![]() Sexton wants to deliver the warmth of a family saga with an overall mood of uplift, but she also seeks to write a novel about a neighborhood in crisis and what it means to try to chase your dreams when a wrecking ball is swinging right toward them. ![]() On the Rooftop, as a novel, has a balancing act to manage. This neatly encapsulates the novel’s assertion that to be part of a meaningful community, you must first figure out who you are. “The world can’t change without me,” Esther muses in one of her first attempts at songwriting. The tension arises from the push and pull of Vivian and her daughters, wrestling with what they can do alone and what they can do as a group. This is where Vivian is able to center herself, and it’s easy to see why a girl group would be so foundational to her ambition: not just music but strength in numbers. The novel’s liveliest moments often take place in the family’s church, commingling message, music, and collective spirit. Still, as much as this is a story about the lives of Vivian and her daughters, it’s also a story about community-how groups serve as sources of support and liberation, too. She knew to let them sit on the streetcar first. Chloe, for all her brashness, recognizes the unspoken racist rules, even in San Francisco: “Still, she knew to look down when the whites passed. Esther needs persuading to take part in unifying residents. Residents and business owners are increasingly content to take buyouts, skeptical that they have the power to resist. But narrow ambition, and the fear that drives it, occupy much of the atmosphere of the Fillmore as Sexton has imagined it. Vivian is the starkest visualization of this idea. One of the chief themes of On the Rooftop is the way anxiety constricts ambition. “She might as well have been in Louisiana,” Vivian thinks when Ruth tells her she’s pregnant, “wandering the rows, twisting the cotton from the bolls, beginning the terrible trek back home.” With every crisis, Sexton returns to the history that terrifies the character. (The echoes of Fiddler on the Roof are palpable.) Vivian is mortified by it all. So much for salvation, or the Salvations. Chloe, the most progressive and precocious of the three-her closest friend is a gay man-flirts with a kind-eyed white jazz aficionado and considers a potential path replacing Ruth. Esther becomes increasingly involved in efforts to resist eminent domain. Ruth, the natural lead of the group, gets pregnant. Deep thoughts about equality and racial justice won’t be necessary just make sure the young women stay focused on music. A manager has persuaded Vivian that girl groups are on the rise, that they have a shot at stardom. You see any of that in San Francisco?” Instead, she’s pinned her hopes on her three daughters, Chloe, Ruth, and Esther, who form a vocal trio, the Salvations, that draws crowds at a Fillmore supper club. “Don’t get me started on the lynchings,” she remembers, “so many at one time, my mama wept every time my daddy left the house. Her relief at being out of the South is so intense that she is quick to shut down disruptive talk of civil rights. The load-bearing beam for much of that anxiety is Vivian, a widow who moved to San Francisco from Louisiana to escape the Klan and Jim Crow. Rather, it goes deep into the early moments of the change and deftly captures the anxiety it created. Sexton’s novel isn’t about those results-it doesn’t tunnel into the future. At the time, the predominantly Black neighborhood was targeted for redevelopment, thanks to debatable claims of blight within the next three decades, the neighborhood would be transformed and its residents dispersed. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s sprightly, emotionally savvy third novel, On the Rooftop, is set in 1953 in San Francisco’s Fillmore district.
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