From The Atlantic: Literature’s Original Bad Bitch Is Back… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
How does a bad bitch enter the world?
From the first pages of Sister Souljah’s 1999 debut novel, The Coldest Winter Ever, the teenage protagonist declares that she’s been a style icon since birth. “The same night I got home my pops gave me a diamond ring set in 24-karat gold,” Winter Santiaga says. Practical considerations, such as whether her infant fingers could even hold up the rings, mattered less to the Brooklyn-raised diva than the shine. “It was important for me to know I deserved the best, no slum jewelry, cheap shoes, or knock-off designer stuff, only the real thing.”
The novel vividly details how Winter’s hubris and greed, two other heirlooms passed down from her drug-dealing father, led to her undoing. She even meets—and ignores the advice of—a fictionalized version of Sister Souljah, who appears as something of a role model to the wayward teen. By the book’s end, Winter is serving 15 years in prison. Now, 22 years later, a new sequel finds Winter ready to reclaim the life that should have been hers all along—but not without facing unexpected hurdles. In Life After Death, published last week, Sister Souljah continues to explore the vices that ensnare Winter and materialistic young people like her. The second novel follows Winter to a temptation-packed purgatory where she must surrender the avarice, lust, and ego that have defined her existence. Though Life After Death doesn’t take place on the literal streets of Brooklyn, the sequel joins its predecessor—and the rest of Sister Souljah’s work—in illuminating both the glamour and the danger of urban life.
Sister Souljah’s first novel has sold more than 1 million copies since it was published, a statistic that doesn’t even account for the many young readers who passed it around in classrooms, buses, and locker rooms like contraband. “The Coldest Winter Ever is one of those books we all read in middle school, or high school, when we were entirely too young,” the book blogger Ms. Malcolm Hughes put it in a recent video review.
“I don’t think it’s right for any author to decide [their own] work is classic,” Sister Souljah told me in an interview last week. “But when … the high schools use it; and the junior high schools are not authorized, but they use it anyway; and everybody’s mother read it; and the grandmother read it—that is the people saying, No, this is a classic novel.” The Coldest Winter Ever is often credited with popularizing “street lit,” sometimes referred to as “urban fiction.” Within a decade of the book’s release, the genre made up the most popular paperbacks at Black-owned bookstores around the United States. And now Life After Death presents an opportunity to more thoroughly consider literature of its kind—for those of us who first became acquainted with Winter as teens, and for a publishing industry that still doesn’t quite understand characters like her.
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