New Novel by Jessica Holter writing as Ghetto Girl Blue
GRAVE MOTHERS
by GHETTO GIRL BLUE
Jessica Holter will push you to the edge of your seat with a mercy killing like no other when the misinterpretation of a biblical scripture becomes a fight to the death between mother and son.
Straight from today’s headlines comes a scandalous tale of motherhood and murder. Grave Mothers is a bloody account of four twisted mothers of some very bad boys. Over a game of Bid Whist and a couple bottles of Chardonnay, Ivy, Sing, Donaka and Dolores devise a cryptic plot to murder their vicious gang-banging sons.
Over empty glasses of wine, it seems like a morally justifiable plan. But it becomes clear in this sarcastic thriller, that the apple does not fall far from the tree, when what begins as a righteous decision to rid the community of their iniquitous children, spirals into a selfish conspiracy of murder for profit, as they band together under their own gang-like creed Like “Momma brought you in this world, and momma will take you out.”
Ivy knew her son Jackson was a murderer. She had seen the mark of “The Kin”, her son’s crew, in TV reports, even if the police hadn’t. But, she came from a time when you didn’t turn on family, and you certainly did not air dirty laundry, you cleaned it. For a while she tried to ignore the piercing screams crawling up her basement walls. She loved her son, but she had no intentions of becoming an accessory to kidnap and the pregnant girl tied to a bed in her basement meant trouble. After hearing a sermon by The Messenger, a powerful voice on her radio, Ivy’s decides to do some Spring cleaning.
The game of Bid Whist could not have come sooner for Donaka, the prettiest little mixed girl to ever step onto the block. She had run away from the suburbs to live like a video vixen, when she was 12. She had Emmit before the year ended, and before the year ended, she was a widowed baby momma. She and Emmit had been like brother and sister, than mother and son since the day he was born. But she was tired of getting on her knees for pretentious paper pushers to keep him out of juvenile hall. She used to love the hood. Now, she would kill to get out.
The day Saul was born Dolores died for 7 seconds. He tore through her body on his way into the world, kicking her womb open with his feet. She was 16 when she gave birth to her father’s child. But the deadly sin she and her son Saul share keeps her living in a hell ruled by his fist. “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…” Dolores prays as she cooks her son’s last supper.
“Hell no”. This was not the plan. Sing had not come from a small Eastern village with outdoor plumbing to end up in a makeshift Chinatown in Oakland. “Come to Hollywood,” the ad said. Singanswered the ad and ended up in a sweat shop silk screening T-Shirts. She was barely 18, hardly spoke English, but even she knew that if she could get pregnant a ball player, she would be set. Dressed to catch, she had not walked into the club, when a voice called to her from a stretch limousine. But her plan failed when the tall, handsome basketball player turned out to be the 16 year-old star of his high school team, joyriding. Facing statutory rape charges, Sing accepts a gangsters offer to keep her and raise her son. But when her son grows up to become a rapist and a murderer, she is sure he will die, eventually. Why not get some insurance money out of it and start a brand new life now?
Jessica Holter finally gives a novelists voice to Ghetto Girl Blue, whose urban grit is reminiscent of Iceberg Slim, for his colorful characters and controversial subject-matter. In Grave Mothers, Blue carves off a piece of Donald Goines’ ghetto dogma, and drops in into a boiling pot of poetic symmetry that is as dark as some of Alice Walker’s best works and as romantic as Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries.
Coming February 2012 from Strebor Books (Simon & Schuster)
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