"We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we're gone. Cha-Cha knew his family was no different. The house on Yarrow Street was their sedentary mascot; its crumbling facade the Turner coat of arms."
Angela Flournoy's novel "The Turner House" is the story of a now-weary house on Detroit's east side and the family that lived there. Thirteen Turner children _ beginning with Cha-Cha (Charles), born during World War II; ending with Lelah, whose arrival came just months after the 1967 Detroit riots _ grew up in the house, knowing every inch of its yellow-papered walls and narrow staircase, listening to its secrets. Now the children are grown and must decide what to do with the empty house (now worth far less than what their ailing mother, who's moved to the suburbs, owes on the mortgage) _ and come to terms with their memories of it.
Published in 2015 (and in paperback last year), "The Turner House" _ Flournoy's debut _ received much acclaim: It was a National Book Award finalist, an NAACP Image Award nominee, and singled out as one of the best books of the year by numerous national publications.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy grew up in Southern California but knew Detroit well; her father, who was from there, often took her and her sister to visit. Around 2010, during her second semester in Iowa, she began thinking about setting a story in Detroit.
"I had been visiting more often because I lived in the Midwest," she remembered. "I had been thinking about the changes that I had witnessed in that city, over my time visiting it throughout my life." She also was struck by what happened to the housing market in Detroit: how so many families, like the Turners, watched as their in-city homes crumbled in value, or simply crumbled.
"On both sides of the Turner house, vacant lots were stippled with new grass. Soon ragweed, wood sorrel and violets would surround the crumbling foundations, the houses long burned and rained away. The Turner house, originally three lots into the block, had become a corner house in recent years, its slight mint and brick frame the most reliable landmark on the street."
Flournoy began by imagining the house _ on fictional Yarrow Street, but in a neighborhood like the one in which her father grew up. "I thought about the house for about 10 months before I really thought of any characters. I thought about who might want to live in a house like that, on the east side of the city, an area that's pretty depopulated. I started to kind of have this image in my head of a woman sneaking around the house at night." That was Lelah, the Turner daughter who struggles with a gambling addiction (rendered in gripping prose) and needs somewhere to live after being evicted from her home _ but doesn't want her siblings to know of her plight.
The story that emerged is one that centered on Lelah and her oldest brother, Cha-Cha, a truck driver whose childhood encounter with a family ghost _ "a haint, if you will" _ bookends the story. "I thought, having these two people that are a generation apart would be good entry points into the larger dynamics of the family and the changing setting," Flournoy said. The other siblings, helpfully enumerated for us on a family tree, appear in lesser roles, contributing to the cacophony of voices that is the Turner family.
Though Flournoy borrowed a few details from her father's large family (he is, she said, the fifth of 13 children), the Turners are a fictional invention. "I decided that one thing that I had never really read was what it's like to be part of a big family, in the 21st century. They're not as common as they were a couple of generations ago, but they still exist, and it helped shape the person I became."
