The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they and she will come to both revere and fear.
It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is also, surprisingly, a heartbreaking love story, of a man and woman haltingly trying, and mostly failing, to overcome their status of slave and master.Title – The Book of Night Women Author – Marlon James Publisher – Riverhead Books Published – February 19th, 2009 These women have been maimed, inside and out, and so this is also a book about how the indomitable human impulses toward kindness, love, friendship, family, and loyalty are warped so absolutely in a slave’s life as to make a mockery of them. These women hide their scars beneath scarves and bonnets and clothes. Their leader has a “quilt” of scar tissue on her back from whippings and breasts branded to mangled nubs.
Of the six women who plan the uprising, one has been shot blind in one eye, one had her throat slit as a child and has lived as a mute, one is scarred top to toe from the deliberate sprinkling of hot coals by an overseer. As the title suggests, this is a book about women, each with her own path through enslavement and her own injuries. James inspires courage of imagination, he has traversed light and darkness, he has traversed centuries, and he has traversed gender. It’s horrible to ask this question because the odds overwhelmingly suggest that if any of us, regardless of race, had been raised by slaveholders, we would probably be able sit on our porches watching whippings and hangings while drinking lemonade. This epic, beautiful, complicated, enthralling book, filled with damaged people living in the misery of a plantation, where “white man sleep with one eye open, but black man can never sleep,” raises an obvious question: Who the hell were these white people? They weren’t aberrant sadists-they constituted basically the entire white population of their communities. I once argued with my husband that we should name our son Toussaint, for example, but James’ unflinching engagement with history made me realize that I have read books on how Nazis, fascists, and communists found willing executioners, but never one on the psychology of the overseers of 400 years of slavery. Reading this book, I was ashamed at the relative paucity of my historical curiosity and imagination. A big, masterful novel like this raises questions without answering them-it raises questions that stay raised.
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