Virginia Primitive

by Sallie Reynolds

"Do something, Lila. Make the child be reasonable." "Time to settle," she always says to Mother. "Chirruns need time to settle their feelins." In the racist South of the 1940s, a white child, Sally, dreams of having a happy family. Sparked by her desire to belong, she shares forbidden activities to fill the empty spaces in her heart. Her parents' alcoholism, neglect, and lack of a strong family bond lead her to create her own prohibited family. But will this choice lead to divisions too deep and far-reaching ever to heal? "My gramamma tell me, 'You comin back to me one day, don't you worry. I done writ yo name on the black hen's egg.' 'What's the black hen's egg?' 'A way the old folks had of bindin you to em forever, honey. For ever!' " Virginia Primitive is a semi-autobiographical novel from acclaimed author Sallie Reynolds. Writing just the way the child Sally heard the vernacular of her family and friends, the grown-up Reynolds artfully shapes each word to reflect her conflicted youth in 1940s Virginia and her attempts to return and redeem. Virginia Primitive is a powerful remembrance of lifelong struggle and love. This book is a blending of two lives over two eras, and is told by the narrator as a child and as an adult 40 years later. It is set in Virginia at the very end of the "Old South," when the black "help" did the parenting and house- and yard-work of many white families, and where pain and lies were never acknowledged. Raised half in one world, half in the other, the narrator struggles as a child to establish a base of love and identity. Later, as an adult in New York, she realizes that she is still living a lie, and that the only person she'd really loved in her childhood was a black woman named Lila who'd given her affection and hope. She goes back and finds the same sassy, tough Lila she remembered. But old, poor, and alone. In Virginia Primitive, as the narrator tells four stories, the child's and the adult's and the black's and t

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2014

Reviews

[Stephanie Golden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sallie Reynolds turns her own childhood in the Jim Crow South into an emblematic story of the tangled, complex race relations of an era and their legacy. Reynolds unfolds the intricate emotional ties among the child Sally, Lila, the black woman who brought her up, Sally’s parents, and Lila’s relatives from the point of view of both the uncomprehending child and the adult Sally of 30 years later, now living in New York, who renews her connection with Lila and tries to help her hold on to a family farm in danger of being sold by a white lawyer to pay Lila’s uncle’s bills.

We see the adult Sally feeling her way through complicated relationships among both black and white folk, still seeking details of the past to fill in the blanks of family history no one told the child Sally. But most poignant for me was the situation in which the little white girl turns from her emotionally disconnected and manipulative parents to transfer her love to the black servant and so is always jealous of Lila’s own son, whom Lila has to neglect in order to care for Sally. You can feel the structure of race relations constraining every move people make.

The story is told so naturally that the reader forgets how much craft went into its construction. I was completely immersed in this world of the rural South, which no longer exists but still remains as a dark history shadowing the world we live in.