I probably never would have read this book if it hadn’t been for Heather Drake of the Pittsfield Barnes & Noble. “I just finished the weirdest novel,” she said, “and I can’t stop thinking about it.” I found it on the shelf, started reading it over a large decaf latte in the Café, and ended up buying it and taking it home.
Helen Campbell’s first novel, Turnip Blues, is the story of two 75-year-old Slav-American (“Hunkie”) widows who set off on a road trip from their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, to visit the burial place of Bessie Smith in Sharon Hill, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. When Mrs. Lemack reads in a newspaper article that the late blues singer — her lifetime idol — rests in an untended grave in a run-down cemetery, she is determined to go there and make sure that Bessie receives the care and respect she deserves. After much pleading and argument she persuades her childhood friend, Mrs. Kuzo, to accompany her, and off they go in Mrs. Lemack’s Firebird, stocked with their suitcases and “Three sacks of groceries, […]gardening tools, twenty pounds of peat moss, […] beach towels, raincoat, boots, straw hat, crossword puzzles, and Parcheesi,” along with a good supply of Bessie Smith tapes for musical accompaniment.
Mrs. Kuzo and Mrs. Lemack — both named Mary, and called Masha — grew up together during the Depression in Braddock’s poor immigrant community, where the "Hunkies" were at the bottom of the social ladder, looked down on for their Eastern European origins and derided for their food, dress, and heavily accented English. The two girls were not good students, and the best they could look forward to was marriage and a houseful of kids, if they were lucky, or long hours and low pay in a factory, if they were not. It was a world in which a good husband was a man with a steady job who stayed out of jail, brought home most of his paycheck, and didn’t hit his wife too often.
The narrator is Mrs. Kuzo, who during the course of the trip tells us the story of her life and that of a cornucopia of strange and colorful friends, neighbors, and relatives, most of whom found ways to run afoul of the law and/or social convention. It is a tale of hardship, ingratitude and heartbreak — but also of love, perseverance, and durable family ties — in which almost any hurt can be made less painful by a sympathetic ear, a warm hug, and a plate of hot buttered turnips.
The story that emerges through Mrs. Kuzo’s reminiscences begins in her childhood home, where she lived with her drunken grandfather, bootlegging mother, and three siblings. Her father — the only man her mother ever actually married — died before Masha was old enough to fix him in her memory. She spent the rest of her childhood repelling advances from her mother’s live-in boyfriends, dodging blows from her cruel brother, Nicky, and caring for her twin sisters, Lily and Annie. The catastrophe that occurs one day, as she takes her eyes off the twins for a brief moment, casts a shadow over the rest of her life, like the one that hovers over the Firebird on the cover of the book.
Interwoven through these reminiscences is the story of Mrs. Kuzo’s lottery ticket. When she heard she had the winning number, she began making excited plans: "At last, I could buy a new Dodge, remodel my kitchen, eat sirloin. Even get the water sucked out of my cellar." But as soon as she started for Harrisburg to cash in the ticket, her car was hit by a bird, recalling the one that flew into the house like an evil omen on the day of four-year-old Lily’s accident. Her earlier elation turns to dread and the conviction that the money is tainted and must be used in some special way to avoid the doom it carries. She spends months worrying about how to dispose of the money, or whether she should even claim it at all, and it is not until she reaches Philadelphia that we learn what she has done with her winnings.
The presiding angel of the novel is Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, who grew up a poor orphan in Chattanooga, leaving home as a teenager to sing and dance in traveling tent shows, carnivals and honkytonks. Although the crowds loved her and she made a bundle of money in her lifetime, she spent it all on "booze and cards and low-down men," and died just as broke as she had begun, under the wheels of a truck late at night on a Mississippi road. Despite all the bad things that happened to her, however, Bessie always kept on going her own way, with grit, gusto and humor.
These are the qualities that show up again and again in the book’s two unlikely heroines, throughout their entire life histories, as well as during their seven-hour journey across Pennsylvania to Mount Lawn Cemetery — a trip that ends in a thunderstorm, a visit to the home of Mrs. Kuzo’s niece, Vicky, and a revelation that would have changed Mrs. Kuzo’s entire life if she had known about it earlier. This is a sad, funny and, ultimately, a heartening novel — and a real page-turner. Thanks, Heather.
More by Helen Campbell
Paperback Released 1998-05 By Spinsters Ink Books List Price: $10.95 USD New From: $0.89 In Stock Used From: $0.01 In Stock 
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