The remarkable Andrea Levy is well known already: her fourth novel, Small Island, swept up awards in 2004-2005 — the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her previous novels, which also include Fruit of the Lemon and Never Far from Nowhere, were set in the United Kingdom, where Levy lives, herself a descendant of Afro-Jamaican slaves with Jewish ancestors somewhere in the mix. These first novels deal with being “black” in the UK and London, where racism and the effects of colonialism persist in many ways.
The Long Song (Headline Review), aptly titled, is not for the fainthearted; it takes an intimate look at slavery, now universally acknowledged as evil. But Levy shows how degrading and depraved it could be for all concerned. Angry, sardonic and satirical, it is the story of July, a Jamaican slave woman, from her conception in a routine in-the-field rape to her old age when, literate at last, she commits the whole saga to paper.
Her narration is both terse and direct. She says: “Your storyteller is a woman possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink.” Moving easily from the slave syntax of her early years to a strong lyrical prose, she does not shy away from the plain facts of her conception and birth, as well as giving a wonderfully detailed and atmospheric sense of “the plantation called Amity”.
She sets the scene for the incident in which July is taken from her mother thus: “So, reader, let me once more draw your eye to that road … to the gig, to the single chestnut horse and the bumpy progress being made by John Howarth and his sister Caroline who sit within.” Measured and calm, she relates how the gig stops, how Caroline, a fat 23-year-old widow, takes a fancy to July who is with her mother on the road, while her brother is more interested in showing off Kitty’s powerful leg muscles, as if she were a horse. July is taken into the house as a pet, companion and lady’s maid.
On Christmas Day 1832 the Great Slave Rebellion of Jamaica began. On Amity everything is in disarray as the slaves have heard they are to be set free. Christmas dinner is a miserable, if grimly funny, farce and ends in chaos when all free men are summarily called up to the militia. The dramatic events of the next few days range from hilarious to horrifying. Levy lightens the telling by showing us 14-year-old July celebrating her sudden lack of supervision (temporary freedom) by sliding the length of the dining hall on her apron. Here she is found by an ex-slave man who feeds her wine and cajoles her into the master’s bed. Shortly after Howarth returns, and, from her hiding place under the bed, the now impregnated July witnesses his death. Complicated events lead up to the point where she watches another death: her mother’s execution.
This is strong medicine indeed, but July’s story is far from over. What becomes of the child she gives birth to is central to the plot. On Amity the only white survivor is the “fat-batty” and greedy Caroline who assumes direction of the sugarfields with July assisting her. The real emancipation of the slaves six years later, their difficult path into the free world, and an encounter on Amity with a liberal do-gooder overseer, who ultimately does much worse to the now freed slaves than the rapists and whip-crackers who preceded him, lead up to the point where Caroline, this time abetted by another ex-slave, and the overseer she has married, steals yet another child.
This is no romanticised saga; the plantation is a factory farm and the slaves are used like animals. Levy’s main characters verge on the grotesque. Not one approximates a “good” or admirable person. The owners and overseers are ignorant, gross and insensitive.
And the slaves are shown as cowed, defeated and brutalised — even Kitty, the Amazon negress. Other slaves quarrel, fight and betray one another and the most race-obsessed character is a female quadroon who despises creoles and Negroes. July seems motivated only by survival and is eventually reduced to penury, having lost both the “pickneys” she gave birth to. But as we know, she is eventually rescued.
This is an absolutely absorbing read with parallels in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon. Closer to home, Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed also shows us the inner world of a woman disempowered, overcome, treated with complete contempt for her human rights and yet retaining the spark to rise again. For all its anger, it is full of strength, energy and beauty. There is redemption in the lives of those rescued from the effects of slavery. Amity, so inappropriately named, is deserted, while the spirit of this name lives on in more congenial circumstances.