The Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town

June 4, 2001
The racial divisions of the 1950s South as seen through the eyes of a young girl achieved quintessential expression in To Kill a Mockingbird. Guidry, then, is courageous in exploring the same situation. In her first novel, she eloquently captures the reality of black and white relations in Louisiana before the civil rights movement. Her characterizations and insights into family life are strong and believable, and her young female narrator's voice is convincing. Narrator Vivien Leigh Dubois, like Harper Lee's Scout Finch, is coming of age in a changing world. A 10-year-old about to go into fifth grade, Vivien Leigh knows that there are differences between whites and "coloreds," unlike her younger sister Mavis, whose best friend Marydale Arceneaux is the daughter of the Dubois family's black housekeeper. When two "colored" nuns (the "sisters" of the title) arrive in Ville d'Angelle to teach at Holy Rosary, the all-white, private Catholic school that Vivien Leigh attends, she slowly begins to see these divisions in a different light. Guidry's characterization is nuanced; not everyone is portrayed as a hate-mongering racist, and she makes it clear that it required bravery to speak out against bigotry. Yet whereas Lee's classic pulled readers into its plot, Guidry allows her story to meander. Only in the last hundred pages does the story propel the reader toward a conclusion where there are no easy heroes, no easy compromises or truths. Though uneven, the novel is written in fluid, assured prose and gracefully drives home its message: that life is not black and white, but rather painted in shades of all colors.