Payback

When I open a Bebe Moore Campbell book, whether memoir or novel, I know I’ll be fully immersed in whatever world she is re-creating, whether it’s her North Carolina childhood in “Sweet Summer” or the crumbling Philadelphia neighborhood of “Singing in the Comeback Choir.” But no one writes about Los Angeles as Campbell does, getting all the details right: what people are eating, how they do their hair or what they see when they drive down the streets. However, it’s not just the landscape that Campbell is interested in. It’s how we get along, or don’t, while we’re driving and eating and looking at one another from our cars or across our desks.

Campbell’s novel “Brothers and Sisters” took on banking, the L.A. riots and interracial friendship. “What You Owe Me” takes on Los Angeles again, giving readers a multigenerational saga that begins in a meticulously reinvented landscape of 1940s Los Angeles, where black men and women arrived from the South and remade themselves.

But this isn’t a historical novel. Jumping to contemporary L.A., Campbell looks at the lives of the emigrants’ children and grandchildren as they navigate cosmetics companies, barbecue joints, small homes in South-Central and anonymous luxury tracts in the San Fernando Valley. Campbell isn’t out to simply detail the journey for us; she wants us to make the connections between old L.A. and new, to see what we learned from our pasts that we so distrust one another now, to show how we manage to work and live with one another and make reparations for the mistakes of earlier generations, all set against the backdrop of wanting and working, Southern California style. While raising a chorus of voices in minor keys which chant distrust, remorse and anger, Campbell has ultimately written a novel about forgiveness and redemption.

Hosanna Clark, newly arrived in 1948 from racist Texas, where her family’s land was stolen by powerful white neighbors, meets Gilda Rosenstein, newly arrived from Nazi Germany, where her family perished in the Holocaust. The opening scenes are wonderful, as Campbell tenderly outlines their lives as maids in a downtown hotel, their suspicion, their tentative camaraderie and their discovery of common strengths: They are both saleswomen at heart, with the gift for convincing people that they need something new in their lives. When Gilda remembers a recipe for lotion manufactured by her father in prewar Poland, Hosanna realizes that hard-working black women need beauty products that, along with moisture and tint, leave behind a sense of self-worth and beauty.

Campbell’s details are lavish and funny and perfect when she writes about booming Los Angeles, where Hosanna and Gilda mix their lotion in hotel bathtubs, while Hosanna makes the rounds to sell it at black churches and salons and barbecue joints. But seeping underneath the prose and the lives she describes are the constant reminders of segregation and prejudice.

Gilda is a haunting character, her body disfigured by Nazi experimental surgery that she never understands, having emerged from forced anesthesia with a scar dividing her torso. Her voice is wonderfully cadenced and hesitant: “My uncle says I will be happy. He speaks of happiness as if it is a bus that will stop at the corner where I am waiting and pick me up,” she says to Hosanna one day. Hosanna is sturdy, practical and blunt: “When I was a child in Inez, white people would give their maids hand-me-down clothes; here in Los Angeles they passed down their neighborhoods. Watts fit me just fine.”

But as soon as Hosanna fully trusts Gilda, opening a joint bank account with their hard-earned cash and signing a contract as business partners, Gilda disappears with the money. Hosanna responds: “I should have known better than to trust a cracker. And that’s all Gilda was: a cracker with an accent. A goddamn Jew.”

Hosanna never recovers. She marries, has two daughters and sells lipstick and lotion from her car for the rest of her days, working herself to death on the road. But Gilda prospers and becomes a corporate cosmetic empire-maker much like Estee Lauder. Fifty years later, we are introduced to Matriece, the company’s newest vice president and Hosanna’s daughter.

Matriece is an immaculate cosmetics marketer with short hair and no man and a vague plan for retribution. She’s the opposite of her sister Vonette, whose imperfect life is just as carefully formed, her wild blond dreadlocks epitomizing her rejections of her mother’s life of business and beauty and no time at home. (“Fifty million hair care products for black women, and she decides not to comb hers at all,” says Hosanna, observing from the afterlife throughout the rest of the novel.)

“A grudge ain’t nothing but a brake; it’ll stop you every time,” someone tells Hosanna, but she passes her grudge to Matriece, setting in motion a story that is filled with absent fathers, black and white; work-obsessed mothers; corporate intrigues and contemporary isolation. The latter is delineated quite carefully by Campbell: Monetary success doesn’t necessarily equal happiness, though maybe Hosanna and Gilda had thought it would for their children. Interestingly, the most compelling characters are two men who show in their lives how community and family ties are more vital than status. There’s Boot, Vonette’s Mexican American husband, talker of smack, taker-in of stray kids, and there’s Mooney, Southern-born owner of the L.A. barbecue joint where Hosanna first mixed her lotion. Mooney sees entrepreneurial visions until the moment he dies, imbuing the novel with the spirit of black men who came to Los Angeles to make themselves over, as the women did, working hard, buying their first lipsticks from Hosanna.

Vonette, Boot and their three children struggle financially, but in the end, they help Matriece get over her anger at her lost father and her fear of committing to a good man. Co-workers at Gilda’s navigate gambling, affluent loneliness and teenage angst. Black businessmen, who knew Hosanna and know Matriece, try to bring Beverly Hills and Crenshaw Boulevard closer together and, in the end, Campbell’s novel remains a paean, almost, to the black Los Angeles of the past, the churches and salons and partnerships and companionship people long for. “Makeup ain’t nothing but a promise.” That’s what Los Angeles was, and Campbell makes us remember how it looked and smelled and tasted.