Sounder
By: William H. Armstrong / Narrated By: Avery Brooks
Length: 2 hrs and 21 mins
Brilliant narration of a story that’ll break your heart
Lemme just get the narration out of the way—If the spare and descriptive words don’t draw you in when this audiobook opens, complete with bluesy guitar fingering, then the warm, deep tones of Avery Brooks most certainly will. From the get-go, we’re immersed in the utter loneliness that’s dispelled by the love of one family member for another, the crisp and cold winds that are withstood even as the Boy asks his questions to the Father. Brooks captures each word, each sentence, with a rumbly, yet smooth voice, and each character comes to life whether they’re young and innocent, or they’re older and have been through much, and seen even more. Top notch narration, truly!
When I introduced this as one of the audiobooks in the Listening to Now section, I’d glibly quipped about perhaps needing a hankie/tissue when all was said and done. Boy, was THAT an understatement, or what?!?
This story, a young black boy trying to navigate his second-class status in a world of unfairness, cruelty, harsh realities—a world where whites only chain, shoot, jeer, condemn—is about as cold and raw as it gets. Especially as we come to see the Boy feeling anger, feeling hatred, wanting to strike out/back as he grows older and deals with more.
Well, here it is: A struggling family where the Man is a sharecropper goes through a period of want that is far greater than what they’ve known before; he steals meat (Dunno if he actually slaughtered the whole hog for it, but ham and sausages were brought back home). It’s like Christmas for three days, the family finally feeling less than hunger for that time. But white men come, finding the evidence to accuse and condemn him for stealing. The Boy watches as the Father is bound in chains, and as the faithful dog, Sounder, is blasted away with a gun for trying to get the Man back.
The search for Sounder begins, as does the attempt to find where his father is sent as time goes on. Anywhere there’s a prison, the Boy goes; anywhere there’s a chain gang, there will be the Boy. Through the intervening years, a chance to be educated is offered the Boy, Sounder returns, and the Mother works hard to keep the Boy and his younger brother and sister alive and fed, even as she hums with worry (With Avery Brooks singing the most sorrowful song about burdens and loneliness that I’ve ever heard).
I like that author William H. Armstrong never gives anybody (Except for Sounder) a name, as it’s a story that is true for a multitude of black families in what Wikipedia says is around the 1950s. Grave injustice, mistreatment, hunger and want.
But there are the bonds of loving family, and how the Boy and the Mother treat and respect Sounder also is hankie-worthy: He is family, as much as anyone. The half-dead dog lives in the hope of seeing his master, the Man, again, waiting by the road where the Man was taken. The Boy gets his life’s desire of learning how to read, and there is hope as the story ends, even as sorrow takes its sad and final toll.
I don’t know how he did it, but Armstrong managed to make Sounder, a tale of strife and sadness, into a testament of courage and hope. Yes, you cry. But oh thank GOD, you feel the lives of love, and you’re left with a sense of lightness.
Of rightness. I’ll be listening to this one again and again…
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