There is no lack of books about the effects of slavery in the antebellum South, and its lingering effects during the Jim Crow era, pre-Civil Rights Movement.  And I've read a lot of them.  So I will admit that when my book club chose this book as its March pick, I was sort of "meh" about the whole thing.  The one thing that made me slightly more enthusiastic was the author.  I'd read The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid's Chair, and I really enjoyed Kidd's style, and the way that she wrote her characters with such care and gentleness, even when they themselves are not caring or gentle, per se.

I should really stop questioning my book club's decisions (with one notable exception-I'm looking at you On Strike for Christmas!), because I got completely sucked into The Invention of Wings. Told from the alternating perspectives of a young plantation owner's daughter and the slave that she is "gifted" on her eleventh birthday, the book explores various types of oppression-based on race, class, gender, and religion-and their effect on both the oppressors and the oppressed.  Sarah Grimke, the daughter of a plantation-owning member of South Carolina's elite, is horrified to be given her own slave for her birthday, and in her naivete tries to free the young woman that has been given to her as her maid.  Sarah is sure that her father, who has allowed her access to his books and has encouraged her to speak her mind about issues in a way usually reserved for boys, will accede to her wishes and allow the young woman her freedom.  When that doesn't happen, she tries to assuage her own guilt by treating Hetty, her slave, more as a friend than a servant, teaching her to read and allowing her to speak her mind freely in her presence.  Hetty, for her part, has no illusions about the true nature of her relationship with Sarah, and despite the fairly kind treatment Hetty gets from her, she carries out small acts of rebellion.  When Sarah's secret lessons are discovered, the consequences are swift and severe, and lead Sarah to contemplate what if anything she can do to dismantle the evils of human bondage and free herself from the stifling expectations of a Southern lady. Hetty, of course, is not planning to wait on Sarah or any other white folks to free her.  She is determined that she will free herself.  As the story unfolds, and both girls grow into strong, independent women, their relationship changes as they both try to find their freedom.

Far from being a typical white savior narrative, this book shows a much more realistic and balanced picture of the relationship between Hetty and Sarah.  Hetty is fierce and outspoken with Sarah about the differences between them, and has conflicted feelings of gratitude, anger, disappointment, and even love towards her.  Sarah, for her part, realizes while agitating for fair treatment of slaves that she herself is suffering oppression, as a woman of a certain class, that keeps her from having the impact on the world that she wishes.  As Sarah becomes more certain that she is meant to fight against the evils of slavery, she also finds that she must fight to be heard, even among other abolitionists. Ultimately, both women end up saving themselves.

The House Girl, by Tara Conklin

The subject of reparations for slavery is a controversial one.  There is no question that this country was built on the labor of African slaves and the bonded laborers from Europe and Asia that came here in the thousands in the 18th and 19th centuries, and there is even some agreement about how to quantify the stolen wages and physical and emotional suffering.  But to whom would the money go?  How does one prove their ancestors were slaves, with so many records incomplete or lost?  And where does the money come from?  So many generations removed from the plantations, how would we even begin to trace where the present wealth came from, and is there any amount of money that can even begin to make up for the tragedy that was the trans-Atlantic slave trade?  Conklin uses this issue as the framework for her novel, The House Girl.

Set alternately in the late 1800s and the present day, the book tells the story of Josephine Bell, a house slave on a declining Virginia plantation.  Her mistress, Lu Ann Bell, is an aspiring artist.  She is also a high-strung woman, with an anxious temperament and poor health.  In a move that is unusual, and indeed illegal, for the time, Lu Ann taught her young house girl to read, and allowed her to draw and paint in her studio when she was feeling generous.  Lu Ann Bell is a capable artist, but Josephine's portraits and landscapes are luminous, capturing the inherent humanity of her fellow slaves while showcasing the lush beauty of the rural south.  Josephine is desperate to run away, has in fact tried to run away before, but she is conflicted about leaving her dying mistress, and her paintings.

The present day story follows lawyer Lina Sparrow.  Lina is tasked with working on a suit, to be brought against the federal government and many major US corporations, demanding reparations for slavery.  In researching a primary plaintiff for the suit, she is introduced to Lu Ann Bell and her art through a controversy brewing in the art world-was the work really done by Lu Ann Bell, or by her house slave, Josephine.  Bell's family is desperate to prove that she painted the works attributed to her, but others in the art world aren't so sure.  Lina discovers a possible descendant of Josephine's who would make a great plaintiff, but while preparing the case she is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about her own past.

A story like this one could become little more than political speech as narrative, but Conklin manages to write an engaging story that highlights the many injustices of slavery, as well as present day controversy surrounding reparations, in a way that does not feel preachy.  I've read plenty of other books about slavery, but the art angle makes this one unique. And it is not just a slavery narrative, not that those aren't important and engaging, as well.  This story is about family connections, loss, motherhood, and identity in a more general sense.  Josephine and Lina both come alive on the pages with an emotional impact that draws the reader in.  The book will appeal to anyone interested in the legacy of slavery, or art, or the modern day reparations movement.

Take One Candle, Light a Room

Many years ago now, I read a book call Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, by Susan Straight.  It's the story of a black woman living in poverty, doing whatever she can to raise her son in  violent neighborhood.  It is richly detailed, with an emotional honesty and depth of experience that you really are transported into the character's life.  When I finished the book, I was almost stunned to find that Susan Straight was a middle-class, middle aged white woman.  Not that it isn't possible for authors to write convincingly from a cross-racial viewpoint, but the book was so raw and the emotions felt so authentic I could only imagine someone who had been in similar circumstances to be able to articulate the story so well. When I delved a little more deeply, however, I realized that living in the racially and socioeconimcally diverse city of Riverside, California, and working in the struggling public schools there, gave her an insight that truly comes to life when paired with her remarkable facility with language.

So I was very pleased to get Take One Candle, Light a Room as a gift earlier this year.  It had been years since I had read one of Straight's books, and I was looking forward to what she could bring to her new subject-mainly, the inner struggle that comes from being of mixed-race, and how the legacy of slavery can affect the descendants of slaves even today.  The narrator of the book is Fantine Antoine, daughter/sister/niece/aunt of a mixed-race family originally from the Louisiana coast, now living in Rio Seco, California.  Fantine, who goes by FX in her professional life, is a travel writer-a profession which forces her to disappoint her mother on a daily basis, since it means that she has deserted the family compound for L.A. Fantine, just back from a trip to Switzerland, returns home to find her nephew on her doorstep-with two of his gang-banger friends.  Victor is a gentle, intelligent, creative type, scarred emotionally by his mother's murder five years before.  Tired from her travels, Fantine sends him away, promising to spend time with him the following weekend.  But when he and his friends are involved in a shooting that leads to the death of a rival gang member, Fantine embarks on a very different kind of trip, cross country and back through time and history to find him and bring him home.

Straight does a beautiful job of getting into the head of Fantine and her family members.  The family's history is firmly rooted in racial violence-her grandparents left Louisiana because of a white man who was preying on the young black girls in the parish.  Since coming to California, the family has stayed mostly in the small town where they settled, running an orchard and keeping to themselves.  Fantine was raised on the stories of the women who came before her, the slaves and former slaves who struggled to survive so their children and grandchildren could have a better life than the one they had.  Straight explores issues of revenge, belonging, guilt, redemption, and the invisible threads that keep us connected to our past, even as we try to run away from it.  Fantine's journey takes her back to Lousisana, and Straight uses Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop for the final climactic scenes of the book.  It's a story of second chances, for another shot at doing the right thing, and about the resilience of a people who refuse to give in to the titanic forces trying to tear them apart.

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

There is no shortage of historical fiction that examines the relationship between slaveowners and their slaves in the 18th century.  The Kitchen House, by Kathleen Grissom, takes that theme and gives it a twist.  The novel is told by two narrators-Lavinia, an Irish indentured servant brought to the plantation as a small child, and Belle, the mulatto daughter of the owner, the Cap'n, who lives and works in the kitchen house.  Lavinia is raised with the slave children, but because she is white the Cap'n always had other plans for her.  Having lived in Ireland prior to coming to the plantation, Lavinia does not understand the complexities of the racial boundaries in 18th century America, and in her naivete she often unintentionally creates problems for her "family"-the black slaves that she lived with for most of her childhood.

When Lavinia becomes a teen, she is sent to live with the family of the captain's wife.  There, she is brought into the household as a young woman being groomed for a respectable marriage and the life of a white woman in plantation society.  Despite the kindness shown to her during this time, she longs to return home to her "family", never realizing how different their lives have become.  Through family tragedies, brutal abuse, and failed marriages, the characters of The Kitchen House demonstrate the corrosive nature of oppression and slavery on the men and women affected by it.

I read this novel with a sick sense of inevitability.  Having read many such stories in the past, I had more than enough background knowledge to know that things were not likely to turn out happily for the residents of Tall Oaks plantation.  But the unusual main characters and the seeming reasonableness of some of the white characters gave me a small hope that perhaps this time history would be different.  The fact is that in the end there was tragedy, but there was also hope and at least some peace for Lavinia, Belle, and the other slaves.  Grissom's treatment of the captain's wife, Miss Martha, and Lavinia herself, highlighted the similarities between the oppression of women and blacks in the antebellum south.  Miss Martha may have lived in the big house and been waited on by house slaves, but she had little more freedom than they when it came to making decisions about her life.  I think that Grissom did a good job in showing how the rigid social norms of the slave/slave-owner society negatively affected everyone in some way.  Sympathetic whites were forced to support and promote treatment of slaves that went against what reason and compassion would say was right; the oppressed minorities scrambled daily to forestall the anger and violence simmering just below the surface of the plantation; and other whites-especially white men tasked with "working" the slaves-became brutal and mean as a result of the culture of oppression that led to their unchecked power over others.

The book, while chock full of meaning, was also a page-turner. I had to keep reading to see if my sense of unease really did lead to the inevitable tragedy I imagined was coming..  I described it to some friends as soap opera in a historical context.  The misunderstandings and missed opportunities led to romantic entanglements right out of a Gothic romance.  But unlike historical romance books, which are basically love stories lightly dipped in history, the historical context of the relationships in this book are an integral part of the story.

Kindred, by Octavia Butler

Any long time readers of this blog know my deep respect for Octavia Butler.  She takes the genre of science fiction and turns it into literature that not even the most pernicious lit snob can say is anything other than high quality.  Kindred, Butler's best known work, is perhaps the clearest example I've yet read of the way that she combines issues of race, gender, and class into her work.

Kindred is the story of Dana, a black woman living in California in the 1970s.  Through some process never fully explained, Dana is transported back to the early 1800s whenever Rufus, her white great-great-great-great (you get the idea) grandfather is on the verge of getting himself killed.  Unfortunately for Dana, this unknown ancestor is also the son of a slave-owner in Maryland.  This means that once she is back in time with him, she must adjust her life to the customs of the time, acting the part of a slave.  As Dana travels back and forth between the past and the present, she learns more about what it meant to be black and powerless in the United States than she ever wanted to.  What was abstract to her and her white husband in 1976 becomes terrifyingly concrete in the world of 1830s Maryland.

Kindred is a bit of a cross-over novel, as the science fiction aspect of it is not nearly as important as the story itself.   Perhaps that's why it is her most popular novel, because you don't have to be a science fiction fan to enjoy it.  But I suspect it has more to do with the examination of race and slavery than with a genre preference.  Through Dana's experiences, Butler shows the brutality and cruelty of slavery.  Dana, with her 20th century moral superiority, begins by "acting" as a slave, but after being whipped, beaten, forced into the fields, and nearly raped, she comes to realize how easily people can be made slaves.  Take away a person's humanity, and they will believe they are less than human.  Value a person only because of the work that they can do or the price that they will fetch, and they will start to define themselves that way, even contribute to their own captivity.

It is this idea that is perhaps the most striking in Butler's work, especially given the 1979 release date.  That close to the heyday of the civil rights movement, it must have been a risk for Butler to create the characters of Rufus, who while not likeable does at least become understandable as the slave owner's son, and eventual slave owner himself.  Even though Dana hates what he does, she can't quite bring herself to hate him, though he certainly gives her ample reasons to do so.  But Dana's relationship with Rufus, and the various attitudes of other slaves on the plantation, demonstrate that slavery and people's attitudes towards it were not as clear-cut as history books would make them out to be.  To be sure, the institution of slavery is abhorrent, but those living within it sometimes had to do things that should not necessarily be judged by 20th (or 21st) century standards.  Butler clearly shows how insidious the effects of living under such a brutal system can be, from the need to run away again and again, even after the most horrific beatings, to the need to try and secure your place by serving up another slave's transgressions to your masters, even though you know what the consequences for them will be.  In the end, Dana is able to retain enough of her 20th century self to free herself from the bondage imposed on her by the involuntary time travel, but not without scars, both physical and emotional, that will leave a permanent impression on her, and on the reader.