We are proud to feature an excerpt from Swift River by Essie Chambers.
In her debut novel, Chambers introduces readers to Diamond Newberry who is a teenager in 1987 learning how to drive, how to love her body, and how to be the only Black girl in an all-white community. Diamond’s coming-of-age story is equally heartbreaking as it is uplifting. Chambers breathes live into intimate scenes with characters that will warm your heart.
We asked the author to set up the excerpt with a short Q&A below, followed by an excerpt from the book’s first chapter.
Can you briefly summarize the excerpt you’re sharing with readers today?
This is the beginning of the first chapter of the novel. It’s the summer of 1987, and Diamond Newberry has just turned 16. She lives with her mother in a crumbling New England mill town, where Diamond is the only person of color. The chapter sets up the many challenges she faces and teases a series of looming mysteries and uncertainties: the disappearance of her dad seven years ago, the murky history of a Black community that used to live in Swift River, and the promise of the money from a life insurance policy that her mother thinks will save them. Diamond hatches the beginnings of a plan to escape it all.
What was the writing process like for this specific essay? What was the hardest part to get right?
Swift River came together over the course of many years; this chapter was the first thing I wrote. I had originally intended for it to be a short story. By the time I came back to it, it was part of a whole novel with all these new layers and characters. I needed to plant those new seeds in this section. Diamond’s oddball perspective had also become clearer to me, and I had to make sure this was the filter through which she was seeing the world. This was the most challenging part—honing her voice, which had to carry a lot of pain, but at the same time show glimmers of hope and scrappiness and humor.
How does this excerpt speak to the rest of the book?
It sets up the central issues for Diamond, gives the reader a sense of her desperation, but also her resilience. It establishes Diamond’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother, their isolation and rootlessness. Diamond’s arc is very much about finding connection, about finally getting rooted by family and history. This is the beginning of that journey.
You have a background in film. What did you learn from a storytelling perspective from that experience that you were able to bring into writing your novel?
There is so much worldbuilding that can happen inside a single frame of film; I love trying to come up with ways to describe a setting from the point of view of a character as if it contains the entire story inside of it.
I also learned a ton about structure and pacing, creating momentum from having to tell a story within the confines of thirty minutes to few hours. In film and television, you have to be incredibly efficient and strategic with the emotional beats in a scene; that practice spilled over into how I crafted the scenes in this novel. There was a lot more room to spread out, obviously, but I developed a process that helped me map out clearly what was happening for each character in every scene. Particularly with the dialogue-driven scenes, where you have to create that volley between characters and make sure every line deepens character or moves the story forward. But I much prefer the space and freedom of novel writing!
An excerpt from Swift River
The summer after I turn sixteen, I am so fat I can’t ride my bike anymore. So I let it get stolen on purpose.
“You got a new boyfriend?” Ma the smartass yells out the living room window, laughing through her smoker’s cough when she sees me lying on the ground in front of our house, wrapped around the bike with a bucket and a cleaning rag.
“Are you humping that thing?” she asks. I ignore her and she leaves me be, puffing away on her Newports—a faceless blob in the dirty window screen. The whole house looks like it’s having a cigarette.
It’s hot out, and the bike is fiery from lying in the yard all morn- ing. I’m curled around the frame so I can get to all of its parts; it’s the only position my body will allow. I scrub at the street grime until a bright red frame pokes through for the first time in years. It mocks the rest of the junk around it: skeleton lawn chairs, broken push mower, Pop’s dead car in the driveway.
“You trapped under there?” Ma shouts as she watches me struggling to stand. She is testing my forgiveness with her stupid jokes. An hour ago she told me she got herself fired again, this time for telling off her boss at the fertilizer store after he refused to pay for another sick day. Now we will have to live off my check from the Tee Pee Motel, the same job she had when I was little. I keep re- minding her we’ll have to choose between electricity and heat once the winter comes, but she tells me not to worry myself, that adults plan things and their kids don’t always know about it. “I have my ways,” she sings from her crater in the couch.
Ma is a break in the long line of a family who worked the same one job their whole lives. I am a break in their pure Irish stock; the first Black person, the end of the whites.
“Something blocking your ears?” She tries again. I decide I will not speak to her for two days.
As I push myself onto all fours, a laser-like sunray jumps across my hand, spilling onto the grass in front of me. I turn to see my neighbor and her friends—dumb freshman girls—out on the front lawn in fluorescent bathing suits laughing and trying to beam me with the tinfoil tanning reflectors they hold under their chins. They are close, only two houses away, but their faces are a blur of baby oil and braces. I like to think that if I wanted to, I could stroll over there and dump my dirty bike water on their ratty towels and pale, greasy bodies. Slap a face or two. But I’m not like Pop; I can’t fight everything, everyone.
“Thank you for all our times together.” I touch the wheel of my bike. “I made you pretty again. You’re free.”
Later that afternoon, I lay the bike gently against a light pole outside the CVS like an offering. Ma has sent me there to get her monthly prescriptions, which takes about five minutes, but I sit in the back of the magazine aisle for an hour reading National Gardening Magazine and Seventeen until the cashier tells me to buy something or go find a library somewhere. When I come outside and see the empty space around the pole, my panic is not for the bike, it’s for the basket. I’ve forgotten to take out the ribbons my Grandma Sylvia had woven in—rows of bright red, white, and blue stripes that purred in the wind the faster I went. They’re the same ribbons she braided into my hair when I was little, when my kinky curls just wanted to feather like the rest of the girls. I’m still sick over Ma throwing away Grand- ma’s sewing supplies after she died. Ma does not like the clutter of feelings. She saves empty Coke bottles (“they make pretty vases”), old TV Guides, and a garbage bag full of travel-sized lotion she stole from the Tee Pee when she worked in housekeeping. But her own mother’s things get tossed.
In this moment, I’m so mournful for Grandma Sylvia’s yarn and zippers and buttons and scraps of cloth that smelled of Jergens lotion that I feel dizzy and heavy, like the full weight of me—two hun- dred and ninety-eight pounds last time I checked—might fall out on the sidewalk. For a second I consider yelling Police! into the empty street, but I remember the feeling of my legs pressed into my stom- ach with each spin of the pedal, my body no longer making room for my lungs so that I can breathe. My three stomach rolls have filled out into one solid ball. I am unbendable. My legs are heavy ghosts that move me from place to place. The bruises and stinging raspberries all over my body from weekly falls are constant reminders that the bike doesn’t want me on it anymore; we don’t want each other.
Goodbye, Grandma ribbons.
It’s a two-mile walk home from the CVS—a new, ugly brick building on the south side of Main Street. It stands apart from the long row of old-timey storefronts that follow, with their thick, hazy glass windows and cutesy signs hand-painted by someone’s cousin who can do calligraphy. The paper mill, where Pop used to work, is close by. Ma and me live all the way north, in one of the identical houses that once belonged to the French Canadian mill families. White people call it “The Quarters,” but there used to be Black people who lived there before them—they ran the textile mill. They called it “Little Delta,” because the area was shaped like a triangle and reminded someone of their old Southern home by a river. They all left except my great-aunt, Clara. She died before I was born, so I never even got to meet her. Pop says she was a midwife. Every now and then someone says, Your grandma delivered my dad! And I wonder why that doesn’t make them treat us any different, any better.
I don’t call Ma to come get me from the CVS. She can’t drive, and taxis are expensive—just to be used in an emergency or on payday. We’re the only people in town who actually walk to get somewhere. There are no buses except for school buses, and the only real side- walks wind themselves around the mile of stumpy blocks that make up the downtown. Sometimes you see Homeless Richard hugging the edge of the road near the entrance to the highway, skip-kicking imaginary rocks at the entry-ramp sign like he’s testing the limits of a force field. Ever since the start of the deer overpopulation we call “Deer- pocalypse,” you also might see a few deer on a street corner, shuffling around like bored teenagers. Otherwise, it’s just us out there, single file on the left side against traffic when we don’t mind the walk, and doubled up in the right-side flow of it when we’re hitching.
On my bike, the stretch of town between Main Street and home had been a haze of places to pass without stopping, all the shitty memo- ries of each fuzzed over by the air on my face and the pounding in my chest. Now, on foot—all kinds of terrible in sharp focus: here comes the barbershop where they refused to cut Pop’s Afro; there’s the moldy-smelling department store selling stale saltwater taffy and Garfield the cat figurines; or the diner where Ma and me used to come for splurge Sunday dinners until I was accused of stealing tips off of tables.
I’m on foot, people stare so hard it’s like I’m on fire. Heads in cars flip all the way around. Workers in shop windows stop what they’re doing to look at me blank-faced—as if I’m not their daughter’s classmate, their friend’s co-worker, like they haven’t known me my whole life. When I forget the spectacle of myself, I look behind me to see who is the me. Sometimes Pop used to stop in his tracks and stare back, saying nothing, until they turned away. Mostly he ignored them until the final bad months. Nowadays, Ma might yell something like, What, are you jealous? and then swish her skinny ass in their direction.
Halfway home, I take a break at the only pay phone on Main Street. It has a seat and the doors close and I’m grateful; everything hurts. Feet, knees, swollen sausage fingers—the pain throbbing out a code: Rest until you’re ready. This has been happening a lot lately, where an ache plucks at some body part and then a message shoots right to my brain. Not like my inner genius or God speaking; just a clear, steady voice that’s me but not mine. That’s how it came to me—I may be too fat for my bike, but I’m going to learn how to drive. I haven’t told Ma. The thought is like a puddle with a river inside it.
Excerpted from Swift River by Essie Chambers. Copyright © 2024 by Essie Chambers. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.