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Overview
In Erica Simone Turnipseed's captivating follow-up to A Love Noire, heartache fans the flames of lust when freethinking Noire and Innocent, her urbane African ex, reunite.
Noire and Innocent are both having a thirtysomething crisis. His former identity as a successful investment banker and eligible bachelor has disappeared. A beleaguered graduate student, she's got no money, no man, and no Ph.D., yet. A year of predoctoral research in Haiti leaves Noire drained. And a trip home to Côte d'Ivoire offers Innocent little more than intermittent sexual gratification. In the aftermath of 9/11, Innocent and Noire are back in New York City and find solace in each other's bed. But even that arrangement collapses under the weight of Innocent's revelation that he has unfinished business in Africa. For Innocent and Noire, patching together their unraveling lives becomes an exercise in hope and humility. With Hunger, Turnipseed lives up to the promise of A Love Noire and has matured into a writer who fearlessly explores the intersection of sex, love, identity, and loss in a cross-cultural context.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061745690 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 998 KB |
About the Author
Erica Simone Turnipseed's debut, A Love Noire, won the Atlanta Choice Author of the Year Award from the Atlanta Daily World. A philanthropist, Turnipseed founded the Five Years for the House Initiative, a fund-raising drive for the Afro American Cultural Center at Yale. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York.
Read an Excerpt
Hunger
A Novel
By Erica Turnipseed
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006
Erica Turnipseed
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060797304
Chapter One
11 September 2001
5:45 A.M.
Innocent thrust his face up toward the showerhead, the hot water pelting his skin like a million rubber bullets shot at close range. The news reporter's voice slithered into the bathroom: "Polls will soon open in New York City. Registered Democrats will be choosing their candidate for mayor during today's primary." He opened his eyes into the hail of water, then stepped back. The bathroom was hazy gray, the only light a promise of a sun that was yet to rise. He made short work of his morning erection, relieving himself in a small, satisfied gasp as the reporter made predictions on who would win the primary.
Voting. Innocent had never concerned himself much with U.S. politics, only mildly chagrined that he paid taxes to a government that saw him as an outsider. But after the fiasco of last year's presidential election, he had managed a more robust interest in this country's system of government that impacted him in more ways than he cared to admit. He swiped a bar of soap across his body halfheartedly, knowing he would soon replace its scent with his own sweat when he arrived at his twice-weekly personal training session with Miguel. No longer a six-figure investment banker, Innocent knew his downsized lifestyle did not warrant Miguel's heftyprice tag, but he decided to keep him even after leaving Wright Richards because Miguel knew how to get the results Innocent wanted.
Innocent stepped out of the shower, residual water making rivers of the ridges in his chest and muscles of his legs and landing in newly created puddles that he tracked from the bathroom to the refrigerator. He grabbed a banana and poured a glass of tomato juice. He ate standing up, dressed, and pulled on his in-line skates before leaving his loft in time for his 7:00 a.m. session with Miguel on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center.
"Where is Pierre?" Madame Jean-Juste crinkled the many folds of her eyes in Noire's direction from her perch on the porch.
Noire kept her gaze trained on Raynald, her landlady's driver, who was loading her last piece of luggage into his car. She had offered to have him drive Noire to the airport. "At home, I suppose." It was her final morning in Haiti and Noire didn't want to reveal the rest of the story.
Madame Jean-Juste sucked her teeth and put her hands on her hips, pulling her housecoat taut over her pendulous breasts and splaying at the bottom to reveal a wrinkled knee. "He loves you. You know that?"
She spoke as if Noire must not have known, as if her revelation would soften Noire's heart to him. Of course she knew how Pierre felt. He always said how he felt. That was the problem. Noire didn't want to know half of what he shared. She knew about his father's torture and death at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes during the elections in 1987 and about his wife's mysterious drowning in 1999. He had more baggage than she wanted to carry. She had rented out her body to him for the price of an orgasm. Haiti had not been what she expected and had left her tired. "I'm going back home, Madame Jean-Juste. And, for better or worse, home for me is the United States."
"The U.S. is overrated."
Noire hunched her shoulders. Maybe that was true, but what did it matter.
"The two of you could live in Miami!"
Noire laughed now, momentarily entertained by her landlady's desire for a happy ending to a story she barely knew. At eighty-six years old, Madame Jean-Juste had outlived two husbands and complained to Noire about the erectile dysfunction of her seventy-four-year-old boyfriend. "If anything changes with Pierre and me, you'll be the first to know." Noire jogged up the stairs and hugged her good-bye. Madame Jean-Juste had been an unexpected source of delight for Noire during a year that had made her more cynical about the world's disregard for the black and the poor, of which Haiti had plenty.
Noire plopped into the backseat of Raynald's car and rolled up the window, adjusting her eyes to the tinted glass that cast a gray-green hue on a predawn Pétionville, Haiti's sole wealthy suburb that clung to mountains that rose up from the frenetic energy of Port-au-Prince. She relished the drive from Madame Jean-Juste's house to Guy Malary International Airport in Port-au-Prince for her return flight to New York. The flight didn't leave until eight forty-five, but she wanted to make the fifteen-minute drive to the airport before the crush of traffic threatened her ability to make her flight. Noire had enough international travel under her belt to know how unexpected and drawn out the whole process could be.
And despite her great affection for Haiti--and her elderly landlady in particular--she was anxious to get home. In her twelve-month stay, she had never adjusted to the country's peculiar brand of class discrimination and the fact that she always found herself on the side of the rich, the influential, and the mixed race. To be sure, her skin color matched that of many of the children who dodged open sewers in their bare feet to sell peanuts and beg for change. But her features, her not-quite-kinky hair, and, most important, her American dollars and accent gave her access to the rarified world of Haiti's elite. And even as she sought to understand the strange tension between Haiti's elite minority and its economically and politically disenfranchised majority who all spoke Kreyòl (whether they admitted it or not), she knew that it was her privilege that bought her entry into both communities, one out of a perceived sense of parity, and the other out of learned deference. Noire was anxious to leave this world whose social hierarchy placed her in the role that she despised yet understood in . . .
Continues...
Excerpted from Hunger
by Erica Turnipseed
Copyright © 2006 by Erica Turnipseed.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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