The Jensey family is a typical plantation family, enslaving around a hundred and fifty people who work the plantation’s cotton fields and growing sugarcane operation. Master William handles business while his wife Sarah handles household management, daughter Kate struggles to live up to their society’s ideals of femininity, and her brother Breck seems too soft-hearted for a life of future mastery. But none of them—not even soft-hearted Breck— realizes that the sensitivities, contradictions, and cruelties of their value system will inexorably lead to their ruin and leave them stranded on the wrong side of history.
M.E. Torrey’s FOX CREEK: A Novel has plenty in common with the forebears to which it responds: there’s a big house in multi-generational ownership, dances and fish fries, an old-boys’ club with drinking and horse racing. But the text begins, literally, with the realities of enslavement, including the physical violence that compels its characters to the auction block and the spiritual violence of families being torn apart and lives being erased. Although the white enslavers still receive the lion’s share of narrative attention—in part due to Torrey’s understandable reticence to speak for, and inadvertently over, Black voices—their self-delusion is made obvious early on. That allows the reader the necessary space to recognize the psychological processes at play when plantation mistress Sarah contemplates the burden of the “gentleness of stewardship over these people whom God had ordained her to care for,” or when her husband considers one of his own “hardships” is “to be forced to whip an entire hoe gang” for underperforming. This most frequently takes place in loose internal monologue, but the book has a knack for encapsulating these horrors in quick, poignant moments—as when clamor to buy a particularly fine racehorse rapidly shifts to offers to buy the enslaved man who trained it.
Those internal and external moments are both rendered in strong, colorful prose that effectively captures “the drugged, torpid days of a never-ending Louisiana summer.” FOX CREEK is particularly good at turning a phrase that quickly sketches a new character into being—“a pork chop-faced man as formidable as he was immense,” for instance—while simultaneously evoking the setting. One character is as “strong as a whalebone corset;” another enters the action with a “cigar clenched between his teeth, smoke billowing from him like a coal-fed locomotive.” The prose is also sensitive to more spiritual sensations, as when mixed-race Monette is (illegally) taught to read: words become “a banquet of consonants and vowels, a forbidden feast” savored in the mouth.
For all its beauties, FOX CREEK never forgets that it is describing a deliberately cruel and ultimately self-destructive world. Some moments nearly puncture the reader so deeply that they’re worth the entire balance of the text. When sensitive Breck tells Monette why white men pursue Black women but white women don’t pursue Black men, he explains: “Because white women are attracted to power, while white men are attracted to helplessness.” Reflections like these cannot, and should not, be forgotten.
M.E. Torrey’s FOX CREEK: A Novel vividly humanizes the self-destructive cruelty of the Southern plantation system.
~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader