THE CURING SEASON

Wells’s debut is the first-person account of a young woman during the Truman era who passively bears physical deformity, poverty, and spousal abuse of increasing violence until ideals and maternal instinct force her into rebellion.

Born with a club foot on a Virginia sharecropper’s farm, Cora Mae Slaughter reaches adolescence feeling like an outcast. Cora describes her father as a drunk who beats his wife and children, her mother as a shell of a woman weakened by childbirth who lives by the Bible. Only Cora’s beautiful sister Sibby, who protects Cora from the mean-spirited teasing of their schoolmates, is described with any affection. As she is quick to point out, Cora is smarter than her peers, but she pines for the kind of romance other girls her age are experiencing. As a result, when an itinerant worker named Aaron flirts with her during tobacco-curing season, she assumes they are in love. After Aaron rapes her, she inexplicably chooses to stay the night with him. Too ashamed then to return home, she wanders the countryside with him as he loses job after job to drink. He also begins to beat Cora. The birth of a child, Joshua, brightens her life, but Aaron’s viciousness increases. Eventually he puts wax in her ears to deafen her and forbids her to speak. She accepts even this new cruelty, believing she thus protects Joshua. Cora’s only friend is Nita, a black woman she meets at the creek where she and Joshua bathe. Finally, upon discovering that Aaron plans to wax up Joshua’s ears too and that he and his friends plan to set fire to the black community where Nita lives, Cora springs into action. Her revenge will be violent and complete.

A portrait of victimhood, almost a glorification, in which the victim is so self-pitying and self-justifying that she loses sympathy, and interest, early on.