The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden
One of those books you read in one sitting with the hair slowly rising on the back of your neck. Slavery in the American South seldom has seemed so real or so horrific. Every awful story you've ever heard or read is right here, seen through the eyes of Sarah, the master's daughter by Emmeline, his slave mistress. I couldn't help but think of Sally Hemings, in durance vile to Thomas Jefferson for her whole life and forced to bear not one but eight of his children, all of them property and subject to sale whenever the master needed ready cash to buy a few more books.
The most painful thing to endure among many is Emmeline's persistent terror, the fear she feels every moment of every day that Sarah will say something that will get them all killed or worse, sold. "Don't say that, baby," is her constant refrain, and it doesn't take long for you to feel her fear, too. It's exhausting, and it is debilitating to intellect and human emotion, too, and that's just from reading about it. What was it like to live through it? I'm grateful I can only imagine.
# Permanent link to The Civil War never looked so necessary.
