Bibliofreakblog

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

In Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s debut novel, Wench, Lizzie, Sweet, Reenie, and Mawu are all brought to the Tawawa resort in southern Ohio for the summer by their masters. Perkins-Valdez researched the real retreat where it was common for Southern gentlemen to bring their slave-mistresses. Of course, being in a free state has a certain lure, and for the first time, their eyes are open to real possibilities of living free. An edifying friendship forms, one that none of the women have ever been able to have with other slaves, due to their status as the master’s mistress.

Perkins-Valdez neither justifies nor clarifies her characters feelings and the direction they take them. She treats her characters with respect, as if they were real people, rather than the stereotyped compassionate or harsh Southern slave owner, the docile or burning slave. Throughout the book, we’re never really sure if Lizzie loves her master, Drayle, or not. We never really understand Drayle’s feelings towards the children he fathered with Lizzie. He fully recognizes that they are his children, his flesh and blood, and has a certain amount of love for them. His wife, Fran, spoils them, as she has no children of her own. But Drayle fully admits that they are property, and every time Lizzie tries to broach the subject of his freeing them, he puts her off.

The dialogue is pitch-perfect. She evokes the cadences of slave dialect without ever resorting to the tricks that make dialect reading so clunky, such as clipping off the ends of words and replacing them with apostrophes. Instead, her characters say things like, “Us on free land. This here is free land. Folks die trying to cross that river and here us is done crossed it.” Even when the characters say words like “sho”, it’s without the apostrophe, and flows smoothly, which allows the reader to become fully absorbed in the world of Tawawa House.

Comparisons can’t help but me made to other writers who have taken on the subject: Morrison, Twain, Stowe, Butler. But Wench is able to stand on its own, not just for the novel spin on the subject, but because of the strength of the characters and the writing.
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If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Beloved by Toni Morrison
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
Property by Valerie Martin
Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill
Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Other works by Dolen Perkins-Valdez:

none.