[Gomez is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. In the following, she provides a thematic discussion of The Serpent's Gift, lauding Lee's focus on African-American history, the past, family, and personal relationships.]

"This all reminds me," says LaRue Smalls towards the end of The Serpent's Gift, "of a story I need to tell you. It's the history of the world, from the beginning to the present." At some point in Helen Elaine Lee's first novel it becomes clear that this is indeed what she herself is doing: she's sliced us a thick wedge of history. The story begins with a young mother fleeing the violence of a drunken husband in Detroit after the turn of the century, and ends two generations later. The layers of life—birth, anxiety, triumph, love, death, trouble and survival—define a Black family here, but in essence are the history of us all.

When Eula Smalls escapes with her two children she is taken in by neighbors, Ruby and Polaris Staples. They move into the basement apartment and become part of the Staples family. Over time the children—Vesta and LaRue Smalls, Ouida and Dessie Staples—grow to regard each other as siblings: the adults share responsibility for them and each other. Each character struggles to cope with the change that is a part of life. Many ideas and themes are woven through the story, but change and the need to belong are two of the strongest.

The book opens with Vesta, the older Smalls child and the one most resistant to change. Fear of a "misstep" restrains her, keeps her from growing and moving forward:

It was the single misstep that Vesta Smalls believed in. That slight lapse in judgment or balance that could send you hurtling through the air.

Her father had given her this, and she held on to it, sensing that it gave her a certain edge on things, understanding the power of the small deed to rip the sky apart, and return it to seamless blue.

Throughout the book Vesta stays stuck in the memories of her dead father:

Learning the sounds of nascent violence, Vesta could hear anger in his footsteps … the scraping of a chair … a falling fork. Her body tightened when she heard him at the door and relaxed only when he slept, and on the nights when there wasn't sleep, she lay awake and heard the little bits of killing that were delivered from his long graceful hands.

Her fears hold her at a distance from her siblings and from life. She fills her time with compulsive fruit-canning and cleaning, as if attention to detail will keep her memories at bay.

Lee's writing is fluid, elegant and lyrical; it is also lively and conversational, set squarely within the African American oral tradition. These two qualities, of language and of cadence, blend nicely ("It was during one of Vesta's cleaning frenzies that the heart attack knocked her flat. She went down in a cloud of Roman cleanser that dusted her white dress blue"). Lee reinforces the oral quality of the novel by making Vesta's brother LaRue a compulsive storyteller. LaRue resists isolation and stasis by creating elaborate tales, almost daily, like a television soap opera. Over the years he develops two mythical characters: Tennessee Jones, a stalwart adventurer who keeps the family informed about social and political developments, and Miss Snake. "The snake has been around since the beginning of time," says LaRue. "It is what you call grounded, living as it does in absolute intimacy with the earth … when it gets finished with the skin it's wearing, it sheds it, crawling on out of the past and into the future."

LaRue embroiders their stories for the family, and his inventions become the tour guides through a labyrinth of lessons and adventures that frame the "real life" passages. He wields his parables like a baton, using them to interrupt family disagreements, to dig his way through things he doesn't understand, and to woo the girl he finally marries.

LaRue finds kinship with Ouida who, unlike Vesta, is open to the tales he spins. Early in the novel Ouida follows the expected path—marriage—and then divorces. Vesta, more disappointed at this outcome than Ouida herself, asks what her husband did wrong; Ouida responds, "It's nothing he did, Vesta. It's who he is." This is the first articulation of the missing sense of connection in her marriage. But in the summer of 1926 Ouida meets a person who does make her feel connected: "Her kisses were like nighttime secrets, and Ouida swore that her laugh, like rain, made things grow. Zella Bridgeforth touched her somewhere timeless, held her, compelled her with her rhythms, and Ouida answered her call."

Their relationship blossoms in spite of the intolerance that surrounds them. No one openly disapproves, but neither is anyone quite able to look Zella in the eye. Lee presents Vesta's intolerance not as vicious, but as just another aspect of her inability to grow beyond the brutality of the past: "Her fear and mistrust had built up, layer upon layer, until she chose a path that would never bend back and meet itself, and something in her folded like a fan." Vesta repeatedly chooses isolation over connection, shielding herself from painful change but also from the warmth and sense of belonging that human intimacy bestows.

The climate surrounding Ouida and Zella as they set up house together remains cool; they do not deny the word "bulldagger" when it is hurled at them. "Brutal words for brutal people," Zella says. But they refuse to withdraw from the world or the Smalls-Staples family, even though LaRue is the only one who can truly embrace their union.

The narrative sweeps through history in broad strokes, incorporating events that necessarily affect the lives of the Smalls-Staples family: the Depression, Black urban migration, the Civil Rights movement. Lee offers an epic vision of the life of a Black family, something that has rarely been explored in this country's literature. We are able to see Black people managing their own lives within the frame of historical events, like the Depression, that are usually symbolized only by white characters. We see social phenomena like changing neighborhoods from the perspective of stable Black families rather than that of fleeing white families.

But Lee does not sacrifice the individual emotional upheavals to the tumultuous historical events that form the backdrop. She lets us marvel at Ouida's blossoming joy in physical desire without losing touch with how shocking that desire will seem to others. We feel triumphant when LaRue's talents find a use with the WPA and then in the growing Black newspaper field. Lee deftly weaves together deeply personal and sociopolitical developments, keeping each in its proper relationship to the other, as most of us must do in order to go on with life.

By giving Black characters a place in history, Lee makes the literary field seem so much more open than it ever has been. It makes us realize the inadequacy of the familiar stock characters, and that most of the stories of people of color—their observations and experiences through all of the twists and turns of our nation—have yet to be told. Each of them, passed down through generations, is an emotional building block, paving the road for Black writers and providing them with a sense of the familiar to come home to.

Near the end of The Serpent's Gift, Vesta sifts through the things that have accumulated in the family home over the years. She ships a box of items to each remaining family member. Ouida calls her to ask what all the boxes are: "The past," Vesta responds; "If you've got a use for it, it's yours." This is what Helen Elaine Lee has delivered to us—an invaluable piece of the past, a different world that has its practical use for us all.