Newspaper Article

A slave woman's ghost observes the lives of her descendants

Reviewed by Melissa Walker, author of "Down From the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement."

1991

نظرة عامة

Though it begins with an account of an interracial marriage in Africa long before slavery and ends with a survey of major events in the 20th Century, J. California Cooper's \"Family\" is primarily about the lives of slaves in the years before, during and immediately after the Civil War. Set in the plantation South, this first novel is narrated by Clora, a slave who, like her mother and grandmother, takes her own life after enduring the sexual assaults of her white master and bearing his children. Though she attempts to kill them, too, her children survive and, surprisingly, so does her consciousness. But while she observes what happens to her offspring, Clora, unlike recent literary and cinematic ghosts, cannot participate in their lives. The heroine of the novel is Clora's daughter, Always, whose white father sells her to an inept, small-scale farmer. Soon after moving to her new home, the cunning Always takes over the management of the neglected farm. She not only turns a profit for her incompetent owner but also secretly puts money aside for herself. Her enterprising ways, however, do not protect her from sexual exploitation, as she repeatedly gives birth to her master's children, only to have all but one, a son, sold into slavery.

• الناشر: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC