Review: A woman makes a deal to survive in ‘The Devil Three Times’

Everything you think you know about the devil is a lie.

In Rickey Fayne’s “The Devil Three Times,” the devil is not objectively trying to pull every wayward soul into sin and disrepute. That special honor is reserved for white folks who have ignored his pleas to liberate their Black brethren from the horrors of slavery, then sharecropping, Jim Crow and structural racism.

Up in heaven, the devil irritated the angels with ethically thorny questions like, “How does God expect us to reconcile free will with providence divine?”. For this, God threw the devil out. He spent eons mourning his unjust situation and trying to get back in, until Jesus came to him and told him to go South and free the Black folks who were being worked to death in America.

“You do this for me and I promise that one day, I’ll find you a way home,” Jesus tells him. “And when the Devil woke, that’s just what he did — and is even now, still trying to do. That’s why Black people have to go through hell to get free and how come to this day, the Devil won’t leave them be.”

So begins Fayne’s ambitious, rollicking, heartbreaking, multi-vocal, sometimes narratively overwhelming debut novel, “The Devil Three Times.” In 400 pages and many, many points of view, Fayne skillfully tells the story of the Laurents.

They’re a Black family whose matriarch, Yetunde, is stolen from Africa and brought to the rural South in the early 19th century. Six generations of Yetunde’s descendants subsequently struggle with poverty, the color line, alcoholism, abuse, the gift of “seeing” ghosts and —as the Devil intimates in the beginning — the challenge of negotiating free will with the divine. Black Southern folklore is omnipresent, providing a rich context for these complex and engaging protagonists’ stories.

This is a churchy book, with many characters who feel called to preach and/or share the word of God in order to honor their culture and move through the difficulties they face. Although this can feel heavy, Fayne’s out-of-time interludes with the devil provide an often humorous but also poignant reprieve, as we see characters struggle with the spiritual bonds they have with the devil, darkness, light, adversity and ghosts.

At his best, what Fayne does is lay out a path to redemption and a complicated kind of freedom. In Fayne’s witchy, earthy rural Black Southern genealogy of struggle, the past is as real as the now. The consequences of everything we have done and not done are ever-unfolding.

I did have trouble remembering all of the various characters — who was related to whom, whose secrets were being revealed and held — because there are so many, in various time periods and sections. The family tree at the front of the book is an essential aid here, but I think the real issue is that “The Devil Three Times” demands to be read over and over, digested slowly, and discussed with others in order to be fully appreciated and understood.

It’s too dense and multifaceted for any other approach. Like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “Mules and Men” and James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Devil” will be incorporated into the American canon as a book that deeply, sometimes disturbingly, reflects the texture and strife of the historical Black experience.

Shannon Gibney’s newest book is “We Miss You, George Floyd.” She lives, reads and writes in south Minneapolis.

The Devil Three Times

By: Ricky Fayne.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 406 pages.

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