I am at least three reviews behind so today I am going to rectify one, then tomorrow another and finally the third. I am told by others not to offer excuses for my inability to get my blog posts out, but I do have excuses: most notably being on vacation, sick and taking care of elderly parents. SO those are my excuses and I am sorry for any delays in communication of my thoughts.
THE KITCHEN HOUSE by Kathleen Grissom, published Feb 2, 2010. As I said before I have had the great pleasure in meeting the author at a writers conference about three years ago. She is a dynamic speaker and she developed characters that you could love but hate at the same time. Her main characters who tell the story are Lavinia and Belle. Lavinia is an Irish immigrate who was onboard a ship bound for America with her mother, father and brother, when the mother and father died in transit. The Captain of the vessel decides to make Lavinia, who is about 5 years old an indentured servant and places her in the care of Belle in the kitchen house. He sells her brother to someone, which we do not find out about until later in the book. We meet Lavinia as she is on a carriage ride to the plantation, when they arrive, she is not talking, sick and instead of bringing her in the house she is foisted off to the man-servant to be taken to the kitchen house, where we meet Belle.
Belle who was brought up by the Captain's mother is actually Belles grandmother. The Captain had relations with his black slave and in all accounts was stricken with her death. Belle is sent to the kitchen house after the grandmother dies and the Captain marries his first wife. They have two children. Now here is the hate part, the Captain never tells his wife about who Belle is, so the Mistress of the house is convinced that Belle is the Captains concubine. He also is gone from the house except for Christmas, leaving his sickly wife to hate fully Belle.
The mistress also has convinced her son that this woman is bad news. In addition, The Mistress is always drugged because she cannot cope with the day to day life on this plantation and the absent husband who has left the running of the plantation to a man named Rankin. The Captain has also hired a tutor for his son, who is a pedaphil, but he will not listen to the house servants when they mention that there is a problem.
We travel through this family and Lavinia's life from the day she is brought to the plantation to the day she becomes in charge. We meet some wonderful characters, like momma. We wonder if Lavinia will ever understand the difference in how she is treated as opposed to the slaves. She is pretty dense about these things and because of this causes much turmoil and problems for herself and her black family. I just wanted to wallop her, the Captain, the Mistress, Belle and the everyone but the older black slaves who were trying to instruct her and keep the peace on the plantation.
One thing that was interesting is while I was reading the book, there was a newspaper article about a kitchen house and slave quarters that were being moved so that the land could be developed. The reason it was in the paper was due to the fact that there were graves beloning to the slaves somewhere on the property. Unfortunately, they could not find the graves, but at least they moved the kithcen house to a new local. I wonder if this house had as much life in it as our stories house did.
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