recent reads

I finished Wench a few days ago, and have been thinking about the best way to discuss it; Andrea Levy’s The Long Song is waiting for me at the library, and if I include The Book of Night Women, I’ll have read three neo-slave narratives in one month.  I’m still thinking about how to write about The Mariposa Club—write a review? set up an author interview? both?  It’s harder for me to review LGBT novels because I’ve only read a few, and that means I can’t really situate the book in relation to a particular tradition.  Context is important, and when it comes to Wench, I know it suffered (for me) by having to follow Night Women.  Wench is a good read, and an original, interesting story—we don’t often get the perspective of an enslaved woman who loves her master, and the fact that the novel is set in the North further complicates the narrative.  This is also a novel about a group of women, but from the start we see the bond between them—three slave concubines meet for several consecutive summers at a resort in Ohio, and their sisterly bond is radicalized when a new woman, Mawu, joins the group.  With her African name, unbound red hair, and curiosity about freedom, Mawu removes the blinders the three other black women have worn to avoid confronting the possibility (and proximity) of freedom.  Refusing to be bound to the son she left back in Louisiana (a child born of rape), Mawu immediately sets out to learn more about Ohio and the free blacks living nearby.  The other women, Sweet and Reenie, shy away from Mawu at first, but Lizzie is completely drawn in.  The homoerotic bond between them is interesting, though never resolved, and Lizzie’s love for “her friend” ultimately drives her to reveal Mawu’s escape plans to her master, Drayle.  Mawu is publicly raped and beaten, all three women shun Lizzie for her misguided “loyalty,” and then the novel shifts into the past to help us understand how distorted notions of “love” have kept Lizzie from considering her own needs.  I was struck by the mildness of this novel—its tone, the writing, the book’s cover, the main character’s temperament.  Of the four enslaved women, Lizzie is the least interesting to me precisely because she lacks the drive to be free, can’t see the true nature of her relationship with Drayle, and holds onto aspirations that seem utterly absurd; as a mother of two children, it’s understandable she would hope her lover/master would set the kids free, yet again and again Drayle proves he’s not to be trusted.  Unwilling to use force against his slaves, Drayle manipulates them instead, using his emotional hold on Lizzie to coerce her into complying with his will.  Until Lizzie witnesses the abuse of the other sex slaves, she’s unaware of her own exploitation.  The novel ends abruptly, and I felt as though a third of the story had been left (or cut) out; I didn’t read Lizzie and Mawu as spiritual twins, and so that explanation didn’t satisfy me…and the role of two white women wasn’t clear to me.  But Wench is a novel I’d definitely teach and recommend to others. (Did anyone else notice an error at the end of the book—Lizzie recalls “Sir” whipping Mawu, but wasn’t it her owner, Tip?)