Excellent Narration of a Troubling Book

As a child, Cather recalled an encounter with a free but formerly enslaved person. This is the last book Cather wrote, and it was published in 1940. It is not Cather's most accomplished work. The language and point of view are repugnant, the logic and sentiments sometimes baffling. It's not an easy read, and at times I gasped in disbelief and outrage. I read this book alongside Hermione Lee's 1989 biography of Cather and Toni Morrison's 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Morrison analyses this novel as an example of how white American writers have used Black stereotypes to constitute American Literature. Morrison's sensitive and measured reading is anticipated somewhat by Lee's. Both reveal the curious interest this book retains despite its flagrant failures of imagination. I recommend those two books as companion pieces to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. This isn't a book one can read uncritically. Nevertheless, it remains interesting as a document of a highly skilled American writer trying to make sense of her family's mixed relationship to abolition-- and sometimes failing to do so.

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