Voices: Love and War in 'The Book of Night Women'

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James is a love story; don't let the jacket information, or any other reviews you read fool you. It's wrapped in a story of slavery, for sure, but the book seeks to answer questions about the human heart: Is there real love on a plantation? Or, more specifically, can love exist between master and slave, white and black?

On Montpelier Estate, where the half-Ashanti, half-white Lilith is born in 1785, love is hard to find. Born to a teenage slave and a heartless overseer, Lilith’s mother dies and she is given over to the barren, unfeeling slave Circe. Circe don't love Lilith, or anyone else for that matter, and the child grows up lonely. She's headstrong and smart and brave. All these things she needs to be, as she matures amidst the ongoing battle Jamaica's white planters wage against their slaves in the late 18th century.

The book is written entirely in Jamaican patois. Patois, or patwah, generally refers to a non-standard version of a language, and in James's Night Women it means upon becomes 'pon, and pronouns like "that" are cast aside. Reading it was like music. There is a beauty in the shape and relationship of the words, and it is made even clearer by the contrast it creates with the actual content. Here's the first paragraph of the book:



Caribbean sugar cane plantations were notoriously violent and cruel institutions. The island that James creates is no different. The violence is compounded by the complete lack of morals. Slaves are taught to lie for their masters, masters lie to themselves, overseers lie on slaves, and slaves lie on slaves. Black women are never women or girls, but always cunt, bitch, niggerwoman. Punishments are doled out unjustly, and not for discipline. Whippings, gang rapings, lynchings, and burnings are for spite, jealousy, blind rage on the part of an old woman that gets tired of her husband coming home smelling like female niggers.

But slaves are not blameless. On James' Montpelier, skinfolk ain't your kinfolk, and can't be trusted anymore than the bosses. Field Negroes hate house Negroes, house Negroes hate master. A slap on the slave's cheek might earn the master or mistress a steady stream of piss in her next bowl of soup, or dog poo-poo in place of molasses in a sweet meal. The ruthlessness that the masters use against the slaves is turned around on them, unknowingly. But a lump of Negro spit in a cup of tea isn't near enough atonement for the misery the Wilson family inflicts on its hundreds of slaves. So, whether they be strong Ashanti that come straight from "the Africa," yellow-skinned mulattoes all tracing their lineage back to one raping overseer, or colony-born Negroes that don't know of a world not surrounded by the stalk of the sugar cane, everyone agrees that life in Jamaica on a sugar plantation is hell incarnate.

Lilith is born into all of this, a dark-skinned, green-eyed mulatto raised by Circe and Tantalus the mad nigger. Ever since Tantalus showed her the picture of the white girl sleeping with the white prince standing over her and staring at her with love, that is what Lilith wants. And damn if her "spiritedness" doesn't earn her some love, but it comes in a form that she doesn't expect. The man's white all right, but not the white she was expecting. Lilith and he love all right, but not the way she was expecting. And Lilith’s heart is hard, an unexpected side effect of her short, tormented life. The last few chapters find her having to make some hard decisions and ask herself some difficult questions. Their relationship, built on the mutual distrust and lies that slave and master share, grows but is stunted. She is haunted by her past, by her allegiance to the Night Women, and by the blood on her hands.

The book's namesake refers to a league of women, all connected in a way that only plantation Negroes can be, who meet at night with the plot to be like Saint-Domingue and form a free black community. Their leader is Homer, an old, battle-worn, austere house slave that runs the roost at the Estate's great house. She saves Lilith from death and harm whenever she can, and appreciates the girl's bullheaded qualities. But Lilith and Homer are slaves and so their bonds can only be so strong; it's nothing for one to snap on the other or watch the other head to a horrible fate.

At 432 pages, the hardcover edition is a surprisingly fast read. The book is vulgar, yet beautiful with plenty of look-away, flinch-worthy chapters that beg you to keep reading. James is an exceptionally gifted storyteller with an ear for the voices that make a character come to life. He's been compared to everyone from Toni Morrison to Zadie Smith, but his novel stands on its own two Negro feet.


-- Whitney Teal