But it’s her sympathetic imagination that brings to life this vacationing “society” of black women who are kept as sexual companions, the most favored of servants but captives nonetheless. Lizzie’s voyage up the Mississippi River itself reminds her that she is chattel, chained to the deck of the steamship while the master she claims to love sleeps in a stateroom.īecause Perkins-Valdez is writing about women who were almost entirely illiterate and left no written record of their own, she has relied on research into historical documents about the true-life Ohio resort she fictionalizes, as well as 19th-century slave narratives, documents and early fiction about black women’s lives. Yet they are perpetually reminded of their subservience - flogged for any perceived misbehavior, expected to be always available for sex. Here Lizzie and her friends are indulged in liberties their masters would never permit at home - given a Sunday off, allowed to visit the city of Dayton free of white supervision. Perkins-Valdez is interested in investigating how Lizzie and three other slave women she befriends contemplate the radical prospect of freedom in a gray zone where the hotel staff are free coloreds residing in free territory, a white woman shockingly reaches out to them, and yet slave catchers prowl the woods for runaways. The tale finds its particular focus in the adult Lizzie’s being taken on several summer vacations by her master-lover to a bucolic Ohio resort, Tawawa House, that uniquely welcomes Southern slave owners and their black slave-mistresses among its Northern guests. Published last year and now out in paperback, “Wench” tells the story of a Tennessee slave girl, Lizzie, who at age 13 becomes the concubine of her master, Nathan Drayle, about two decades before the Civil War. How this came to be - that is, the nature of the sexual relationship between blacks and whites in slavery-era America - is examined in layers of beautiful complexity in Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s debut novel, “Wench.”

It’s a fact that the majority of black Americans, about 60 percent, have some European blood - a white ancestor somewhere in their past.

Amistad, 290 pages.Īuthor appearance: Dolen Perkins-Valdez will speak at Barnes & Noble Buckhead, 2900 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, at 7 p.m.

Wench by dolen perkins valdez