Mother and daughter, divided by the shadow of disease
72 Hour Hold
By Bebe Moore Campbell
Knopf, 319 pp., $24.95
In her previous four novels, Bebe Moore Campbell has examined many sensitive topics in the context of their racial repercussions: sexual harassment, infidelity, orphanhood, and betrayal between friends. Now Campbell tackles mental illness in ''72 Hour Hold," a riveting drama about a mother's quest to find treatment for her 18-year-old daughter's bipolar disorder.
Keri Whitmore is the successful owner of a designer resale clothing store, As Good as New, in Los Angeles, where she lives with her daughter, Trina, who scored close to a perfect 1600 on her SATs and is expected to enroll at Brown in September. But Trina, who began acting out in her senior year by smoking pot, dressing provocatively, and hanging with a bad crowd, has been diagnosed with manic depression. When she takes her medication, she seems almost normal, and Keri is filled with hope. Then Trina decides to ''cheek" her pills, and the next thing Keri knows, her beloved daughter is calling her the devil. ''That's when I knew she wanted to hurt me," Keri tells us. ''I knew that what was wrong was soul deep and strong as chains."
Throughout the novel, Campbell renders Keri's experience as analogous to that of slaves struggling to be free. ''I embarked on my own Middle Passage that night, marching backward, ankles shackled," Keri relates, of the moment she realized the extent of her daughter's troubles.
Keri is not alone in her efforts to manage a mentally ill family member. She belongs to a support group including other parents, and she says that ''discovering one another had been like falling in love." The joke they shared, she says, is that they are ''the only black people in America willing to admit having mental illness in our families."
Campbell has said she believes that African-Americans have difficulty talking about mental illness in part because the community tends to be religiously fundamentalist. Some churches preach that prayer, as opposed to medication, will control mental illness, she observes. The same is true, she adds, of homosexuality, another issue she presents -- though relatively tangentially -- in her book.
One of Keri's challenges is learning to accept that her daughter will probably not recover fully. Sometimes, the best she hopes for is to emulate the Africans in Zimbabwe who ''ask in their language, How are you? And the answer is always, I am suffering peacefully."
The novel's title refers to the three-day period during which a hospital can hold mentally ill people against their will if they are a danger to themselves or others, or are gravely disabled. Trina has been hospitalized several times on a 72-hour hold, which Keri often wishes could be extended so that Trina could get the treatment and medication she needs.
When Trina becomes increasingly paranoid, wild, and violent, Keri -- who is exasperated by the inadequate assistance she and her daughter receive through the traditional psychiatric system -- decides to join a program of illegal intervention. She is encouraged in this move by Bethany, another mother whose daughter's mental illness makes her spin out of control. Though Keri has her doubts about the Program, wondering if it is a brainwashing cult, she turns herself and her daughter over to its care.
Quickly, Keri finds that the Program is modeled on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman's system of moving slaves from safe house to safe house until they could reach immunity in the North. Brad, one of the ''conductors" of the Program, tells Keri that ''mental illness is a kind of slavery. Our movement is about freeing people too."
Keri and Bethany entrust the well-being of their daughters to Brad and other members of the Program, and set off with them on a journey that takes them from site to site without their knowing where they are at any given time. The goal, as Brad has described, is to make the young women medication-compliant and enhance their recovery through nutrition, therapy, exercise, and love. Keri finds herself invoking the spirit of Tubman as she wonders whether this alternative treatment will finally restore to her the daughter she has known.
''72 Hour Hold" is an absorbing and poignant portrait of the relationship between a mother and daughter illuminated by the light of hope Keri holds up in the dark shadow of Trina's disease. The characters are richly drawn, and Campbell is particularly skilled at exploring the nuances of family, with all the definitions that concept entails.
Campbell is the author of ''Your Blues Ain't Like Mine," which won her an NAACP Image Award for literature; ''Brothers and Sisters"; ''What You Owe Me"; and ''Singing in the Comeback Choir." She has also written a memoir, ''Sweet Summer," and a book for children -- also dealing with the topic of mental illness -- ''Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry."
At one point in ''72 Hour Hold," Keri recalls what she refers to as Tubman's ''claim to fame": ''Never run my train off de track, and I ain't never lost a passenger." The same could be said of Campbell's record in delivering compelling novels about the intricate dances of emotion our human experience inspires.
Jessica Treadway is the author of ''Absent Without Leave" and ''And Give You Peace." She teaches creative writing at Emerson College. 
