THIS HERE IS LOVE

Indelible characters bring to life the drama of bitter survival in colonial Virginia, indicting a society of enslavement and dehumanization.

In this epic tale of early America, abolition is still generations away. Half a dozen disparate characters, Black and white, converge into a center in which they will have profound and often shocking effects on each other’s lives. The novel begins in 1692: open season on Africans for kidnapping for wealth extraction and forced reproduction in the brutal Virginia Colony. As the narrator observes with typical bluntness: “All slaves were vulnerable, women more than men, children more than women, little girls more than all the rest.” One of those little girls is Bless, a great character in a constellation of well-crafted people who make do with the family they’re given and long for the people they’ve lost. Bless has the curdled privilege of being a rich girl’s plaything; later, the reader will learn about outdoor labor: “Field hands had to pluck the worms and grind them beneath their bare heels.” Perry’s descriptions are cinematic, and the dialect is evocative without being grating. She makes reverent nods to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and evokes the rooted magic of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. The white men who buy humans and give orders are sometimes well established in the colonies—or like Jack Crewe, they are “the bartered class” of despised immigrants. They, too, have a price, and can’t afford to be sentimental. Perry’s intimacy with the period is palpable, and readers will gain greater knowledge of daily life under slavery, especially the monstrous glossary around the cold assessments of Black bodies. Some slavers flatter themselves: “Benjamin fancied himself a benevolent master, a caretaker to a rude and backward people.” Laws shift here and there, and we meet Black men who believe they are free. But white people, grasping to climb the next rung of the ladder, break their promises. By the end of the book, it’s an utter surprise what fate appears to unfold for the children of both striver Jack and survivor Bless, who has had to make the hardest decisions of all. Perry takes the long way home, following rich scenes with a slightly distanced narratorial explication that at first may seem redundant. Why show, then tell? It’s a congregation’s call and response. This history must be retold lash by lash, scar by scar, victory by victory, along with the reminder that systematic cruelty is codified, modeled, and taught.

A riveting new story about an abiding atrocity.