Mind Picker: Nightcrawling

Letting the streets have you is like planning your own funeral. I wanted the streetlight brights, the money in the morning, not the back alleys. Not the sirens. But, here we are. Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.

Nightcrawling is fine: Teenaged debut novelist Lelia Mottley stuffed this gritty urban tale with just about every inner city social issue imaginable, and with the writing style dialled up to eleven, there are many fine lines, many fine scenes, but also an unrestrained exuberance that made me a bit impatient. Nightcrawling has been longlisted for the 2022 Man Booker Prize — meaning people whose opinion counts more than mine does found this novel to be among the best released in English, worldwide, this year — but it didn’t really engage me on a literary level. The nomination may have led me to expect more from this novel, and I have to admit that the writing does not betray the author’s young age, but overall, this was just fine. Slight spoilers (not much beyond the publisher’s blurb) from here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There’s not a thing Daddy could’ve done that would’ve made me hate him. When he died, I thought maybe it was a consequence of not resenting him more, not playing into karma like Marcus had so the world wouldn’t have had to kill him to keep the good-evil balance in check. That was before I learned that life won’t give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don’t make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers.

Nearly eighteen-year old Kiara and her older brother, Marcus, live alone in a seedy East Oakland apartment complex — their father is dead and their mother is in prison — and when their rent is doubled, Kiara doesn’t know what to do: She is about to lose the few under-the-table shifts she works at a liquor store and Marcus is refusing to get a job beyond recording the rap album that he’s convinced is their ticket out. When Kiara gets drunk and a man mistakes her for a sex worker, Kiara accepts as inevitable that she’s going to need to start walking the streets to keep her brother and herself safe. And when the mentally unstable, drug-addicted woman downstairs abandons the ten-year-old son that Kiara has always felt affection and responsibility towards, the stakes are raised even higher.

I did appreciate the agency that Mottley gave to Kiara in this decision (beyond that first encounter) — she never feels sorry for herself or loses respect for herself for doing what she feels she has to do for her family — but Kiara loses that agency when she is picked up by the police and forced to work private parties for them, for which she isn’t even always paid. (The police angle is based on actual events and it was this news story that first prompted Mottley to write Nightcrawling.) How Kiara deals with this exploitation, and her efforts to support her brother and the boy from downstairs, are the bulk of the plot.

“We still family, Ki.” And I think he means it, beyond words, beyond this moment, beyond the things our parents did to leave us broken. I nod and, for the first time, I think about what I did, about the panic that sets in when anyone else touches me the way Marcus just did, how many guns have been pressed to my skull, fingers scraping my skin, fists in my hair. In this room, with these golden boys, all the things I’ve done feel vulgar, devastating, like I do not deserve to be loved good again.

There are plenty of shocking events in Nightcrawling — the sex work, drug abuse and trafficking, police brutality, suicide, guns, child neglect, roadblocks to justice for the powerless — and colourful details from the Black commmunity — the Black Panthers, basketball, rap, braids — but shocking events and colourful details, on their own, don’t add up to a deep dive into a community to me; this all felt so surface, even with the exuberant sentences. Mottley obviously has big ideas: in the afterword, she writes, “Like many black girls, I was often told growing up to tend to and shield my brother, my dad, the black men around me: their safety, their bodies, their dreams. In this, I learned that my own safety, body, and dreams were secondary, that there was no one and nothing that could or would protect me.” And I found that very provocative — not something I had heard before — and while I can see that this is an idea that Mottley was exploring through Kiara’s story, I would love a deeper, while more subtle, literary exploration. Again: More important voices than mine have singled Nightcrawling out for praise; this is naught but my small contribution to the conversation.