I Just Wanna Testify (5 points)

I honestly couldn’t tell you why, but reading Just Wanna Testify felt like walking through a shopping mall covered in a thin, almost unnoticeable film of slime. I have always been put off by the bougie lifestyle, but when Cleage describes the way the vampire coven lives and works, it makes me want to skip ahead a couple pages. Which, in hindsight, is kind of what she is trying to make the reader feel. I think it has something to do with how the vampire mythos is used in this book. For all intents and purposes, the vampire women could just be diet-crazy and rich just like a lot of people in the world today. This interpretation has given me an insight to how older gothic novels would have felt to the readers who were living when books like Frankenstein and Dracula were new. How Serena talked about her and the other coven members put me on-edge, hesitant and anxious from the sense of power she gives off, must have been similar to the fear within the readers of the 1800’s.

Also, when reading this book I noticed a trend in vampire fiction that has stayed almost completely consistent over the many decades that vampires have been reinvented and written about. Vampires have never been written deliberately poor or middle class. They have consistently been wealthy enough where money is just as important a power as their fangs. I feel like this has come from a place of fear, intimidation, and naivete that real life wealthy people tend to have. The sense of superiority and ignorance for human kind can be an allegory for the kinds of feelings that the extremely wealthy have for the poor. It was a deliberate choice then for Cleage then to have her story be put in a utopia of sorts where poverty is not a fear for the people of West End under the protection of Blue. The power and influence that Blue has is just as impressive as Serena’s, which levels the playing field in a genre that ends to focus on power imbalance. As a result, the story feels like a game of tag between Serena and Blue.

I could tell that the book was not written for me, so it was really hard to keep engaged. But, it did give me a lot of insight into some of the fantasies and focuses of African American women that I would not have had if I had not chose to read it.