Home Alone

In the formidable wake left by author Terry McMillan’s 1992 bestseller “Waiting to Exhale,” it seemed like every major publishing house began scrambling to snag African American authors who depict the contemporary black experience. And many authors were only too glad to oblige, turning out a series of “sistergirl-boyfriend novels” that has been threatening to drown in its own excesses.

Though Connie Briscoe’s first novel, 1994’s “Sisters and Friends,” was perceived to be following “Waiting to Exhale’s” pattern, the author attempted with 1996’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” to add depth to her narrative with a historical perspective, in that case the civil rights movement. Briscoe expands on this approach in “A Long Way From Home,” which has the added allure of being based on the history of Briscoe’s ancestors, house slaves at Montpelier, the Virginia plantation of former President James Madison.

But in this book, Briscoe ventures into territory occupied by novels like Margaret Walker’s “Jubilee,” Ernest Gaines’ “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” even last year’s “The Wake of the Wind” by J. California Cooper, and unfortunately, unlike these acclaimed authors, founders under her meticulous research, heartfelt sincerity and flat characterizations.

The novel follows three generations of Madison house slaves--Susie, Clara and Susan--over more than 30 years. Told first through the eyes of bratty 11-year-old Clara, whose earliest concerns are how to avoid wearing shoes and evade her mother’s “yelling fits,” slave life at Montpelier is characterized as better than at most plantations, centering on a close-knit society of house slaves who share chores, gossip and opinions and field slaves who, despite their substandard conditions, take what to modern eyes seems like a perverse pride in being mistreated as infrequently as they are. Montpelier is strangely insulated from the realities of slave rebellions, over-cultivated land and the surfeit of slave labor that plagued the times. Even when Clara’s playmate and his family are sold to prop up the plantation’s dwindling finances and the dissolute ways of Mass Todd, Dolly Madison’s wastrel son, the impact seems diffused by the child narrator’s limited awareness and the house slaves’ stalwart belief that it won’t happen to them.

All that changes when Mass Todd takes over the plantation upon the death of his stepfather, former President Madison. Heavy-handed foreshadowing by the author has already prepared the reader for Mass Todd’s reign of drunkenness, in which he embarks on gambling away the plantation’s assets and indulges an all-too disturbing familiarity with the female slaves. Clara almost falls prey to his advances at one point and lives in fear of his every visit to Montpelier: “She hated it when this man was home. The only reason she didn’t run away was because of Mama. And the day Mama died was the day she was leaving. Mass Todd was a serpent all right, but this was no Garden of Eden. This was Hell.” Yet when Clara appears later pregnant, readers are left to wonder: Is she carrying an indirect descendant of the Madison family?

By the time Clara’s daughters, Ellen and Susan, are teens, the novel has plodded through a hundred pages of unsolved family mysteries and increasingly hard times on the plantation. But despite this turmoil and hardship, Susan, like her mother before her, starts out as a naive, pampered house slave who, although treated like a pet by the present owners of Montpelier, insists on seeing herself as a member of the family. That illusion is stripped away when Clara learns that Ellen is going to be sold and spirits the girl away with her husband. Unfortunately, the scheme backfires, and Susan is sent instead to be governess-nursemaid to Mass Willard’s daughter in Richmond, where she witnesses the breach of South from North and meets her future husband Oliver Armistead, descendant of a Revolutionary War hero.

Runaway slaves and unknown parentage, free men of color in the slave-owning South, slaves fearful of freedom yet hating their servitude--the elements are there for a stirring tale of danger, heartbreak and triumph over adversity. But although “A Long Way From Home” casts its line into these waters, it too often comes up empty, undercut by simplistic prose and a focus on the mundane aspects of slave life. Though Briscoe’s attempt to further distinguish herself from the school of contemporary black writers is laudatory, “A Long Way From Home” falls short of its own deeply felt promise and the reader’s expectations. *