Should I stay or should I go? A slave contemplates

Holy cow, this book doesn't hold back.  When I told my friend that I planned to read Wench on audiobook, I asked her if she thought it would be too graphic for an audiobook.  She said no.  "I don't think the graphic-ness was the hard part.  The utter despair of slavery was."

And she was right.  This book is really good in the way that Kindred was really good - it makes slavery so immediate and personal that you cannot look away and you cannot think about it in vague, abstract terms.

Because I'm lazy and want to get to the meat of this review, and because the book summary is actually pretty good, here's how Publishers Weekly describes the novel:

In her debut, Perkins-Valdez eloquently plunges into a dark period of American history, chronicling the lives of four slave women—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters' mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio. There, they see free blacks for the first time and hear rumors of abolition, sparking their own desires to be free. For everyone but Lizzie, that is, who believes she is really in love with her master, and he with her. An extended flashback in the middle of the novel delves into Lizzie's life and vividly explores the complicated psychological dynamic between master and slave. Jumping back to the final summer in Ohio, the women all have a decision to make—will they run? Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful, this novel showcases Perkins-Valdez's ability to bring the unfortunate past to life.

This novel's strength is in its ability to bring to life all the gray areas that existed in slavery.  When we learn about it now, we often think of it in strictly black and white (no pun intended) terms.  We imagine cruel masters whipping slaves in chains.  But that vision completely ignores the the complexities that existed under the Peculiar Institution.  It's books like this one that bring those to light.  Lizzie and her friends are all slave mistresses to their masters, mothers to mixed-race children.  When they consider running away, they are considering an opportunity for their own freedom that could have dire consequences for their children.  When they consider staying in their current situation, they are accepting a lifetime of rape.

And even that is putting it in terms that are too rigid.  Lizzie begins the novel believing that she's in love with her master and that they have a very happy relationship.  It's only as she gets to know her friends better that she's able to put her own relationship in context.  As we learn more about her life, we see how her affair with her master impacted her relationship with the plantation wife, with her children, and with other slaves.  Nothing is easy for Lizzie or her friends, and the exhausting balancing act they play all day, every day is so important to know to begin to contemplate the effects of slavery.

So much of slavery's ability to last for so long was based on this power of whites to threaten and manipulate blacks to do things they normally would not.  When Lizzie wants to help her friend that's been badly beaten, her master/lover forbids her to do so and says that if she does anything to help him, he will beat her son to within an inch of his life.  Her son - who is also his son.  And his personal property, since he was born to a slave.  So Lizzie wonders - does he even have fatherly feeling towards her children?  Or does he view them as collateral, disposable property?  When she thinks of her children, she wants desperately for them to be educated as well as whites, but knows that they need to learn some sort of trade so that, if worse comes to worst, they have something of value to barter.

This is such a well-written book that provides an important window to a way of life that we like to gloss over and talk about in blanket terms.  Highly recommended.