Rating: WORTHY!
Originally published as Slave and Sister, this novel is set in the 1850's and 1860's in Cassville in the northwest corner of Georgia - the very route Sherman's army took on its march south in 1864. I'm not a fan of stories about the civil war at all, but this one wasn't really about that. That was more of a backdrop to the second half of the story, and it didn't intrude so much that it turned me off the story.
I was intrigued by the fact that the blurb really told the end of the story, which book blurbs almost never do! Of course it was not quite the very end, but it certainly wasn't the start of the story, either. This was a curious thing to me because I can't remember seeing that before on a novel's back cover (so to speak), although I may have. Just be warned it's a bit of spoiler because it takes a long time to get to that part of the story (some 75% of the way through, give or take). Even though I knew where this was going - and kept wondering when it would happen! - the story was still engaging enough for me that it wasn't an issue. it did feel a little bit like a bait and switch, because I'd been expecting one kind of a story and got another one, but the story I got was fine.
The story explores the relationship between two step-sisters, one a slave, the other the daughter of her owner. It's a complex story which moves very slowly, be warned. It seemed like it took me forever to get through it, but the story always offered something to keep me going and hold my interest. Be warned also that there's a lot of tell and very little show, so that it felt a bit clunky here and there, such as in the repeated comparison of the slavery experience of the Hebrews under the Egyptians in Biblical times, with the Jewish ownership of slaves here and now (in the 1850s), but that aside, I really liked the story and the characters, even when they were, at times, obnoxious.
For a novel about racism, there seemed to me to be a touch of racism in how the characters were depicted. None of the slaves had any really objectionable qualities. That is to say that they were pretty much all consistently good people with good hearts, whereas the white folks were depicted as money-grubbing and filled with disdain, cruelty, and brutality. The only two exceptions to this were Adelaide Mannheim, the oddly named daughter of an observant and practicing Jewish couple (Adelaide isn't a Hebrew name), and Henry Kaltenbach, the Jewish-German immigrant who Adelaide eventually marries. This seemed rather self-serving. Yes, these people were slave owners and had most no respect for the African Americans who were quite literally their property, but all of the white folks were all bad all the time and none of the African Americans had any real bad qualities? That strained credibility for me.
The rest of the story was good and engrossing enough though, that I was willing to let those problems slide. I liked that it did not flinch from telling history as it was (and as far as I can tell, the author got the history right: at least as right as it needed to be in a work of fiction). She didn't shy away from using painful words and concepts to tell it, and I appreciated that. I loved the ever-changing relationship between Adelaide and Rachel, who had been her personal slave since she was twelve. Adelaide's father Mordecai was also complex, if rather stereotypical in his love of money, take note. He was strongly contrasted with Henry, who was a sensitive man and had conflicted feelings about owning slaves.
Conflict is at the heart of this story - with Rachel and Adelaide having an awesomely conflicted relationship, especially when feelings of jealousy and betrayal start to enter into it, and they neither of them seem to be able to live with or without the other, but you can never forget that in their own way, they do love each other as sisters. Henry is in conflict with Mordecai over the huge debt which Adelaide's father has lured him into, and over how to treat slaves and looming over all of this later, is the North and South, which eventually come into conflict over slave ownership.
One thing I got to thinking about was early in the story when Rachel is hurt by being called a "nigger". Nowadays, and for many decades, this has been an evil word to use, and it is hurtful and mean, but as far as I know, it's only since the early to mid-twentieth century that it's really been seen, used, and felt as such a god-awfully bad word as it's viewed today. There's no way any of us can know short of someone inventing a time machine, but I couldn't help but wonder if this was true - if African Americans really were hurt by the use of this word back then, or if they really paid no mind to it than they did "Negroes" or than, for example, servants did from being referred to as "servants". Did the slave owners really mean anything hurtful or mean by it, or was it perceived by them as really nothing more than a convenient word to describe property (which was bad enough), but which was neither used, nor intended, nor felt as the acute abuse it clearly is today, and has been for some considerable time?
There's no reliable way to know, but it got me thinking about it because mindsets on both sides of that divide were so different back then - a century and a half ago. It doesn't make it any more right than it is now of course, but was it perceived back then as nothing more than a label, or is the author right that people were hurt by it as they would be now? Maybe there's more reading I can do - not of fiction, but of historical factual works - which might enlighten me on this score, but that was such a horrible time in history that it's actually painful to read those things. This novel did give me an idea for a novel of my own, however, so I guess I'm going to have to do some more reading! The author discusses further reading in a section at the end of the novel.
Talking of whom, Sabra is the Hebrew name for a prickly pear, and it's also applied to any Jew who is born on Israeli territory - an endearment or a statement of how tough and rooted they are, and this author tells a prickly story which in my opinion is well worth the reading. I recommend this.
