I’ve never been the most read when it comes to nonfiction and memoirs, but I’m glad I’ve been giving more chances to them. _The Waterbearers_ is a really beautiful collection of recollections and experiences across three generations. I love how the theme of water and proximity to bodies of water comes up throughout and how Sasha Bonét talks about it shaping her and the women in her family. There is a lot of obvious love and obvious pain throughout the stories shared, and the ways generational trauma plays out for them. I think I especially loved how Betty Jean, Connie, and Sasha all have different ideas of how to be a good mother and present different iterations of strength, and how those ideas have shaped each other. This was really beautiful and engaging, and I liked how it was telling the stories but also examining them from knowledge gained from own experiences and therapy.

Sasha Bonet’s memoir beautifully pulls in the metaphor of water and waterbearing to tell her family’s story. While her writing is very poetic, it feels in many ways like spoken word poetry and I think it might be even better on audio. In print, it’s sometimes hard to get into the rhythms of the writing and how the stories flow together.

Thank you to the author, publisher and Net Galley for providing an ARC of this title.

This is a personal memoir exploring the author's lineage in relation to the women in her family. The author includes her own thoughts, some history and considers present day events. Though not told in chronological order, the author does explore her childhood and her grandmother. She pulls on strong black female figures of the present day.
While I enjoyed the author's writing, the organization was a bit confusing to follow. But I was reading an early, advanced copy, so hopefully issues will be found and fixed before publication.
I just happened to have been reading several truly amazing banned books dealing with racism, history and support needed (and deserved) by groups of people, and this book fit in beautifully with those.

4 stars (really hope those issues are fixed!)

At the beginning her book, Sasha Bonet included a matriarchal family line, beginning with her great great grandmother, Rose, born a free woman in 1875 on a plantation in Louisiana. Bonet’s memories begin with her grandmother, Betty Jean, who birthed eleven children by nine men, the names of her four sons as well as the names of the fathers of the children omitted from the line. Curiously, Bonet chose to include the names of her two brothers, the only men, in the matriarchal line. One of her brothers is listed by relation, Junior, a designating that the value of a name is given to the father not the son, a transmission given through the name of the father. The other brother bears the traditionally female name, Shannon, which mimics the subterfuge by Thetis to dress her son, Achilles, as a woman to keep him away from the war. Shannon, born during a time when the phrase ‘getting in touch with ones feminine side’ was in vogue, suggests a mother aware of the cultural changings of her time, of the rise of a less toxic man, in preparation of the transmission of genetic information to, however miniscule, include the men in the lives of the women in her family history. Of her brother Shannon, Bonet wrote that they shared an identical balance of the masculine and the feminine.

Make no mistake, the passing on, the bearing of water, individually, historically, and communally, Bonet makes clear has always been the burden of Black women, upon whom the country was built. Betty Jean migrated to Houston, Bayou City, and within Houston migrated to several addresses, the final one known as 50 10, a house to be filled generations of women, the home base for any of them, and the men, in their lives whenever they were in trouble, a place of refuge and healing, the well, to return to however far they traveled from 50 10. When Bonet’s grandmother was pregnant with her mother, she dreamed of water, and when Bonet was pregnant with her daughter she dreamed of water.

The genealogical search of Betty Jean branches off into historical sketches of other women, biographical sketches Bonet titles and numbers Tributaries. The numbers are random as a lottery drawing, suggesting Bonet will share more sketches of women in the future. Two familiar tributaries. Betty Mabry Davis, one of the wives of Miles Davis, a fiercely independent artist, entertainer, and creative force of nature in Manhattan until her disappearance. The other woman, Iberia Hampton, mother of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther, murdered by an orchestrated act led by the FBI. The Hamptons were next door Chicago neighbors to Mamie Till and her son Emmett. Earlier, events leading up to the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father, charged and executed in Italy for rape and murder, mentioned by the poet, Ezra Pound in his Cantos, would be written in Writing to Save a Life by John Edgar Wideman to form a bloody triad of the Till family. The sons of Black women slaughtered by police join the Black women, mothers and daughters who also met violent deaths by police, in a later chapter of Bonet’s memoir.

And the psychological damage of swallowed micro-aggressions held over generations as trauma genetically passed from mother to daughter to someday in some later generation break through the levee holding back anger and rage to gush forth as mental illness is described. Bonet’s chapter on her mother’s career in outdoor managerial positions, working for the railroad in Houston, reads like a branch to Isabel Wilkerson’s description of train routes from the South in The Warmth of other Suns.

Sasha Bonet’s memoir is compelling reading, written with deep knowledge and a poetic flair, making it a must read.
Thank you to the publisher, Alfred A Knopf, and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy.

The Waterbearers is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish the last page. Sasha Bonét tells the story of three generations of Black women; her grandmother, her mother, and herself and she writes with such honesty and power, that it felt like sitting down to listen to a family history that’s both deeply personal and universally important.

The book starts with her grandmother, Betty Jean, who raised eleven kids on her own in Texas after years spent picking cotton in Louisiana. Her strength and independence are honestly jaw dropping. Then there’s Mama Connie, Bonét’s mother, who tried to break away from her past but ended up repeating some of the same patterns. And finally, there’s Sasha herself, who is trying to make sense of it all while raising her own daughter and figuring out what kind of mother she wants to be.

Bonét’s writing is gorgeous. It is poetic without being overly flowery, and full of heart. The prose is really beautiful! She also brings in stories of iconic Black women like Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, and Oprah, showing how their lives connect to her own and the women in her family. It’s like a love letter to Black motherhood, resilience, and the way we carry our histories, sometimes without even realizing it.

This book isn’t just about one family, but about legacy, survival, and how women keep going, even when the world expects them to break. If you love memoirs that feel raw, beautiful, and important, you’ll want to add this to your list. I’ll definitely be thinking about this one for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley, Sasha Bonét, and Knopf for the eARC of this book.

"The Waterbearers" is author Sasha Bonét's personal exploration of her lineage and upbringing, borne on the shoulders of the women in her family. It's part memoir, part history, and includes Bonét's own musings and thoughts on present day events and phenomenon.

While the writing isn't chronological, Bonét shares details of her childhood, and the lack of presence of any male figure - for her, her mother Connie was her sole guardian and parent. She also goes into detail about her grandmother Betty Jean, a fiercely strong woman who spent most of her years in Louisiana picking cotton before moving to Texas to raise her family, almost single-handedly. And for her daughter Connie, despite her best attempts to separate herself from her mother's shadow, she too became a single mother, but raised her daughter with as much love and direction that she could. She pulls as well from strong black female figures in the present, highlighting the many ways these women continue to push forward for all black women, and the extent of weight they bear on their shoulders.

While I found Bonét's writing complex and captivating, I struggled with this novel as a whole. The chapters weren't organized in a way that I could easily follow, and the skips in time periods as well as certain repeated events or themes were hard to follow. I was given what I imagine was a very early ARC of this book as well, so there's a number of issues with the spelling and grammar ("ff" appears to be removed from any and all words, line breaks that occur in the middle of words, sentences missing key words and years (possibly to be filled later with more research), etc. that detracted from the reading experience as a whole.