Tuesday, September 24, 2013

The Wedding Gift

The Wedding Gift
Author: Marlen Suyapa Bodden
St. Martin's Press
9/24/2013
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781250026385
ISBN10: 1250026385
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 320 pages

From the Publisher:
When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa's hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: Sarah, the young slave with whom she was raised. Sarah also is Allen's daughter and Clarissa's sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once powerful family.

Told through alternating viewpoints of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius' wife, The Wedding Gift is a stunning novel that shows where the complicated and compelling bonds and relationships between black and white women began. It is an intimate portrait that shows where this particular American story and dynamic all started and will leave readers breathless.

Idgie Says:
I am not denigrating the value of the story and the history in this novel in any way, but I have to admit that at times I felt I was reading a bit of a soap opera.  As the story became deeper, it seemed that everyone was sleeping with everyone else (whether they wanted to or not) and everyone was surprised with the fact that they were all somehow related to each other - blacks and whites. 

This is a deeper novel than that, fully sharing the facts of being a slave, of being a non-slave and being able to treat slaves as you like, and the fact that both sides of the story had dreams and disappointments. Women of both colors were not much more than chattel and learned to "work the system" as best they could to make their lives tolerable.

Outrages are described fully, along with the anguish that goes along with the occurrences.  There are pages where you just wince as you read.

This is a novel that keeps you invested in the story, but I still felt I needed a genealogy chart to keep up.

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The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden

Q&A

1.     What can you tell us about your new book The Wedding Gift?
It’s my debut novel and it’s set in the 1850s pre-Civil War American South. When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa’s hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen’s daughter and Clarissa’s sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa’s husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once powerful family.
Told through alternating viewpoints of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius’ wife, The Wedding Gift shows where the complicated bonds and relationships between black and white women, a particular American story, began.

2.     Tell us about your research process into this novel?
My research process for The Wedding Gift chiefly was to read non-fiction, scholarly books and articles on American slavery. The works I found most useful were ones that relied on court and government documents, such as deeds, records of lawsuits, birth and death records, and census reports.
I read, but did not rely on, a substantial amount of slave narratives, transcribed interviews conducted by the U.S. government in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, a time of grave poverty in the U.S. But scholars have pointed out that those interviews did not accurately depict the lives of slaves during slavery because the subjects were small children when slavery was abolished in 1862-1865. I found it striking, and sad, that what almost all the subjects commented on was that during slavery they always had a lot to eat.

3.     What made you want to explore the subject of slavery?
American slavery and the Civil War are very important topics in the U.S. and, as children, we studied them in school. I was interested in history since childhood and even then, I was most unusual for someone so young, because it made me sad to think that my ancestors had been kidnapped in Africa and taken to the New World as slaves. As an undergraduate, I studied history and literature, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that I began to read a few reports of modern-day slavery, but these reports seemed like isolated incidents. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that I began to read about the true figures of how many slaves there are around the globe, in our times. Anti-slavery advocates estimate that today, all over the world, in every industry, there are at least 27 million slaves. That’s more than at any other time in history, including during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, when over 11 million Africans were transported to the New World. 

4.     You are a lawyer in New York City by day, so when did writing become a focus for you?
In 1999, when I read, in a non-fiction book on runaway slaves, about a case in Talladega, Alabama, where a planter sued his wife for divorce and the court granted him all the property his wife had brought into the marriage, including a young slave woman. I thought about writing a novel based on that case. But I didn’t focus on writing until 2003, when I had a client who had been taken from Asia to New York City as a slave and with the help of police had escaped. I knew then that I had to write The Wedding Gift, to give voice not just to my ancestors, but to the slaves of today.

5.     How do you fit your writing in around such a demanding role?
I write on weekends and vacations. But I also read for research and write on the commuter train, the subway, during lunch, and just about anywhere when I have time from my “day job.” But, I also practice the law the same way, I often have to work on my cases on weekends or vacations.