Jesse > Recent Status Updates

This is set during the period of John Brown’s guerilla war against pro-slavery forces. Reading up independently on John Brown was learning something my high school history courses had sort of glazed over in a vastly different light. This crazy story has an interracial love triangle, two of whom are basically foster siblings, and for a hot second I thought that the Englishman had a gay nurse crushing on him.

So, the fairy tale aspect of these stories is strong. I’m 99% sure that White Eagle is the disgraced heir that Maxwell had been looking for, which makes Winona the inheritor of the estate, which is the real reason that White Eagle was murdered and the kids were abducted into slavery. I could be wrong, but obscured identities and crazy inheritances were major plot points in the three Hopkins stories I’ve read.

OMFG HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT COMING AHHHHHHHH

melodramas are freakin awesome!!!!!!!!!!

I’m really caught up in this. Hopkins is a good hand at pacing these romances. In Contending Forces, she didn’t milk the drama but had Sappho tell Will everything straightaway once Langley tried to blackmail her. Now that the snare is around Cuthbert, Jewel is firmly on his side while the drama of the murder trial (and private investigation) bear out.

Also, I’m guessing that Senator Bowen was poisoned, too!!!

OH GOD I JUST REALIZED THAT HAGAR PROBABLY RECOGNIZED ENSON BUT SHE CANT SAY ANYTHING AGAINST HIM WITHOUT HAVING TO EXPLAIN WHY SHE KNOWS HIM AS A HORRIBLE SON OF A BITCH WHICH WOULD INVOLVE EXPLAINING HER HERITAGE AND IT ALREADY BURNED HER ONCE. HER INTERNALIZED SOUTHERN CASTE PREJUDICE IS ROBBING HER OF HER AGENCY. THIS IS GONNA GET SO FREAKIN MESSY

As a romance, this works, because I’m pissed at the 50 yr old barely disguised St. Clair’s Enson busting up Jewel’s engagement to Cuthbert so that he can marry her, by way of using Aurelia, Cuthbert’s one-time fiancée.

Given the format, I’m 99% sure that Mrs. Bowen is Hagar, and Aurelia is her daughter, the two having been separated from when she jumped into the river during her escape.

We have an echo of the scene-setting drama that began Contending Forces: a woman’s wealthy, slave-owning husband is murdered and she, along with her child, are slated to be sold into bondage due to her parentage. In this case, her African ancestry is a surprise to her and her husband, but Ellis Enson was too moral a man (for a slaveholder) to revile his beloved. Which is why his brother had to stage a suicide.

“Talma Gordon”

A murder mystery! It’s also a vehicle for Hopkins’s views on intermarriage by way of what appears to be a discussion on American colonialism. The point of the doctor telling the story appears to be that if our society cannot treat mixed race people humanely then we have no business establishing an American empire where racial intermingling is inevitable.

The American Colored League hearing is where the aim of this novel became apparent to me and why there has been such an emphasis on mixed race heritage and miscegenation. Hopkins sees these people as bearing the psychosexual trauma of being the living legacy of decades of slavery and sexual violence.

Part of what is nice about this book is how it places in fiction so much of the problems plaguing African Americans in the northern United States that, yeah, I vaguely remember from history books, but which hits a bit different in this fictionalized account. Hopkins also tries to shine a light on the complex sectional politics and notions of “blackness” that lead to the self-destruction of Pan-Africa.

I ran into a cognitive speedbump because Hopkins is purposefully evasive in directly connecting the Smith family to the escaped Jesse Montfort, I assume as a way to thematically underline his attempted break from his past. It’s doubly confusing when his… grandchildren??? are presented with what appears to be the Montfort last name, but I assume that this is, like, their second middle name.

This covers a lot of ground, from how the English were abolishing slavery to how race relations were managed in the Bahamas to how someone like Charles Montfort could expect to be treated in the south. The answer, based on rules that Hopkins outlines about miscegenation and fomenting dissatisfaction among the slaves and other weird slavery-era Southernisms, is you can expect to die.

“…because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”

Back when I first read this I had no idea that the engraving of the “dead man” was a reference to the Academy Awards, let alone that the given names of the uncles was an oblique reference to its nickname, Oscar. I also had no idea how much of the spirit of Holy Wood was meant to evoke The Call of Cthulhu! I mean, it also links Holy Wood to Atlantis, but the ideas surrounding Cthulhu are far more prominent.

Gaspode the wonder dog—and the rest of the talking animals—practically steal this show. This is one of the more meta Discworld books, since so much of it is “our” reality leaking into theirs. I realize now that this sort of craze is pretty much the exact same plot as Soul Music. I mean, a lot of Discworld’s comedy comes from direct parody / referential humor, but this is a kind of intrusion.

I am in shock that this is the novel that introduced the stable of the Unseen University with Ridcully, the Bursar, the Dean (born to eat big dinners), and Ponder. Ridcully has strong Ron Swanson vibes. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Gaspode appear. This is more of a satire-heavy story so it’s not quite as good as, say, Guards! Guards! but I’ve been laughing a good bit.