Lou graduates high school and goes on to be a reporter for the Times, writing the obituaries and death reports of the city’s Black, brown, and poor white Catholic communities. She knows him, but cannot recall from where.
It is in this gym where a Black fireman, Captain Jefferson Clayton, arrives one day to help an injured fighter, and Lou feels time stop as she recognizes the man from sketches she has been drawing.
Lee spends his days training fighters to find their power shot, Lou and Esther finish their school days in the gym doing homework, sneaking wine, and watching men spar. Lee built his boxing gym to serve the people of “the most racially and religiously mixed neighborhood in Los Angeles,” where, despite the oppressive systems in place, people still believe in the American Dream, “an idea not limited to race, religion, tribe, or culture,” Lou narrates-adding, “we’re told.” While Mr. Lee, owner and trainer of a boxing gym in Boyle Heights. She keeps this power hidden from her new friend, Esther, an aspiring Chinese-American actress and the daughter of Mr. Lou discovers quickly that her body heals instantly from wounds and injury, and does not keep scars. “We’re all on the verge of somebody else’s violence,” muses Sarah, a Black woman serving a prison sentence 100 years in the future, in Chapter Zero. Though detached from memories and familial identity, Deón’s protagonist inherently understands the Black experience and the violence she anticipates her body, and others’, will encounter in the story, one of the main themes of the novel.
Released into foster care to a loving Black family in South Central Los Angeles, she is given the name Louise-Lou for short.
Desperate to regain her memory and find a shred of familiarity, she is instead quickly arrested. Natashia Deón’s second novel, The Perishing, is both a work of compelling fiction and social commentary on the past, present, and future cycle of racial violence we find ourselves in, as a nation that birthed itself through slavery and built itself on capitalism through enslavement.ĭeón begins the novel, set in 1930’s Los Angeles, with her protagonist, a young Black woman, awakening in an alley-naked, disoriented, and immediately engaged in a fight for her survival.
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