'The House of Eve' explores Black motherhood and associated stigma in the 1950s

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

In the 1950s, pregnancy and adoption were topics often clouded in shame, secrecy – or both. That's certainly true for Eleanor and Ruby, the two protagonists of Sadeqa Johnson's new novel, The House of Eve. As the two young Black women try to maneuver the misogynoir in the society around them, they're also confronted with the complicated realities of becoming a mother. In today's episode, Johnson tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe how those circumstances bring the characters together, and why she felt it was important to pay special attention to Black women's experiences during that time in history.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Linda Holmes. It's NPR's Book of the Day. There are a lot of stories that have been told about mothers, good ones, lousy ones, ones who are around and ones who are gone.
0:13.2	Sadiqa Johnson's novel, The House of Eve, set in the 1950s, is about two young black women who have really different experiences around mothers and
0:22.4	motherhood. Eleanor is in Washington, D.C., where she encounters a closed circle of elite
0:28.2	black families. Ruby is in Philadelphia, rejected by her own mother. They both fall in love
0:34.2	with men who are, at least in someone's eyes, the wrong men.
0:38.4	Johnson told NPR's Aisha Rasko that she thought about her own grandmother and her own mother,
0:44.0	as she wrote about having and not having children.
0:47.2	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:52.0	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources
0:57.8	and methods.
0:58.6	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand
1:03.1	why distant events matter here at home.
1:06.2	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:12.3	Young love can be so overwhelming, the stolen glances, the butterflies in the stomach,
1:19.0	the drama, but mixing the racism and misogyny of the 1950s, and that cute puppy love
1:26.0	could easily become corrosive and dangerous. That's the backdrop for the new novel, The House of Eve. It follows the lives of two young black women, teenager Ruby, trying to escape poverty in Philadelphia and Eleanor, a student at Howard University, trying to figure out how to fit in with the elites of
1:46.1	Washington, D.C. They both fall in love with men who society says should be off limits to them.
1:53.3	Sadiqua Johnson is the author of the House of Eve. She joins us now. Welcome to the program.
1:59.1	Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure and an honor to be here.
2:03.0	Tell us more about Ruby and Eleanor, whose lives eventually intersect. They have different backgrounds and interests, but I mean, I feel like they have some similarities too.
2:15.5	I think they have similarities as well. I mean, they're both two young girls.
2:20.4	Ruby is 15. And when I started working on the novel, the thing that I knew about her was that she was
	...

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