Book Review By Dr. Brenda M. Greene
“Words let you outlive yourself. They take your energy, your life force, and speak for you long after you’re gone.”
Black (Issac’s Song, 308)
Daniel Black’s novels, Don’t Cry for Me (Hanover Square Press, 2022) and Issac’s Song (Hanover Press, 2025) explore father/son relationships from the perspectives of Jacob Swinton, a dying man who writes letters to his son Issac, and Issac Swinton who keeps a journal that explores his relationship with his father. Jacob writes to reconcile with his son after years of an estranged relationship, and Issac writes in a journal to explore his origin story, his “coming out” as a gay man, and his relationships with his mother, in his eyes, a loving woman, and his father, in his view, a caustic and bitter man who he has not spoken to in years.
The themes that emerge in these novels reflect the history of enslaved Black people in the south, the sacrifices that families made to escape poverty and the Jim Crow south, the value of an education and reading, the challenges facing queer Black men, the effects of loneliness and depression on the human spirit, and the value and need for love and a beloved community. At the core of Black’s novels are the complex and complicated relationships between a straight Black man who came of age in the 40s and 50s and his gay son who grew up in the 80s and 90s.
In Don’t Cry for Me, Jacob begins his letters to his son by recounting how he regretted never talking to his father who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Thus, he and his father could never talk honestly about how they had hurt or disappointed each other over the years. He reflects on how “. . . Daddy’s mind left like a dream at dawn.” Don’t Cry for Me is Jacob’s attempt to break the cycle of regret. He is determined to connect to his son.
The epistolary form of writing in fiction is a genre that brings readers into the interior lives of the protagonist. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, TaNehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons illustrate this. Don’t Cry for Me engages readers with the interior life of Jacob. Readers feel his loneliness, emotional pain, and anger at himself as he writes his letters while struggling with cancer over the last four months of his life.
He spends hours listening to music, reading, and contemplating his actions towards his son, his wife, and his grandparents. His journey is an awakening, a testimony to what it feels like to confront one’s self, and on the ways in which grief and emotional scars can tear at one’s soul. Jacob tells Issac, “When you read this, I’ll be in the next world. Don’t cry for me son. I’ve cried enough for myself. And have no regrets about us.”
Readers do not have an opportunity to witness Issac’s responses to his father in Don’t Cry for Me. However, in Issac’s Song, a companion novel, readers enter into the world of Issac. A therapist asks Issac to tell his life story and to capture the emotions of the experiences he has had with his father, mother, and friends.
The reader witnesses Issac’s responses to his father, his questions about his father’s relationship to him, and his conflicts about his sexuality and identity as he struggles to fulfill his parents’ dreams to become a successful straight Black man. In telling his story and writing in his journal over 45 days, he gains a deeper understanding and appreciation for what his father has tried to convey to him in his letters. He also comes to an understanding of his family history and how that has shaped his relationships with both of his parents. Issac, like Jacob in Don’t Cry for Me, experiences an awakening.
The value of reading and acquiring an education are also major themes in both novels. Books open up new worlds for both Jacob who did not formally learn to read and for Issac who discovers what he missed in not reading and studying the history, literature, and culture of Black people. Issac writes: “Words let you outlive yourself. They take your energy, your life force, and speak for you long after you’re gone.”
Jacob’s and Issac’s journey will resonate with fathers and sons who have been searching for ways to connect in meaningful ways and may provide the impetus to initiate conversations that may be difficult. Daniel Black asks readers to “reconsider the capacity of our father’s hearts. Many of them were handed so little, yet we expected so much. Don’t Cry for Me and Issac’s Song also symbolize a healing call for fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, families, and the entire community.
Daniel Black is an author and professor of African American studies at Clark Atlanta University. His novels include Issac’s Song, Don’t Cry for Me, The Coming, Perfect Peace, and They Tell Me of a Home.
Dr. Brenda M. Greene is an Author, Professor Emerita, and Founder and Executive Director Emerita of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. For more information, visit https://www.drbrendamgreene.com