Ladybug

by Nikia Chaney

From poet, author, educator Nikia Chaney comes an experimental memoir of extreme poverty and schizophrenia, mothering and love. This is Inglewood, California, 1988, bright and loud, spilling brown colored kids out on the sidewalk, like butterflies or trash, their mothers screaming at them from the front door. You sigh. Niki, and your voice is quiet, serious, sometimes I hear people talking to me...Can you hear them too? I strain to listen. You have gone silent again, stiff and lost. I lean into your body and try with my whole being to hear. I make my posture like yours. I close my eyes thinking that it might help me hear better. I brace myself and imagine my ears becoming as big as an antenna, huge satellite dishes that will pick up all the sound in all the house in all the neighborhood in all the world. But I only hear the water running in the sink. Outside a bird caws, then the whoosh of a car driving by. Mommy. Mommy. I can hear them too. I can hear people talking too. I hear them. I hear them like you. You sigh, so relieved and happy. You smile at me in the mirror and laugh, a little, coming back into the room. I refuse to look at you, especially your eyes. I do not know what I will see.

200 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2022

Reviews

[Sam Farler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short memoir chronicles a life of suffering and setbacks under the cloud of multigenerational mental illness. Out of this suffering the author has risen up to create a work of great beauty.

Only once the last page is read and the book rests quietly on the end table, the two black figures of little girls on the cover silently waving, does the magnitude of what has transpired become fully clear. The descriptions are so subtle, so childlike, so immediate that the reader must fill in the many gaps with an adult's understanding. And then we are shaken, haunted.

Ladybug takes the reader on a journey that touches down at key points in the narrator's life. These points are not quite dreamlike, yet one almost feels outside of time. Throughout the memoir, an 'I' calls out to a 'You': The child Nikia calls out to her mother; the adult Nikia calls out her daughter.

Nikia's is a childhood is lived under the cloud of the emotional and financial struggles of a gentle, loving single Black mother who hears voices, raises two daughters, goes into business for herself, briefly remarries, flees to protect her girls, spends days on the couch staring into nothingness. Strongly affected by her mother's struggles, the child Nikia struggles with isolation and finding connection in school. The adult Nikia bears children of her own but experiences further heartbreak. She must send a child into residential care for the child's safety, as the child suffers intensely in a manner reminiscent of Nikia's mother. Throughout the text, Nikia's passion for life and resilience are ever present.

Deeply impressive, even astonishing, to me is the authenticity of the voice of the child narrator at various ages. We are truly in the mind of the kindergartener, the seven-year-old taken into the garage by her mother's boyfriend where the unspeakable happens ("And now I need to stop. I cannot breathe," p. 71), the nine-year-old who cannot take the stress any longer ("I break. I tear open like a piece of paper with a half-finished paragraph," p. 72), the angry twelve-year-old ("I can see the sadness grow and grow and grow until it molds over your soft parts like you are bread left out too long ..." p. 113).

I stand in reverent silence before this book.

[Azizi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend of mine gifted this book to me at a book club meeting. I was instantly intrigued by the title and the cover, but I didn't have much in the way of expectations because I had never heard of the book or the author. Needless to say, I was hooked after reading the first two pages. In many ways, I saw myself reflected in Chaney, a young black girl growing up with a mother who suffered from schizophrenia. While my mom does not have this particular illness, much of the instability, shame, and fear that she writes about is quite familiar. Chaney's account of her childhood is beautifully written despite the awfulness that she depicts. I have no doubt that her transparency about her experiences will be a soothing balm to many who have been impacted by a mentally ill family member. Also, Chaney includes her own struggles with depression, motherhood, and identity. There is a lot to unpack, and I wish that she'd written in more detail about her adult experiences, especially as the mother of a mentally ill child- something that I can also relate to; however, I'm mostly grateful that this book is in the world and that it can provide comfort and solace to those who feel alone or unseen.