Down Here We Come Up, a novel by Sara Johnson Allen
Review by Jane Ward
In Down Here We Come Up, 2022 winner of the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize, debut novelist Sara Johnson Allen propels us into the lives of three women–mothers linked by the loss of their children and a thrumming maternal desire to reunite with them. The novel’s prologue, with its imagery of an apology issuing forth from a dying mother’s lips to rustle, snake, and skim its way across the country until it reaches her estranged daughter, promises dynamic storytelling ahead. The gripping novel that follows delivers on that promise.
As the story opens, Kate Jessup is working in a Harvard University-affiliated greenhouse, the lone GED recipient among PhD students of botany. Her wealthy, university professor boyfriend called in a favor to land her this job she is otherwise unqualified for, and it soon becomes clear that Kate has been getting through life this way: relying on her looks, a series of attachments, and a long list of dangerous impulses. These survival instincts were honed in childhood. Kate was raised in poverty with her twin brother, Luke, by single mother Jackie, who involved them in various frauds and cons and exposed them to many unstable, unhealthy personal relationships.
At fourteen, Kate was learning some things were best to get over with quickly…She had always suspected it, but now was learning it for sure. Everyone wanted something, and they would try to take it if you didn’t offer it up yourself. Even in your own house. Even when you thought you were alone. Even with your mother on the other side of the door. For all you knew, she might even be in on the deal. (p. 51)
To escape, Luke focused on getting into Harvard and getting ahead, while Kate retreated into an intense relationship with her hometown boyfriend, eventually becoming pregnant. She surrendered her baby in a closed adoption and followed Luke to Cambridge, piggybacking on his wealthy connections and his upward rise. Years later, a rare and surprising phone call from Jackie tenuously reunites the estranged mother and daughter. Jackie is dying and wants a favor: Kate must come back to North Carolina, and from there travel across the Mexican border to smuggle three children into the US to be reunited with their mother, Maribel. In return for making the dangerous trip, Jackie promises to supply Kate with the current address of the daughter she had surrendered years ago.
Kate is lured back into her mother’s orbit, tempted by this possible reunion with her child. Once home, though, the reality of her mother’s scheme involving guns and drugs and the rescue trip to Mexico settles in and sobers Kate. She believes the border crossing will be impossible, dangerous; she needs time to think about the way forward. But Maribel is determined, telling Kate, “That’s the kind of luxury you have. . .to think about it.” (p. 193) This woman’s determination, coupled with the criticism of Kate’s privilege, provide the needed push.
When Kate gets in the car with Maribel to travel to El Paso and then on to Juarez, the story’s tension is ratcheted up. She journeys through, and confronts her past in, parts of the country she has avoided visiting. Simultaneously, she delves into the parts of herself that she has also avoided confronting. Conversation in the car with Maribel offers Kate insight into a kind of mothering she has never known from Jackie and was prevented from providing to her own surrendered child. Johnson Allen also uses this long, hot drive to highlight the baked-in American hierarchy that favors rich over poor, white skin over brown. The drive and the rescue change Kate, allowing her to understand what she has squandered by letting this hierarchy and others’ expectations have their way with her.
Those with citizenship held fistfuls of options as valuable and malleable as gold…Kate had miscalculated many things. She had lost more than she had gained in the sum total of her twenty-six years, but she could choose who she wanted to be with, choose where to return, choose who she would become from here on out. (p. 241)
Down Here We Come Up tells a powerful story of three mothers who have lost their children in three different ways. Instead of being overwhelmed by the losses, Kate, Maribel, and Jackie aim to change the course of their relationships in the best ways they can. In between all the action, Johnson Allen never loses sight of these characters–their imperfections, their motivations, their humanity, and their desire to shake off the malaise that threatens the belief that every individual has an inherent human value and a need for autonomy.
Down Here We Come Up
by Sara Johnson Allen
Black Lawrence Press, August 2023
Paperback $19.95
ISBN-13 978-1-62557-056-7
Jane Alessandrini Ward is the author of In the Aftermath (She Writes Press, 2021), The Mosaic Artist (2011) and Hunger (Forge, 2001). She has been a contributing writer for an online regional and seasonal food magazine and a blogger and occasional host of cooking videos for an internet recipe resource. Jane lives in Massachusetts. To learn more, visit janeaward.com.