The American Daughters

The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin started out as a novel of historical fiction, about the life of black women who were raised in southern states of the U.S. during the decades before the Civil War, and a few years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The emphasis was on the lack of freedom and the decisions that they could not make for themselves as the result of having masters who made those decisions. Certainly the story involved sexual abuses, although the author wrote sensibly about that, meaning he left some of the worse cases of abuse to the reader to fill in the facts that were being inferred. But the focus was also on the women who successfully challenged the old order and how they chose to work within the system to do so. 

I should have seen it from the first pages in the book when the author gave future references to the material from this antebellum period, about what research had been done to understand the material about 150 years into the future. So, I got lost in the story of Ady who had learned to read and write, and she left behind a diary entitled “Confession of a Freedwoman.” Ruffin told a story about Ady, her mother Sanite, her best friend Lenore, and John du Marche, the master of “the slave labor camp also known as a plantation.” Ruffin wrote of families being broken up as the result of the slaves being sold. He spoke of the slaves’ attempts to reach freedom and their constant preoccupation with that. But he also spoke of the love that the slaves had for each other.

 

Ady and Lenore joined a secret sisterhood that worked to undermine the Confederates, but they also suffered from trauma and losses as the result of those efforts. The narrative was brilliant and believable. The story got across the trauma of being a slave while not always detailing the too horrible brutality. The author’s prose was beautiful. It’s a stirring story but it was made better when Ruffin, at the end of the novel, set his stage 150 years into the future as people of that era worked to look back at this troublesome era and understand what life was really like in the deep south. That part of the novel is a remarkable tribute to the author’s creativity and imagination. This book gets my strong recommendation.