Photo credit: somegeekintn via Foter.com / CC BY
I happened upon Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s new book at The Book Table. The description intrigued me, my mom had heard wonderful things about it, and it’s by a POC. All those things helped seal the deal for me when it came to deciding to purchase it (this is why I should not be allowed in book stores).
It takes place in Chicago right after the Civil War. I love reading books that take place in my hometown, especially when I can point out all the things the author got wrong (like turning south on Randolph. Tsk tsk, Perkins-Valdez).
Sadie Walker is a newlywed white woman whose husband just died. She moved to Chicago from Pennsylvania to be with him, only to find upon her arrival that he had died in a train crash on his way up. Shortly after she moves in, she starts hearing a voice in her head. She thinks she’s going crazy, but it turns out to be the spirit of a Union soldier who died shortly after the battle of Shiloh. She uses him as a medium to talk to other spirits and bring some comfort to people who lost someone in the war. Needless to say, she has plenty of customers because everyone lost someone in the war.
Madge is a freeborn black woman in Tennessee whose mother and two aunts taught her how to cure various ailments using the plants that grow around them. What they did not teach her was how to know what’s wrong with someone just by touching them. That’s a gift Madge was just born with. After the war, Madge decides to find out for herself what this brave new post-slavery world has in store for a woman like herself and sets off for Chicago.
Hemp Harrison was a slave on a hemp farm owned by a man named Harrison. Even after the war broke out and all the other slaves walked off the farm, Hemp remained for two years because he was afraid his wife and stepdaughter, who were sold shortly before the war, wouldn’t be able to find him if he moved. When his former owner died, Hemp left the farm anyway, afraid some long-lost relative would show up and try to claim ownership of Hemp and the one other slave who had remained to tend the farmer in his old age. Hemp had always been called “Horse” and when he gets to the North and they tell him he needs a proper name he’s afraid his family won’t be able to find him with a different name, which is why he decides to go by Hemp Harrison.
Hemp tries everything to find his family. He walks all the way from the farm on Kentucky to Chicago. He enlists in the Union Army and spends his evenings asking around for his wife and stepdaughter. When he gets to Chicago he continues asking around, puts notices in the newspaper, and even enlists the help of a local white doctor.
Nothing comes of any of his attempts, and in the meantime, he meets Madge. They fall in love, but he doesn’t want to be unfaithful to the wife he is sure is still out there somewhere.
All three characters struggle with unfinished business with family they were separated from. All of them decide their new lives are in Chicago, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to make things right with those they left behind. I won’t spoil anything, but despite my initially tepid feelings about this book, I was very satisfied with the ending and was even grinning when a particular chapter reached the ending I wanted it to reach. It’s an excellent story of love, loss, and finding one’s own independence.
What did you guys read this week? Anything you took a while to warm up to? I want to hear all about it!