'Freedom had come after the war for all black folks. All excepting Rue, she felt, for she was born to healing and stuck to it for life. And stuck to this place. Her own doing that, a secret curse of her own making.'
I've been itching to pick up Afia Atakora's Conjure Women ever since I saw the cover on Instagram, and was lucky enough to receive a proof copy from the publishers.
A couple of weeks ago, looking for some lockdown entertainment, my mum started watching Gone With the Wind. I wasn't keen, having seen bits of it before, but found myself unable to look away from its bizarre romanticism of the plantation lifestyle that depended entirely on an enslaved population.
It's so profoundly out of touch that at times, Mr Book Fox and I were to be found laughing out loud at the television, or else sitting stunned into silence with the knowledge that even in 1939 (seven decades after the Civil War), it was still acceptable to explicitly mourn the age of 'slave and master' in a blockbuster film.
After that experience, my first thought was to pick up Conjure Women. Set amidst the same tumultuous times of slavery, war, and freedom, the novel is told with the focus where it belongs, at the heart of the enslaved community rather than inside the master's house. I knew reading it wouldn't take away the bitter taste of that misguided narrative that the 'Old South' was somehow romantic and genteel. But still, I wanted to hear a different voice tell the story.
Miss Rue was that voice, and her story is so beautifully woven together with that of her mother, the plantation to which they belonged, and the white mistress she uneasily considers a childhood friend, that I knew early on I would be giving this novel five stars.
The story is that of Miss Rue and her mother, Miss May Belle, both of whom are healers and midwives to their community: May Belle in slaverytime, and Rue in freedomtime, after her mother's death. Time isn't particularly linear, with Rue's present mingling with memory and her mother's timeline, but I never found it hard to follow or understand. The passages seen through Rue's eyes as a child are particularly well observed, as we see her struggle to understand her mother's craft and the cruel whims of their master's daughter, Miss Varina.
There's a natural flow to the narrative that weaves in and out of these two very different periods in time, creating a stark contrast and gradually filling in the blanks in Rue's past, until we understand the true dangers that face her in the here and now.
For Rue has delivered a baby with strange pale, scaly skin and dark eyes like the 'black-eyed beans' that give him his name, Bean. The child's mother shies away from the baby, but Rue finds herself drawn towards him and filled with foreboding about what his appearance means for his future - and hers. When a wandering preacher arrives in town, the town's reliance on Rue for health and reassurance starts to shift allegiance.
But don't think of this as the classic tale of a healing woman up against the religious dogma of a zealot. Akatora cleverly subverts expectations around witchcraft (or 'conjure'), healing, and authority, and I would never have guessed the role Father Abel has to play in this story. Nor can the reader ever fully trust Rue, and even less so her mother Miss May Belle, who plays her cards so very close to her chest in order to eke out a safe living for herself and her daughter.
Combining the deep wound of slavery with Rue's confused feelings about freedomtime, healing lore with the sometimes-gruesome reality of childbirth, and human fallibility with superstition, Conjure Women is a truly wonderful historical novel which presents the Civil War, its prelude and consequences, in all its pain and complexity. I'm a white Brit and can't claim to have any understanding of what Rue's life would really have been like, but all I can say is that reading this novel felt like time travel.
My rating: five stars!
If you like this, try:
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins
The Familiars by Stacey Halls
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