The arid climate, especially the high heat, is a constant factor in their daily lives because, of course, the landscape of inland Southern California itself is a main character that is present in all of Straight’s books.

And while the environment in which her stories are set is harsh, even dangerous, it is one that Straight reveals as astonishingly beautiful and worthy of respect. Straight renders the landscape, including its date farms, sacred, and the prose is swept into reverence. Date palms, farmed deep in the Coachella desert, appear in several of Straight’s books—their bond to the sacred becomes more crystallized with each iteration. While in Aquaboogie (1990) date palms are mentioned only in passing, by the time we get to Mecca (2022), they are breathtaking: “It was magic out here, even in the heat. Giant sweeps of golden strands feathered with tiny blooms, four feet long. Like fantastic brooms and the gods could sweep the sky.” In Sacrament, Straight returns the reader to the date palms of Mecca, depicting the tree as a kind of portal between humans and heaven. While Cherrise is working at the hospital, she sends Raquel away to Mecca, California, where she learns to climb a ladder up the palm’s trunk to where the fruit grows and ripens. High among the date bunches, Raquel finally understands why her late father called it the “bottom of heaven.” When she’s not in class on Zoom, Raquel works in a packinghouse where the fruit is sorted, boxed, and shipped to all parts of the world, most notably for Ramadan, the holiest month of Islam.

In the meantime, the kids in Sacrament are looking to nature for existential clues. Dante, the son of Larette and her husband, Grief, is fixed on astronomy, while Raquel studies life on earth. As Raquel wrestles with nature’s cruel mysteries—coronavirus, West Nile, hantavirus—Straight invokes the sacred in Paulann Petersen’s poem “A Sacrament”: “Become that high priest, / the bee. Drone your way / from one fragrant / temple to another, nosing / into each altar. Drink / what’s divine.” An understated but recurring theme in Straight’s work is the holiness that is not just made by the will of gods or ordained by the powerful, but evoked by the care, hard work, and bonds of ordinary beings.

But what happens when those bonds are tested and even basic practices of care are disrupted? As Straight’s Sacrament reminds us, the pandemic turned the world on its head and forced us to rethink how we enact care for one another. Counter to everything we’ve known as humans, survival suddenly depended on no physical contact, and technology became ever more essential to keep us connected. However, Straight also leaves room for the opposite to be true, since technologies that connect us can also separate us.

Inevitably, despite our best efforts, intentions, and Wi-Fi service, there is also room for many mistakes, some with irreversible consequences. Cherrise and Larette, like many nurses isolated from their families, keep the tidal wave of tragedies they witness, not to mention their exposure to the virus, to themselves. Necessarily, they forge new unions with each other, while keeping their loved ones at a physical and emotional distance. But omissions can become secrets that deepen distances. The damage of secrets, Cherrise notes, is eventually evidenced in the body itself. Or more precisely, often in the socks and feet of her patients. “All these men and their secrets. The diabetic gods attack the feet.… The whole world is in the body.”

Culture is as important to Straight’s work as environment is. She reminds her readers that poetry, art, and music connect us or bring us back together when we drift apart. Her novels are tuned in to a cadence of attention that is nearly meditative. In Aquaboogie, titled after the song by Parliament, Nacho finds respite from janitorial work, homesickness, and harassment by listening to music and making art. Through the line work of his drawings, he is transported home. The groove of Parliament’s funk gives Nacho the defiance he needs to stand up to the near-constant racism his bigoted coworkers subject him to.

But whether engaging with funk or painting or cooking collard greens, Straight’s characters understand that there’s more to life than hardship, survival, or even resilience. Through the artistry of their daily lives, they know about a kind of transcendence or enlightenment. The key is in the soundtracks that Straight builds into her stories. “Never learned to swim / Can’t catch the rhythm of the stroke / Why should I hold my breath / Feeling that I might choke?” Parliament’s George Clinton, and other Black musical luminaries such as the late Sun Ra, aimed to connect listeners to higher frequencies through their music. The groove was meant to transport you to the divine.

At the end of Sacrament, we return to “What Love Has Joined Together.” As I finish reading the novel, I replay the song and listen more carefully to the lyrics. It’s a song often played at weddings or anniversaries, danced to softly cheek to cheek when new vows are made and old ones renewed. And although the song is being played at a fictional funeral, it also marks a beginning, as a community renews its vows among all of its loving members. The story of these intertwined families will go on long after you close the pages of the book, and you will be welcomed once again when you return to them, perhaps, in one of Straight’s next novels.•

Join us on June 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Straight will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Mecca. Register for the Zoom conversation here.