Free Enterprise

Mary Ellen Pleasant, the owner of a string of hotels that double as havens for runaway slaves, and her young Jamaican friend, Annie Christmas, join John Brown's doomed raid on Harper's Ferry. 25,000 first printing. Tour.

YA-The lives of American women in the mid 1800s and early 1900s are vividly portrayed in this challenging montage of stories that centers on two fictional collaborators in John Brown's failed raid. Mary Ellen Pleasant is a cigar-smoking feminist who rises above race and gender, escapes to San Francisco after Brown's defeat at Harper's Ferry, and continues to use her significant influence to work toward integration. Annie Christmas is a privileged Jamaican who flees her plantation home to join the Cause and is captured by a Confederate chain gang. Her spirit is broken, and after the war she retreats to the isolation of a leper colony. The struggles of other women are richly described in this brilliant mosaic of mystery and myth. Eccentric Alice Hooper, who would do nothing more for the Cause than apologize, provides insight into the wealthy society of the day as does the story of unstable Clover Adams, whose statue still weeps in a Washington cemetery. Not every reader will recognize the historical, artistic, and literary allusions, but those who put forth the effort will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of the history of feminism, racism, and civil rights.
Jackie Gropman, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An articulate writer with an alluring prose style, Cliff offers an absorbing tale of friendship, survival and courage. In 1858, a young girl flees Jamaica, escaping the overseer's bed and her mother's compliance, and renames herself Annie Christmas. She forms a lasting camaraderie with Mary Ellen Pleasant, an actual historical figure who was a wealthy black hotelier and activist in Boston. Annie and Pleasant plot to take part in John Brown's raid, but they never reach Harper's Ferry. The doomed raid marks each woman in a different way: Pleasant returns to San Francisco and continues her work for racial justice, but Annie, haunted by a secret, becomes a hermit living on the banks of the Mississippi River, contacting only other outcasts in a nearby leper colony. Cliff ( Abeng ) skillfully weaves oral testaments, letters, poems and colorful narrative to tell stories of French, English and Spanish enslavers and the African, Chinese, Indian and Hawaiian people they persecuted. With prismatic prose, she limns the portraits of her two protagonists--each with her own joys and troubles, who are bound by a common love for their people.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ambitious writing undercut by an equally ambitious political agenda as Jamaican-born Cliff (Bodies of Water, 1990, etc.) reclaims the life of African-American Mary Ellen Pleasant, a co- conspirator in John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. In prose that veers from the lyrical to the polemic, Cliff makes the story of Mary Ellen the centerpiece of a novel that's as much a reprise of the wrongs done to the historically oppressed- -blacks, Jews, native peoples, lepers--as to Clover Adams, wife of the famous Henry. Mary Ellen, the daughter of a daring sea-captain who'd escaped from slavery in Jamaica and a Gullah-speaking mother from the South who'd fled as a young child to Martha's Vineyard, mostly tells her own story in the form of letters written (if not sent) while traveling--letters to wealthy abolitionist Alice Hooper and fellow conspirator Annie Christmas. She recalls her parents; how she met Annie at an antislavery meeting in New England; how her chain of prosperous hotels in California provided not only shelter for runaway slaves but money for John Brown's raid; and how she barely escaped death when that raid failed. Annie Christmas, daughter of wealthy French freed slaves, who'd dedicated her life to revolution, adds to both the story and the political agenda with her own recollections. Now living in a cabin on the banks of the Mississippi in Louisiana, she has befriended the more symbolic than real inmates of the nearby leper sanitorium--including a descendant of Hawaiian ``feathered kings''; a woman, Rachel, whose family had fled the Spanish Inquisition for the New World; and a hill-woman from Kentucky who'd witnessed a brutal raid of runaway slaves. And to broaden the polemic, Clover Adams's tragic suicide is retold with a feminist slant that blames her father as well as Henry for her death. A potentially great story lost amid too many flights of lyricism and litanies of wrongs. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.