Book Review: The Freedom Maze
Jan. 18th, 2014 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe summer of 1960 is not going well for Sophie Martineau. Not only have her parents gotten divorced, not only has she been sent to spend the summer with her crotchety relations in the old Fairchild family plantation in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana, but a weird magical cat-creature has sent her back in time one hundred years to the the time when the Fairchilds still had slaves - and Sophie, although she’s white, has been mistaken for one of them.
This is the premise of Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze. It’s a set-up with a lot of possibly problematic aspects, which Sherman deftly avoids. Sophie has not been sent back as any sort of white savior. Not only does she not lead any kind of rebellion, I don’t think she manages to teach anyone anything about anything, not even basic literacy. She’s simply too busy being ordered around by the white Fairchilds to do much else.
But neither has Sophie been sent back in order to learn Important Lessons herself. Sophie, well-versed in the ways of portal fantasies, decides she’s ready to go home after a couple of weeks: she’s learned the slaves didn’t like being slaves and black people are very hard-working, which is what she’s been sent to learn, surely?
“But the story isn’t done yet,” the cat-creature objects, and leaves her in 1860.
Sophie, you see, was mistaken: she thought she was sent back in time to have a story of her own, but in fact she was sent back to be an adjunct in someone else’s story. The role she needs to play is one that only she can do: impersonating a white Fairchild in order to throw slave hunters off the scent of a runaway.
What the premise allows Sherman to do is strip away the illusion of safety: a white reader cannot read this and think, “This could not happen to me” - well, okay, the time travel part couldn’t - but a white reader cannot think, “It’s sad that this happened to other people but it basically doesn’t affect me.” Because dramatizes the inherent instability of markers of social rank or even social existence. Does this person count as a person, or not?
Walter Johnson talks about this in River of Dark Dreams, the fact that people who acted funny on steamboats, for instance, often fell under suspicion for being escaped slaves. Sure, this fellow looks white, but...are you sure? Do you know him? He seems a little odd...
To have a category of humanity that doesn’t actually count as people is, obviously, worst for people who are inescapably part of that category. But it’s a threat to everyone.
I wouldn’t want books about white girls mistaken for slaves to become the hot new thing in historical fiction about American slavery. But Sherman used it well to illustrate her themes in this book.
This is the premise of Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze. It’s a set-up with a lot of possibly problematic aspects, which Sherman deftly avoids. Sophie has not been sent back as any sort of white savior. Not only does she not lead any kind of rebellion, I don’t think she manages to teach anyone anything about anything, not even basic literacy. She’s simply too busy being ordered around by the white Fairchilds to do much else.
But neither has Sophie been sent back in order to learn Important Lessons herself. Sophie, well-versed in the ways of portal fantasies, decides she’s ready to go home after a couple of weeks: she’s learned the slaves didn’t like being slaves and black people are very hard-working, which is what she’s been sent to learn, surely?
“But the story isn’t done yet,” the cat-creature objects, and leaves her in 1860.
Sophie, you see, was mistaken: she thought she was sent back in time to have a story of her own, but in fact she was sent back to be an adjunct in someone else’s story. The role she needs to play is one that only she can do: impersonating a white Fairchild in order to throw slave hunters off the scent of a runaway.
What the premise allows Sherman to do is strip away the illusion of safety: a white reader cannot read this and think, “This could not happen to me” - well, okay, the time travel part couldn’t - but a white reader cannot think, “It’s sad that this happened to other people but it basically doesn’t affect me.” Because dramatizes the inherent instability of markers of social rank or even social existence. Does this person count as a person, or not?
Walter Johnson talks about this in River of Dark Dreams, the fact that people who acted funny on steamboats, for instance, often fell under suspicion for being escaped slaves. Sure, this fellow looks white, but...are you sure? Do you know him? He seems a little odd...
To have a category of humanity that doesn’t actually count as people is, obviously, worst for people who are inescapably part of that category. But it’s a threat to everyone.
I wouldn’t want books about white girls mistaken for slaves to become the hot new thing in historical fiction about American slavery. But Sherman used it well to illustrate her themes in this book.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-18 03:22 pm (UTC)I think what this line of thought opens up for me is the tension between our sense of what makes a person a person and our unexamined assumptions of what the **markers** of that are. (And then, getting away from the basic question of humanity, on a lesser scale, the same thing with regard to, say, what makes a person brave and what the markers of that are, or what makes a person smart, and what the markers of that are, or what makes a person kind, faithful--any number of things---and what the markers of that are)
Markers are a dangerous shorthand.
I enjoyed the book very much.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-18 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-18 09:34 pm (UTC)Sherman's writing has clearly kicked up to another level since then.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-18 09:40 pm (UTC)I'm not necessarily talking about people who are consciously hypocrites, but people who believe being able to talk the talk means that they really are good (and often can't bear to be criticized because they have such a black and white view of goodness). Humans do tend to mistake the marker for the real thing.