Wench - Dolen Perkins-Valdez

2010, 304 pages
Four women, Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu meet at the Tawawa resort in Ohio. They are all black slaves coming from the south with their masters, allegedly to clean for them, cook for them and take care of them, but actually as their mistresses, or their sex slaves. That is, all but Lizzie, who is really in love with Drayle, her master, and sure that he is in love with her as well.
The visit to the slave-free state opens their eyes to things they didn’t know or didn’t want to think about before, and they all have to make some tough choices.
The story focuses on Lizzie, and after the first summer in the resort, we go back to Lizzie’s story and to her life in Drayle’s plantation and their relationship. The story then continues to the next summer visits to the resort and the meeting with the other women in the same situation.
The book does a good job in describing this side of slavery, not being the master of one’s own body, not being able to take care of the children that are born as a result to this relationship, children that are also the property of the master, who can sell them if he wishes to.
I found the story line a little confusing. Scenes don’t always end in a clear way and it feels like they are abruptly cut. The jump in time from the first summer to Lizzie’s past and then back to the second summer didn’t work well for me and I wasn’t sure what happened first and what happened next. Some parts were very interesting and touching but others were a little boring and I wondered what are they supposed to contribute to the story. In general it seems like a collection of drafts, some of them very good, some of them are less good, that now should be composed to one good story. Sometimes I felt the story slides towards the “yellowish” zone of sex and violence to attract attention.
I also felt the characters are a little stereotyped. Almost all whites were extremely mean, almost all blacks were extremely good. I wrote in my review of my previous book, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” about the Armenian genocide, that what makes this book excellent is that it does not fall to cliché and stereotypes where all good people are on one side and all bad people are on the other side. Too bad I cannot say the same about this book. It may not be fair to compare them but that’s how it turned out, that I read them one after the other so I can’t help it.
All in all I enjoyed the book, in spite of some weaknesses I mentioned above, and I recommend it.