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- Verified Buyer
This is Tara Conklin's debut novel, though I find it reads more as that of a seasoned author.Two women from very different times are the protagonists. Josephine is the house girl of the title, which is a nice way of saying that she is a slave who works in the house. She is close with the mistress of the house, who is very ill. Lina's story unfolds in present time, where she is an up-and-coming attorney. She is assigned to work on a case involving slave reparations.Josephine's story is far more compelling than that of Lina's, which makes sense. Josephine's life is never her own. It doesn't matter whether or not she has feelings about anything or if she's tired or if she has an injury. The work is there and she must do it. She must take anything that is thrown at her without complaint. I can't even begin to imagine what it was like to live that life, but I think Conklin is able to paint a realistic picture.Lina lives with her father, a famous artist. Her mother was killed in an accident when Lina was a toddler. Lina is her job. She doesn't have room for anything in her life that doesn't involve making partner by the time she's thirty.Lina's story can't match up to Josephine's, of course. It's kind of like how the Academy awards the actress who allows herself to be made into the ugly duckling. The swan cannot compete with that (fine, unless you are the Black Swan, no pun intended.)I was glad to read more about the case for and against slave reparations. First of all, I can't imagine viewing another person as property. I don't view my cat as property. But, I am not sure that reparations should be paid. Don't get me wrong - I realize that so much of America was built on the backs of slaves. However, there is no one alive today who owned slaves or who was a slave. I know for a fact that my family never owned slaves - though at the time that part of the family lived in Maryland and Kentucky, they were poor.In doing some further reading, apparently only 1/4 of Southern whites owned slaves. And surprisingly enough, there were slaves in the Northern states at one time, too.While I wish that the practice of slavery had never existed, it was interesting to read that the culture from which the slaves came also kept slaves. Not to mention, there's also indentured servitude - so many people came to America as indentured servants and were often not released after the cost had been repaid. And let's not forget the Native Americans, many of whom were enslaved when the Europeans arrived. (I'm not forgetting what the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis, just trying to keep this discussion to the American history.)If there are reparations to be paid, well, probably everyone is owed something.Some interesting tidbits from the books:* "What about the whole idea that there is no loss?" Garrison said. "If you look at the numbers, the African American population of the U.S. is in a far better economic position today than if they'd stayed in Africa. You could easily argue that the transatlantic slave trade brought them to this country, which then gave their descendants the opportunity to take advantage of America's economic success. I mean, isn't any wrong done back then negated by the objectively better position we find ourselves in today, as compared to the people who stayed in Africa."* Africans themselves kept slaves, Garrison said, it was part of the culture. Chieftains of one tribe gladly handed over prisoners from an enemy tribe to the European traders. And what about no retroactive application of law - did a more firmly rooted legal principle even exist? You couldn't penalize someone for doing something that was legal at the time they did it. That's arbitrariness at its worst. That's what Stalin did.* Truth was multilayered, shifting; it was different for everyone, each personal history carved unique from the same weighty block of time and flesh.I really enjoyed the book. I made note of the sources Conklin used and look forward to reading some of them.Highly recommend.
