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Tag Archives: slavery

The Freedom to Belong: The Last Runaway

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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African-Americans, Civil War, Fugitive Slave Act, historical fiction, Ohio, race relations, slavery, Society of Friends, Tracy Chevalier, Underground Railroad, United States

Review: The Last Runaway, by Tracy Chevalier
Penguin, 2013. 305 pp. $27.

In 1850, a young Quaker woman from Dorset, England, sets out for America with her sister, who’s engaged to marry a man in Faithwell, Ohio. But the sister dies en route, so Honor Bright (too cute a name by half) arrives in Faithwell bereft and alone. She’s also unexpected, for she decided to accompany her late sister on a whim, having been jilted by her English fiancé.

Instead of acceptance and welcome from her fellow Friends, Honor faces criticism of her accent, clothes, and introspective character. The one thing they admire is her ability to sew a quilt, which surpasses anyone else’s, though even there, they find ways to turn that against her. Sewing is her solace, her gift, her art (not that she’d call it that), and a respite amid so much else she dislikes. To Honor, Americans seem blunt and intrusive, and her surroundings, transient–buildings are ramshackle wood, and people act as if they’ll move further west at any moment (as some do). Worse, she can no longer stay in the house that took her in, so to anchor herself in Faithwell, she must marry into this alien community.

Slave_kidnap_post_1851_boston

However, that’s the least of it. Honor believes implicitly in the Friends’ creed that slavery is plain wrong, but that’s not how things go at Faithwell. Many runaway slaves come through Ohio, and the Fugitive Slave Act makes it a criminal offense to harbor or aid them. To Honor’s disgust and dismay, most Friends obey the law, for fear of losing their farms or going to prison.

If Honor persists in her view, she’ll be an outcast, but if she gives in, she’ll be untrue to herself. Her new neighbors tell her that slavery is an abstract concept in Britain (where it’s illegal), but in Ohio, a complex reality that doesn’t allow certainties. Their argument appalls her, but she’s at their mercy. What she does about it makes an excellent, compelling novel. I’ve read four of Chevalier’s, and I think The Last Runaway is her best since Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Chevalier makes terrific use of the tension involving runaway slaves, a slave catcher to whom Honor feels attracted, her place in Faithwell, and a potential mother-in-law who’s a nasty piece of work. But I especially like how the author unfolds Honor’s character, showing how she gradually overcomes her fear of a wild, intimidating landscape to enjoy its beauties, the first aspect of her new home to excite her. She finds pleasure in fireflies, hummingbirds, and other unfamiliar creatures, and learns to accept the products of the soil:


Honor closed her eyes and bit down, slicing the kernels with her teeth. She opened her eyes. Never had she tasted anything so fresh and sweet. This was corn in its purest form, a mouthful of life. Turning the cob, she bit again and again, to savor the taste, so different from the other corn dishes she’d eaten over the past weeks.


Chevalier also contrasts point of view, revealing Honor’s feelings in plaintive, lonely letters home, even as she tries to bear up under intense pressure. I like that touch, though the articulate, perfectly grammatical prose made me wonder whether Honor had really written them, considering that the narrative says nothing about her schooling or her reading, except for the Bible. Similarly, a few phrases from a key African-American character sounded modern to my ear, though I haven’t researched them and could be wrong.

In sum, though, The Last Runaway hits the mark, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

His Private Thoughts: I Am Abraham

02 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Grant, historical fiction, Illinois, Jerome Charyn, Mary Todd Lincoln, McClellan, nineteenth century, slavery

Review: I Am Abraham, by Jerome Charyn
Liveright/Norton, 2014. 456 pp. $27.

What an extraordinary, ambitious idea, to narrate a novel in Abraham Lincoln’s first-person voice. But, as with its protagonist, I Am Abraham is not ordinary. And if you think you know this man–the Rail Splitter, Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, and so on–here’s a different portrait, the man who never appeared before Matthew Brady’s camera. Or, rather, it’s the man while he’s away from the chair in which Brady posed him.

A younger, unbearded Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via the Ohio Valley Civil War Association).

A younger, unbearded Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via the Ohio Valley Civil War Association).

I Am Abraham is the private Lincoln: full of self-doubt, compassion, deep melancholy, a sense of social inferiority, a parallel dislike of social pretension, an iron will that grew with political maturity but which he couldn’t exert at home, and, maybe surprisingly, lust. Schoolchildren may learn about poor Ann Rutledge, the young woman whose premature death left him heartbroken; I remember that. But we sure didn’t hear what Jerome Charyn has Mr. Lincoln remark, that she was “the most voluptuous gal in Sangamon County,” courted by every man who didn’t already have one foot in the grave, and even some who did. Nor did we hear about the effect that young Mary Todd, the aristocratic Kentucky belle, had on the somewhat older country lawyer:


 

 

She was like a quake of raw energy and some kind of sun goddess, and I was quickened whenever I was in her orbit. Sometimes I’d hold her hand, and I could feel an electric spurt. Mary herself said that the two of us had ‘lovers’ eyes.’ I still felt ungainly around her, like some gigantic frog with warts on his face.


It was Mary, Charyn asserts, who saw Lincoln’s potential, and urged him to enter national politics. Without her support and encouragement, he’d have never become anything more than the itinerant horseback lawyer, while she stayed at home with the children. But she had political skills too, which she longed to use, and told him early in their courtship that she intended to be the First Lady, or, as they called it in those days, Mrs. President. However, once her husband became politically powerful, he excluded her from politics, which brought about a split between them. Both lived close to the edge of mental disturbance–depression, in his case, and acute paranoia, in hers. The White House itself was a house divided.

Readers expecting watersheds of history will be disappointed. The Emancipation Proclamation takes up maybe a page, and the visit to Gettysburg, to which Charyn devotes a chapter, moved me, but not in the you-are-there way. Rather, the history here is more personal, as with stump speeches, everyday political confrontations, and the debates against Stephen Douglas–in other words, anything that shows how Lincoln came to form his principles:


 That vile skunk and piss-pot, Chief Justice Taney, had dynamited us all with the Dred Scott Decision–negroes weren’t included in the Constitution, he declared. . . It didn’t matter if [Scott] talked like a duke and read the Bible better than white folks. He wasn’t a human being. I couldn’t pirouette around Dred Scott and palaver about the virtues of the Republican Party. I couldn’t pussyfoot. Or we’d all be pissing in the wind.


Of the other characters, my favorites were Robert Lincoln, the eldest son (and Mary’s darling), and two Union generals, McClellan and Grant. But there’s also the language, which combines Lincoln’s actual words, the patterns of Shakespearean and Biblical phrasing he loved, and a voice of curiosity, self-doubt, and moral questioning that reminded me of Huck Finn, my favorite literary character. Sure enough, in an afterword, Charyn says that he had Huck Finn in mind.

I highly recommend I Am Abraham. Even though you know what happens, it’s a great story, national and personal.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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