Novelist Tina McElroy Ansa Passed Away On
September 10, 2024 🕊

Authors Tina McElroy Ansa and Paula T. Renfroe pictured above in Atlanta, Georgia at the 2008 National Book Club Conference.

 

Tina McElroy Ansa, [Class of ’71], who passed away on September 10, 2024, was more than a novelist, publisher, filmmaker, teacher, and journalist — she was a cultural icon who wove the rich tapestry of the Southern experience into the fabric of American literature. She was 74.

—Spelman College

 

 

 

I learned of Tina McElroy Ansa‘s passing two weeks ago from a personal text that read, “The Hand I Fan With that we shared with your Mother,” followed by a YouTube link. That’s it. That’s all it said. So I just knew I was about to watch a phenomenal reading by Tina or better yet, an announcement that one of my favorite novels was finally getting made into a movie. I excitedly clicked the link and instead read the heartbreaking header: Beloved Author Tina McElroy Ansa Made Transition on September 10, 2024. I screamed, “Oh no!” and exited the app without even watching the video. I just couldn’t.

I’ve been on a social media hiatus for the month of September. Starving my distractions to feed my writing or something like that. 🤔 So discovering that the author—whose words were so beautiful, so lush, so moving that I’d played the audiobook version of ☛THE HAND I FAN WITH [pub: Anchor Books/Doubleday] with the rich, yet comforting voice of Sheryl Lee Ralph narrating as my beloved mother transitioned from this plane to the next—became an ancestor… well, it rattled me.

My mother and I shared an infatuation for the “absolutely delicious love story” about “Lena, now forty-five and tired of being ‘the hand everyone fans with…’ So she and a friend perform a supernatural ritual to conjure up a man for Lena.” I believe it was my sister-in-love (law) who recommended Tina’s third novel, The Hand I Fan With to me. I bought my mother—who’d lost her sight when I was in junior high school—the cassette version of the audiobook. Cassettes were easy to rewind and play back when she missed a line in the story or simply wanted to hear something again. Like the chapters featuring Lena’s lover Herman aka her man. Get it? Oh how we giggled shamelessly! Listen, no other author could make Herman a sexy name.

 

In writing about Lena, I had a chance to examine all of the sensations that give us pleasure–the feel of a silk stocking, the delicious smells of Herman, her lover. When I opened myself up to the world, everything became erotic–the clothes Lena wore, the furniture, the way Herman stands back in his legs, their lovemaking, Lena cooking Herman a meal. It’s the eroticism of everyday life.

—Tina McElroy Ansa on The Hand I Fan With

 

 

 

I could go on and on about The Hand I Fan With. It is truly one of my timeless faves. However, Tina wrote more novels including her debut ☛BABY OF THE FAMILY [pub: Harcourt, Brace & Company], ☛UGLY WAYS [pub: Harcourt Brace & Company], YOU KNOW BETTER [pub: William Morrow/HarperCollins], and her fifth and final novel ☛TAKING AFTER MUDEAR [pub: DownSouth Press], which is out of print and almost impossible to find. So if you’re fortunate to own a copy, take grand care of it. 

 

And today, I want to end with some words from Tina McElroy Ansa, Spelman class of 1971. (Applause.) In one of her novels, she wrote, simply: “Claim what is yours…You belong anywhere on this earth you want to.”

—Our Forever First Lady Michelle Obama at Spelman College Commencement May 15, 2011

 

 

 

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A post shared by Tina McElroy Ansa (@tinaonanisland)

I’m gonna miss seeing Tina’s posts pop up on my Instagram feed and Twitter timeline. I was so honored she followed me back and grateful I got to share with her that I played her audiobook for my mom. She was moved. It’s not a coincidence that her last post on IG featured Tina smiling gleefully and Vice President Kamala Harris—our first Black woman Vice President of the United States—in the background laughing. I do believe it was fate that our first Black First Lady, our Forever First Lady, Michelle Obama quoted Tina McElroy Ansa’s debut novel, Baby Of The Family at Spelman’s 2011 commencement. I’m so glad she was alive to experience and witness it all.

 

Oh, and I finally watched the beautiful tribute video where Tina’s talking about Sea Island and her cherished home St. Simons Island with visuals and sounds of the ocean throughout. I envision Tina’s ancestors welcoming her, the same way they surrounded Lena in the second to last chapter of The Hand I Fan With during a storm. “She called on all her powers of faith and belief and love and gratitude and did the work before her.” Rest In Eternal Peace and Power. 🕊

 

The Hand I Fan With Synopsis From Anchor Books/Doubleday Book Jacket:

Bestselling author Tina McElroy Ansa is back with another tale from Mulberry, Georgia, the richly drawn fictional town and home of the extraordinary Lena McPherson. Lena, now forty-five and tired of being “the hand everyone fans with,” has grown weary of shouldering the town’s problems and wants to find a little love and companionship for herself. So she and a friend perform a supernatural ritual to conjure up a man for Lena. She gets one all right: a ghost named Herman who, through dead for one hundred years, is full of life and all man. His love changes Lena’s life forever, satisfying as never before both her physical and spiritual needs. Filled with the same “humor, grace, and great respect for power of the particular” (The New York Times Book Review) as her previous critically acclaimed novels, Baby Of The Family and Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With is yet another memorable and life-affirming tale from one of America’s best-loved authors. 

 

Tina’s debut novel, Baby Of The Family was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

 

 

 Baby Of The Family Synopsis From A Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Company Book Jacket:

In a voice that is “strong and clear and distinctive” (Atlanta Magazine). Tina Ansa takes us into an absorbing world of eccentric characters with this evocative, delicately comic story of a young girl’s coming of age.

From the moment of her birth in a rural Black hospital in Georgia, Lena McPherson is recognized by all the nurses as a special child, one with the power to see ghosts and predict the future. Only Nurse Blooom knows the spells to ensure that the child will see benevolent spirits, not evil ones, but she hasn’t bargained for Lena’s mother, who scoffs at “old-timey” ideas and discreetly disposes of the the special tea the nurse has brewed. No ill effects are immediately apparent to Lena’s relatives in their signs of trouble, and Lena is prey to suspicions no on else need condider: a new face may be a new kid in town—or it may be a face from the grave.

From a special little girl, Lena grows into an especially fearful adolescent. Ultimatiely, she must accept that those she loves can give her love and nothing more and that she must find her own uncertain way. An evocative, delicately comic story of a girl’s coming of age.

 

Tina’s second novel, Ugly Ways

Ugly Ways Synopsis From Houghton Mifflin:

Three sexy, screwed-up Southern sisters come home to Mulberry to put their totally self-centered mother, Mudear, in her grave. We meet the Lovejoy women as they gather in their mother’s house to lay her and the demons she has dumped on them to rest. Mudear Lovejoy was the kind of mother who ruled her house and raised her daughters with an iron hand even after her “change.” Betty is her oldest daughter, big-boned and strong, the only one who remembers what Mudear was like before The Change. Emily is the middle child, restless and divorced, the one who every one assumed would be the first after Mudear to crack. The youngest is wild Annie Ruth, a TV anchorwoman who is pregnant out of wedlock and plagued by visions of menacing cats. Ernest, their father, is a kaolin mine worker who is so overwhelmed by all the females around him that sometimes he just wants to yell out, “Womens taking over my house!” As the sisters reminisce, they are unaware that even though Mudear’s body is laid out in Parkinson Funeral Home, she is not so easily buried. Her spirit refuses to die, and she floats around Mulberry, watching her daughters stretched out on her porch smoking cigarettes, drinking her husband’s liquor from her best glasses, and talking about marijuana like “some damn black girl hippies.” In alternating voices, each member of the Lovejoy family tells us what preys on his or her mind. As they prepare for the memorial, sit up with the body, and at the funeral itself, each must come to grips with her relationship to Mudear. At the same time, each must define what a mother, a black mother – their mother – is.

 

Tina’s fourth novel, You Know Better

 

 

You Know Better Synopsis From Harper Perennial:

As the tiny town of Mulberry, Georgia, celebrates its spring Peach Blossom Festival, things are far from peachy for three generations of Pines women.

Eighteen-year-old LaShawndra, who wants nothing more out of life than to dance in a music video, has messed up again — but this time she isn’t sticking around to hear about it. Not that her mother seems to care: Sandra is too busy working on her career and romancing a local minister to notice. It’s LaShawndra’s grandmother Lily Paine Pines who is out scouring the streets at midnight looking for her granddaughter. But Lily discovers she is not alone. A ghost of a well-known Mulberry pioneer is coming out of the shadows.

Over the course of one weekend, these three disparate women, guided by the wisdom of three unexpected spirits, will learn to face the pain of their lives and discover that with reconciliation comes the healing they all desperately seek. You Know Better brilliantly portrays the fissures in modern African American family life to reveal the indestructible soul that bonds us all.

 

Tina’s fifth novel, Taking After Mudear was published by Tina’s own publishing company DownSouth Press

Taking After Mudear Synopsis From DownSouth Press:

Taking After Mudear continues to follow the story of the three Lovejoy sisters and their mother Mudear, who is deceased but refuses to die, in the small Georgia town of Mulberry.

The baby of the family, Annie Ruth, — pretty, unmarried and hugely pregnant with the first Lovejoy grandchild — has moved back to Mulberry and is living with her big sister, Betty, a prosperous businesswoman. The middle girl, Emily, who claims she has taken a leave of absence from her job in Atlanta, has moved in, too, to help out and mostly raise the level of sibling tension and friction.

But just as the girls begin to think things have settled down for them, Mudear, their recently deceased, self-centered, self-focused mother, starts to make her presence felt again. And with the birth of Annie Ruth’s baby girl, the fragile Lovejoy family situation begins to totter even more.

With each piece of evidence that something otherworldly and strange is indeed still hanging around the Lovejoy household, the sisters suspect more and more that they are being haunted by their mother. With various “baby’s daddies” showing up and Lovejoys having signature meltdowns, things soon escalate into a full-flown supernatural Mulberry battle for the very life of the newborn child.