Call Your Daughter Home, by Deb Spera. Park Row Books, 2019

Set in South Carolina in 1924, this novel weaves together narrations from three disparate women. Annie Coles is the rich, white, woman. She’s not as rich as she used to be, though; the Cole family money was in cotton and the boll weevil has left that business in tatters. But they are getting into tobacco, and Annie has a business of her own: The Sewing Circle, where the cotton sacks for packing crops are sewn, which is cheaper than buying premade sacks. And now Annie and her younger son, Lonnie, are branching out: they are starting to manufacture clothing to be sold in stores around the area.

Gertrude is poor white trash, married to an abusive drunk who is starving his family when he’s not beating on them. One day she can’t take it anymore, and flees the shack in the swamp with her children. She’s lucky: in this economically depressed area, she manages to get a job. But it’ll take more than that to give her security.

Oretta is the Magical Negro. She’s worked for the Coles family all her life; she is the first generation of freed people of color. The Coles had owned her family before the Civil War. She keeps the Coles’s house and family in good shape. She can see and talk with the dead.

The three women, who normally wouldn’t have associated with each other, find their lives bound together in strange ways. There is a big secret in the Coles family, one which keeps Annie’s two daughters, Sarah and Mollie, from speaking to her. One of the Coles sons committed suicide at a young age. Gertrude’s secret would be totally damning if found out.

It’s a wretched time and place to be living in. Disease, alligators, poverty, misogyny, racism, and classism, all are present. All three women are well acquainted with grief. The author did well creating her main characters; you can’t not feel their pain. The story bogs down in places- the middle section seems to take forever- but it’s still a can’t-put-it-down story. While it’s pretty easy to figure out the biggest secret early, how it’s dealt with in the end caught me by surprise. Survival and motherhood are the backbone of the novel. Four and a half stars.

The Keepers of the House, by Shirley Ann Grau. Avon Books, 1964

The Howlands have lived on their well-to-do farm for seven generations, since the end of the War of 1812, when the first William Howland decided he didn’t want to go home but to settle in some place with easier land to deal with. He didn’t live long- killed by an Indian raid- but he did live long enough to sire six children. Every generation had a William Howland, until two generations each produce only a single daughter. Abigail Mason, of the seventh generation, is the chief narrator. In this deep South setting, there is a tremendous amount of prejudice still around in the 1950s and 60s.

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is broken into five parts; the first four are from the point of view of different people (although the first and last are both Abigail) and an epilogue. The middle sections are first William’s (narrator Abigail’s grandfather) and then Margaret’s- William’s housekeeper/mistress who is a woman of color.

Margaret is the daughter of a free black woman in a village in the woods and a white surveyor who came through the area. Her white blood doesn’t show in her, but she is considered an outsider in the village because of her white father. When William runs into her in the swamps and offers her a job, it gives her a chance to escape, into another situation where she is considered an outsider, this time because of her black blood.  When she has three children by William, no one cares. It’s considered just part of living in the south. Margaret also raises Abigail, due to Abigail’s mother dying young. When Margaret’s children reach a certain age, they are sent north to be schooled and raised as white.

Abigail marries a young politician and becomes the perfect wife and mother. But her husband turns out to not be who she thought; it’s not bad enough he’s a bigot himself, but he joins the KKK and votes against integration. This creates problems between them, but nothing like what happens when word leaks out about William and Margaret’s relationship. Because there is something about their union that is intolerable to the bigoted rednecks of the area. And they will take revenge on the Howland family for hiding this fact for so many years. Their violent and destructive acts won’t be the last acts of revenge, though. Abigail will get the last word on that subject.

This is a powerful book. I did have trouble following it at first because of the way names were repeated within the Howland family, but as I got further in I sorted them out. The characters are vivid and fully human, not stereotypes. The descriptive passages bring out the physical beauty of the area; the author clearly loves the geography of the state she grew up in. But the sheer ugliness of the actions of many of the people are what grabs the reader. I can only imagine the impact it might have had when she wrote it, during the civil rights movement. I think this is an important book for people to be reading now, as America seems to be at risk of sinking back into the mindset of the era and area. 

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