Honest "Bird" Bennett is a young Black girl with a hunger to learn what lies beyond the walls she shares with her mother, Maddy, and her grandmother, Odelia. Their home resonates with the hum of Maddy's sewing machine, echoes of Bird preparing supper, and Odelia's stories of times past. The women live in Bennettsville, Illinois, a freedmen's town established by Bird's great-grandfather, where rural life pulses with church song and where peace is fragile with the neighboring white town, Tuckersville. As Bird comes of age, she must reckon with turbulence at home and with what it means to fall in love with a childhood friend. As an adult, rejecting a life of self-denial, Bird spreads her wings and finds a new home in Harlem. After a decade of growth and loss, she is summoned back to Bennettsville to confront her kin and her past as Tuckersville residents try to drive Black families from their own land.
In Belonging to the Air: A Novel, author Avery Irons follows one family's intergenerational experience of the Great Migration. Among the novel's cast of characters are a blind matriarch, women who heal with herbs, and queer lovers. Irons's evocative and lyrical prose imagines a world in which these complicated characters try to care for one another in a country that does not care about them. History talks to and through itself as elders confront youngsters and as racism shapeshifts in rural and urban settings across the decades. With dialogue that jumps off the page and rings with a truth that lingers, Belonging to the Air urges readers to think about how constructions of race, love, and freedom have—and have not—changed over time, demanding that we consider the wisdom of our inner selves while we listen to that of our elders.