Copperfield Review's Blog, page 9
July 22, 2019
Seeking Historical Novel Reviews
July 15, 2019
The Sins of Jubal Cooper
July 1, 2019
Pompeii
June 18, 2019
K.V. Martins
June 4, 2019
Footsteps
May 20, 2019
Child of Barley
May 6, 2019
The Hunger of Plagues
April 29, 2019
The Visitation
Plymouth, Massachusetts
1650
Mambi, years dead, came to Chloe in the night and told her that Mr. Henry was a wooden paddle and Mistress Abitha was a wooden post. Having been beaten to a limp by Mr. Henry weeks before for eating the last of the root-cellared potatoes, Mistress Abitha standing by, Chloe had no reason to argue with her mother. Mambi rarely visited, so Chloe didn’t want to waste time on the evident. She would rather hear of Mambi’s roamings—her flight here to Plymouth, back to Barbados, back to Africa, and back again, a Black-winged Kite circling carrion, smelling of Caribbean sugar fields, fish rot, and blood.
For reasons, Mambi had killed Master Green’s overseer with a hoe to the neck. Master Green hung her from a Cassia tree for it. Chloe was only four years old, but she remembered her mother twitching and then dangling from the end of the noose, her head nestled in the flowering boughs of the tree, a limp queen with a festooned crown. Chloe remembered how Master Green cut Mambi down and then set her on fire. Keeping Mambi alive, barefoot, and bound to the sugar fields would have answered Mambi’s deed many-fold. Killing her increased her rage and gave her flight.
Killing her gave her schemes and she would fly to Chloe betimes to share them. Even though Chloe liked hearing Mambi’s plans to avenge herself, Chloe couldn’t say she approved of her mother’s murdering hands. God commanded slaves to obey their masters and roared, “Thou shalt not kill!” Many a Lord’s Day, Miss Abitha read those words aloud out of The Book. If Mr. Henry was a paddle and Miss Abitha was a post, Mambi was a closed fist—always fighting—and rebellion was as the sin of witchcraft! Miss Abitha read that out of The Book, too. Chloe believed witchery was the truth of Mambi, and she scorned her dead mother for it, even as Mambi sat in the dark corner of Chloe’s sleeping nook, the whites of her eyes piercing the dark like a cornered possum’s. For Mambi’s sins, Master Green, as good as God himself, erased her from the material world. Fair enough. Chloe knew that she, herself, wasn’t a fighter nor a murderer like Mambi. She was weepy, needy, and now lame, which was fair enough, too—she should not have taken the last of the potatoes.
Still, Mambi’s fighting spirit lit embers in Chloe’s stomach. Warmed her. But, the guilt of this sympathy cooled her a bit. Miss Abitha wouldn’t approve of Mambi’s incorporeal comings and goings, let alone her talk of revenge which was God’s property, just as sure as Mambi was Master Green’s and Chloe was Mr. Henry’s.
“I make him sick wit’ what he done,” Mambi rasped, the whites of her eyes and toothy smile glimmering. “I take it—me red rage—ball it up, send it to him, and he come down sick. Slow but sure, I lay him in de grave. Soon. And him send you here to this paddle and post after I gone? Nah suh! I put him low.”
Chloe turned her face away from Mambi, the leg Mr. Henry hobbled throbbing under the gingham. “Leave me,” she whispered.
“He beat you! And she watch!” Mambi threw up her hands. Her fingers looked like bony feathers.
“He meant it not. And she is sorry for it.”
Chloe kept her low tones. Mr. and Mistress were sleeping in the next room while she slept on a paletted hay mattress behind a makeshift curtain in the pantry. Making it up to the attic was nearly impossible after Mr. Henry’s pummeling work on the lower part of her leg. The pantry was not a likely place for a food thief, so Mr. Henry must have had faith in his power to apply proper and effective correction.
“You power ‘dem, gal. Lay ‘dem low.” Mambi’s eyes glittered in the dark, slim shafts of glow from the full moon striping her black face from between the slats in the wooden slab that covered one of the only windows in the house.
While Mambi rasped on, Chloe closed her eyes and called on the only Power. She recited the Lord’s prayer, over and over again, eventually drifting to sleep on Mambi’s smell of boiling sugar, on Mambi’s pain and its intangible power to waste, on the prayer’s promise of forgiveness and deliverance from evil.
The next morning, Mr. Henry, foot shod and clad with his field hat, glared at Chloe’s’ leg from the kitchen board. Mistress Abitha sat opposite him as she folded three cloth napkins lengthwise.
“Make haste, girl. I must to the fields.”
Mr. Henry, with his marvel of auburn curls peaking from under his hat and the matching wiry hair on his chin and cheeks would not look Chloe in the eyes as she limped to the table with the morning bread and cheese. But, Mistress Abitha looked at her kindly which heartened Chloe a bit. Miss Abitha laid two of the napkins on the table for Mr. Henry and Chloe, adjusting her white cap over the blonde hair that Chloe had braided into two long ropes a few days since.
“You mustn’t stand today, Chloe,” she said.
“She will stand, Abitha. It is her custom to stand and it is her place to stand.”
Mr. Henry stared at the table, his chin propped with elbows and folded hands, the unyielding stance looking oddly like the act of prayer. “There’s nothing wrong with her. She be play-acting.”
A root of hurt budded in Chloe’s abdomen as her leg throbbed. It sent a prickly tendril up through her throat and behind her eyes. She swallowed and blinked to smother it. She grit her teeth to kill it, red washing her vision. As she stood between Mr. Henry and Miss Abitha nibbling on a crust of bread as they ate, a boiling sweetness crept into the air, even after the breakfast prayer. She wondered if they could smell it, too. She wondered if they could sense the warmth blooming in her stomach as she listened for the rustling of black wings. Mambi could wither with her pain. Of a sudden, Chloe wondered if she could do the same with hers.
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Jade McGowan is a writer living in Bradenton, Florida. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Scribble. She is also an editor for 805 Literary and Art Journal.
April 15, 2019
My Dear Hamilton
My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton
Written by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Published by HarperCollins
Review by Irene Colthurst
So few accounts of the American Revolutionary era begin in the midst of the fighting after 1776 and then stretch through the fragile 1780s and tumultuous 1790s. The life story of Alexander Hamilton, however, demands exactly that frame. So does that of his wife, Elizabeth “Betsy” Schuyler Hamilton. The runaway success of a certain Broadway musical re-introduced the American public to that period and sparked interest in its other major figures. The appeal of My Dear Hamilton, therefore, is its promise to go “beyond the hype” of Hamilton the musical to examine Elizabeth Schuyler’s entire long life. It’s one of several novels in the last few years, including another from authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie themselves, that look more deeply at the American revolutionary era through the eyes of women. Here they give us Elizabeth “Betsy” Schuyler in her own voice, framed as her reminiscence in old age, as she grapples with and yet fights for Hamilton’s legacy. Dray and Kamoie succeed in giving us an intimate view of the era that inherently challenges many of the cherished images that the prominent members of the revolutionary generation hold in the American public’s imagination. In doing so, they have written a novel considered among the best historical fiction of 2018.
The novel opens in the mid-1820s as James Monroe makes a visit to a Eliza in late middle age. She then tries to explain to the reader why she received him so coldly, prompting her to relate her life story as if building one of her husband’s legal arguments. She begins by noting, “I was a patriot in my own right before I ever met Alexander Hamilton”. Chronicling their courtship and early marriage, as well as Hamilton’s rise to power, Eliza reveals a life that alternated between private moments of family joy and the public contentions and social disruptions whose effects strained her marriage. The cycle became almost predictable as the narrative spun on through the 1790s and the infamous Reynolds affair, and beyond. Hamilton’s appeals for forgiveness and declarations of love often seemed overwrought, and it could be hard to know how much of his pleading to “his angel” was due to his lawyerly character and guilty conscience, and what was narrative necessity.
The authors are disciplined in their depiction of only Eliza’s direct experience of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. They also succeed in letting Eliza demonstrate how much more than a wronged wife she always was. Eventually, the narrative ends up back at the meeting of Eliza and Monroe. To drive towards that conclusion, Dray and Kamoie let the frame of Eliza’s older perspective weigh perhaps too heavily upon the story as it unfolds. Readers are given her feelings in the moment, and then immediately her late reconsiderations of those feelings. The message of the frame story is that we are not supposed to lose ourselves too much in this novel, but it is impossible not to.
Overall the novel is alive with intimate detail and fascinating historical echoes for our own time. Elizabeth Schuyler’s evolution into a political wife and a reluctant champion of her husband’s complicated legacy is rendered with a strong moral intensity. Her perspective is the Federalist perspective, which goes unexplored in most depictions of the early American republic. Dray and Kamoie do not shy away from letting Elizabeth Schuyler show herself as a daughter of privilege whose political views are based on a love of martial heroism, terror and contempt for the mob, and a patronizing dismissiveness towards the common people outside of her charity work.
Ironically, Dray and Kamoie can bring Eliza’s elite Federalist perspective to life because of the rise of social history, a discipline dedicated to broadening the narrative beyond the elite men of the US Founding generation to the Natives Eliza treated with as a young woman the enslaved in her father’s household, and the common whites she was disdainful of. Now insights from social history have come to historical fiction about the American Revolution. My Dear Hamilton is a worthy entry alongside other recent Revolutionary War novels by and from the perspective of women, such as The Devil Take Tomorrow by Gretchen Jeannette. Like them, it is romantic in a way that echoes but is more serious than the literature of the period itself. Unlike them, it lets the story continue into the less romantic days of post-revolutionary politics, grief, and imperfect union. None of them claims to be “The Red Badge of Courage for the American Revolution”, an iconic literary rendering of the war. That is unnecessary, for these novels are evocative works in their own particular way.
In giving us Eliza’s whole life, and her own case for that life in the face of consuming grief in a democratizing nation whose direction she only eventually reconciled herself to, we get a woman who is ultimately as tragically and valiantly human as her husband.
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Irene Colthurst is a reviewer with the Historical Novel Society. She lives in San Diego.
April 1, 2019
Not a Proper Evacuee
4th September 1939.
Auntie Win never says anything nice to me. It’s always “Joyce, take your elbows off the table.” “Joyce, don’t talk with your mouth full.” I don’t want to go and live with her in Brimley, but I suppose I must.
“You’re so lucky to have an aunt living in Essex,” my mother says, as we’re travelling up on the train. “You might’ve been evacuated.”
I nod.
When she opens the door to us, Auntie Win’s wearing her bright blue district nurse’s uniform, ‘sensible’, black, lace-up shoes and wrinkled flesh-coloured stockings on her thick legs. “Expected you half an hour ago. I have to go out. One of my patients has had a fall. I’ve made you tea.” She waves her hand at a brown pot with minute white chips on its spout.
Moments later she’s swinging her leg over her bicycle and jingling her bell at a dog in the road, leaving us in the ill lit kitchen, me counting the faded black and white quarry tiles on the floor and trying to ignore the stale cabbage smell seeping up my nostrils. My mother smooths her silk dress and brushes the wicker seat of her chair before she sits down. I expect her to make her usual Auntie Win comments, about droopy skirts and outside lavatories, but, over the past few months, as war with Germany became more likely every hour, my parents have stopped saying this sort of thing.
We’re unpacking my suitcase in the little room where I am to sleep when we become aware of the hum of conversation and revving of engines in the street below. I step over to the window. “Buses,” I cry. “Red London buses.” I pull my mother, shaking her head, to the tiny casement. “Honestly. Look. It says ‘London Transport’ on them.” I want to add, “Aren’t they splendid? Aren’t they spiffing?” but then I think that would be a funny thing to say about buses.
My mother peers over my shoulder and sniffs.
It takes me a moment realise that there’s something wrong about these ordinary red Route Masters, lined up behind each other as if in a queue. All the passengers are children. They’re tumbling off the landing platforms like ants, clutching gas masks in cardboard boxes and carrying brown paper parcels bundled up with string.
Turning away, my mother stoops down to examine her face in the looking-glass. “From the East End, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Proper evacuees, with brown luggage labels tied around their necks. Even though the sun has been shining down upon us all day, a reminder that summer is not yet over, and, earlier, my little bedroom seemed stiflingly hot, a shiver jolts down my spine. This war is really happening.
“Joyce, don’t stare.” My mother beckons me away from the window with a jerk of her head . “You be careful around those East Enders. Remember that you live in a nice house in Friern Barnet. And that your father’s the manager at the bank.”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“What’s the time?” My mother raises her wrist to her nose, and squints at her tiny silver-framed watch. She says that glasses don’t suit her. Picking up her handbag, she reaches over to kiss my cheek. “I’d better take the four thirty-two, darling. Daddy and I are going out to dinner tonight. You’ll be all right until Auntie Win comes home, won’t you?”
I gulp in a short breath. I want to scream, “Please don’t,” and “Please, please, please… take me home,” but I’m twelve. I force a smile. Wartime spirit and all that.
After she’s left, I continue to watch the buses. I wonder if I could stow away under one of the seats and I carry on thinking about this long after they’ve revved up and driven off, around the corner and out of sight. For a moment, I still hear their clattering engines… then nothing, only the shopkeeper over the road retracting his blind. If only I were fourteen. Fourteen year olds are allowed to stay in my wonderful London. If only we had relatives in America, like my friend, Eileen. She’s sailing on the Queen Mary tomorrow. Lucky thing.
Daddy’s suggested I keep a diary.
* * * * *
6 th September 1939
I’ve started at Brimley School for Girls. The buildings are old, with long corridors painted grass green and mustard yellow, hardly any playground, no tennis courts or hockey pitches, or anything like we had at my old school. There are so many of us in the form room that some pupils have to share a desk, or even kneel on the floor. The village girls have bagged all the places on one side of the room and the evacuees, all from Deptford, the other side. I sit at a single desk at the middle, in front of a pillar, beside me pipes which gurgle like someone being sick.
When Miss Clough asks us to introduce ourselves, I’m last. “Joyce Harper, Miss,” I say. “From Friern Barnet Ladies’ Academy.”
Someone behind me sniggers.
* * * * *
5th October
Everyone at school keeps calling me ‘Friern Barnet’. The Deptford girls started it. They say I talk posh and I’m stuck up. I don’t and I’m not.
I’ve just spoken to Mummy from the telephone box down the road. I asked her about coming home, just for a weekend, but she won’t let me. It’s not fair. The Germans haven’t dropped any bombs in London. I didn’t tell her anything about school, of course. She’s doing war work, knitting for the WRVS, and Daddy’s an air raid warden.
Auntie Win’s listening to ‘The News’ on the wireless when I get back, but then the announcer’s voice fades out and that horrid Lord Haw-Haw comes on. It’s disgusting the way he talks. Nobody knows who he is, or even if he’s one person or several. His accent’s British, though.
Afterwards, I feel cold inside, as if icy water is running through my veins. Auntie Win makes more cocoa. She makes very good cocoa. We don’t talk about Lord Haw-Haw. We don’t talk much at all. She reads the newspaper and I do my homework.
* * * * *
26 th October
They’re calling me names again. They stopped for a few days and now they’ve started again. It’s my own fault, I suppose. I mentioned my old school again during algebra. I’m not a tell-tale, but I did speak to Miss Clough this morning and she was jolly decent. This afternoon, she’s sent me out of class with a message for the headmistress’s secretary, and, when I go back in, she’s saying, “We must just call her ‘Joyce’. That’s her name.”
* * * * *
31st October
Nothing goes right for me.
It’s all over the papers that Lord Haw-Haw’s name is ‘William Joyce’. The girls in my class are following me around, chanting, “Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling”. I hate them all. The rotten thing is that, when Marjorie and Tilly come over at break this morning, I think they want to be friends and I smile at them, but immediately they start. “Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling”. I hate them. I hate them all so much.
I go back to Auntie Win’s and she’s moaning about clothes left on my bedroom floor. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
I’ve had enough. I’ll tidy my bedroom, all right. I’ll tidy it so she won’t know I’ve ever been here.
* * * * *
31 October, later.
Auntie Win’s using the outside lavatory when I’m lugging my suitcase downstairs, bumping it over each step, one by one. So much noise and I can’t help it. I’m afraid of damaging the case, or the catch bursting open. I slip out the front door, but don’t slam it shut. I’ve 5s 2d in my purse. That’s going to be enough, surely. I trundle down the street, dragging my heavy suitcase. I never realised how uneven the Brimley pavement is, and the handles on my case are really hurting my hands. I have to keep swapping from left to right, but, like the poster says, I carry on. Into the station booking office at last. “Single to Liverpool Street, please.” Ah, the music of those words.
“Six shillings,” mutters the booking clerk, as I empty the contents of my purse on to the counter.
I push my coins towards him, shillings, sixpences, threepenny bits, pennies, halfpennies and farthings. I look up at him, studying the lines on his face and his sprouting eyebrows. He’s smiling. I’m sure he’s a nice man. He’s got to be a nice man. No, he’s not. He’s shaking his head. “But…” I plead.
“Six shillings, Miss.”
“Pleeaase.”
“Six shillings to you. Same as everybody else.” Calling “Yes?” over my head, to the soldier in uniform, he shoves my coins back across the wooden counter.
The Deptford girls – the real evacuees – would have argued the toss with a C’monnn Misterrrr.
I’m Joyce, from Friern Barnet. And still in Brimley.
I trudge back through the village, past the Co-op, the church, my school, and all the other horrible, dreary buildings. It’s autumn now. Dusk is falling and, with the blackout, it goes dark fast. Only the fish and chip shop gives out a faint glow. Mummy says, you can never get the smell of chip fat out of your clothes.
Ten minutes later, I’m staring at the leaded fanlight over Auntie Win’s porch, papered over in accordance with wartime regulations. I lift my hand to knock. I’ll do it. In a minute.
A piercing sound like splitting wood has me staggering backwards. The front door, swollen with October damp, rips open. My aunt, a yellow cardigan over her blue nurse’s dress, hovers in the doorway, her hand on the lintel. Her complexion, never beautiful like my mother’s, is drained of any colour, except for suddenly prominent freckles and pink broken veins.
“Joyce. Thank God.” Then she reaches out for my arm and pulls me inside, as if removing me from imminent danger.
“I…”
“Your mother… What could I have said?” Her eyes light on my suitcase. She cannot tear them away.
“I’ll… I’ll take it upstairs.” I’m speaking so low I can hardly hear myself.
“I’ll make some cocoa.”
With my hurting hands, striped red and white, I drag my belongings back to my room. She calls up to me three times, even though I remain in my room only to remove my outdoor shoes – not allowed in her house. I sit at the kitchen table, once more counting the black and white quarry tiles, aware of her moving about and making cocoa, but not daring to look at her. “I’m afraid you do have to stay here, Joyce,” says Auntie Win, as she hands my cup to me.
I take a gulp of steaming chocolate froth. It scalds my throat. “I know.”
She sips her own, swallowing loudly. Usually, she’s a tea person. “Your bedroom… it wasn’t too untidy. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”
What did she just say? I shuffle in my seat.
“I’m a nurse. I’m afraid I expect everything to look like a hospital.”
“I’ll make all tidy when I put it everything back.” Grown-ups don’t apologise to children. It’s not the proper thing.
“Thank you.” She sits back in her chair, sliding forwards as if she’s lying on it. “Now, tell me. How are things at school?”
“All right.”
“Really? Unless things have changed a lot since my day, girls can be absolutely horrible.”
Her kind tone almost makes me cry, but I hold back, rushing upstairs again, then wishing I hadn’t because I want my cocoa. She follows me to my room, carrying my cup. When I do talk, she doesn’t put her arm around me and stroke my hair like Mummy would, just sits beside me on my bed. She already knew, of course. People talk in villages.
“Pity you mentioned the ‘Ladies Academy’ bit,” she says.
“It’s what my school’s called.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“I’m not stuck up.”
“I know, but think about how it sounds to other people.” She grabs her handbag. “With all this going on, I haven’t put tea on. Let’s buy fish and chips. We’ll sort out those girls. You see.”
* * * * *
31 October, still.
We’ve been waiting outside the chip shop for some time when Marjorie (from Brimley) and Tilly (from Deptford) join the queue. “Those two’re in my form,” I whisper to Auntie Win.
“Say hello then.”
“They’re horrid.”
“They’re waving to you.”
I shake my head.
“Come on, Joyce. Be friendly. Wave back.”
I don’t want to, but I do, because Auntie Win’s raising her eyebrows and looking at me.
“And smile.”
I force my mouth into a tight sort of grin.
An icy wind, straight off the North Sea, whips through my Friern Barnet coat. Tilly says it’s cold because it blows from Germany. Tilly can be nice sometimes. When I get my meal, wrapped up in the Daily Sketch, I clasp it to my chest like a hot water bottle. “Mummy doesn’t let me eat in the street, but would it be all right if we had a few chips?”
Auntie Win is already unravelling her bundle of newsprint. “Mum,” she says. “Mum.”
I frown. “Mummy wouldn’t like being called Mum.”
“Call her what you like… in Friern Barnet… and don’t eat in the streets… of Friern Barnet. But this is Brimley and I’m Auntie Win.”
“You and she don’t get along, do you?”
“Of course we do,” my aunt says almost before I’ve got my words out. She bites off a large piece of fish and chews it slowly. She nudges me as we’re about to pass Marjorie and Tilly. “Offer them some chips.”
My arm locks by my side.
“Go on.”
I thrust my bag in front of them. “Er… would you like a chip.”
Tilly looks at Marjorie, at Auntie Win, at me, at Auntie Win again. “Watcha,” she giggles, grabbing two.
“Watcha” says Marjorie, taking one. Marjorie copies everything Tilly says.
“Well done,” mouths Auntie Win as we cross the road. “Don’t let them see they upset you.”
We’re just finishing our meal when two figures come hurtling up the street, shouting, “Joyce, Joyce!”
“Have a chip,” pants Tilly, holding out her portion.
“Would you care for a chip, Nurse Carter,” asks Marjorie. She stares up at her. “You looked after my grandma last year, when she had her stroke.”
Auntie Win nods. “Yes, of course. How’s Grandma now?”
“Very well, thank you,” says Marjorie. “Actually, not really.”
“I’ll drop by tomorrow, Marjorie.”
“You can come around with us at break tomorrow, if you want, Joyce.” Tilly’s voice comes through chewed potato. She swings on her heel to face Marjorie. “Can’t she, Marge?”
“Do you think she means it?” I ask my aunt, my face furrowing into a frown as we walk home.
“Only one way to find out.”
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Rosemary is returning to short story writing after spending time writing a historical novel. She was inspired to write this short story after seeing photographs of red London buses bringing evacuees to a town near to where she lives in Essex, England. She has articles published in Christian Writer and Together. In real life, Rosemary lives with her husband and cat and teaches IT and maths. She blogs about writing and everyday life at Write On.
