A slave’s life, unbound

Novel unfolds Jamaican woman’s pain, undaunted joie de vivre

May 30, 2010|Ann Harleman, Globe Correspondent

“Why must I dwell upon sorrow?’’ asks the narrator at the end of Andrea Levy’s fifth novel. “Perhaps . . . upon some other day there may come a person who would wish to tell the chronicle of those times anew. But I am an old-old woman. And, reader, I have not the ink.’’

The speaker is July, narrator and heroine in the fullest sense of the word of “The Long Song.’’ Born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, daughter of a field slave called Kitty and the plantation’s brutish Scottish overseer, July lives through the last two decades of slavery, the chaotic and violent time of manumission, and the difficult first decades of freedom. Such a life holds plenty of sorrow. If we read in order to enlarge our experience to go somewhere in place, or time, or the human heart that we could not go on our own, we might expect to find this novel exhausting, horrifying, depressing. Instead, “The Long Song’’ leaves its reader (a personage frequently addressed by July) with a newly burnished appreciation for life, love, and the pursuit of both. How? Levy conveys July’s experience in the way recommended by Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.’’

July writes down her life story at the insistence of her son, Thomas Kinsman, whom she left outside the door of the Baptist minister shortly after his birth. Thomas was subsequently raised in England. Returning to Jamaica a successful publisher, he finds his birth mother — now middle-aged, impoverished, and ailing — and takes her into his home in Kingston. It is Thomas who offers us, with an introduction and an afterward, July’s completed manuscript.

Framing the narrative in this way reflects Levy’s hopes for the novel. In an interview in The Guardian, Levy tells the story of being at a conference on the legacy of slavery and having someone in the audience ask: How can I be proud of my Jamaican roots, when my ancestors were slaves? Of Jamaican ancestry herself, Levy said she set out to answer that question. Her research turned up almost no accounts in which the enslaved speak for themselves. Here, as Levy has said in interviews, is where fiction comes into its own. It was within her power to “put back the voices that were left out.’’

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