Interestingly, freedom doesn't protect all of the white characters in the novel either. We are told that ".if Miss May Belle insisted on a thing, she'd have it, as good as willing it into existence." However, this power and this "freedom" ultimately do not protect her or those she loves from sexual violence and death. And May Belle always seems to find what she needs even if she has to create it for herself.
They let her have her own way." This meant a special dispensation from field work and greater access to things like blankets and soap. We learn that "…because she kept their property from dying, white folks let her have it. One of the primary questions the novel asks is this: even in the time of freedom, who is really free? And in what ways must we "conjure" freedom for ourselves? Rue's mother May Belle is afforded a certain level of status and freedom even before the war because of her magic and healing powers.
In the tradition of Toni Morrison's Beloved and more recently Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, Conjure Women largely uses magic and motherhood to explore the reverberating effect of slavery on all of the people and communities it irrevocably binds together. From the beginning, the setting evokes much of the complicated history of slavery in America and the thwarted promise of freedom in the Reconstruction era. The town is the home of former slaves, their "prosperity," as one character says.
It's in her dutiful response to that cry that we meet Rue, a second-generation healer and recently freed slave tending to a post-Emancipation town in an unnamed part of the American South. A spell-binding tale of mystery, magic, and the things that haunt us all, set in the American South post-Emancipation.Īfia Atakora's debut novel opens with the ominous sound of a baby's cry.
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