11:04am Saturday 27th February 2010
By Sharon Griffiths
BY rights, this should be a deeply depressing book.
Set in 19th Century Jamaica at the time of the abolition of slavery, it is the story of slave called July, born after a white overseer casually raped a black slave.
It’s set against the riots in which the white plantation owners carried out unspeakable horrors against the plantation slaves, whom they saw as having no more rights or dignity than dogs – and even against white men who tried to protect them.
But it is a wonderful, life-enhancing, at times very funny book, largely because of the brilliant invention of the narrator, July. She is writing in old age, when she is living with her very respectable English-educated son – whom she gave up as a baby – now a successful printer in Kingston, and who is alternately proud and exasperated with his old mother. Their bickering forms a little commentary of the main action.
July, a pretty child, was taken from her own mother to be an indoor slave, and renamed Marguerite by the plantation owner, Caroline Mortimer, whose second husband starts off with good intentions towards their slaves. Such good intentions, that he considers himself July’s husband, fathers a daughter with her, but then deserts her, destroys the homes and crops of the now-freed slaves, and is no better really than every other white man she’s had dealings with.
This is history from the inside by Andrea Levy – who wrote the awardwinning and televised Small Island.
It is thoroughly researched, but wears its research lightly and as well as a fascinating story of our joint black and white past, gives us the splendid Miss July, who is surely destined to be one of literature’s great characters.
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