cover image Free Enterprise: 2a Novel

Free Enterprise: 2a Novel

Michelle Cliff. Dutton Books, $19 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-525-93704-3

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. (Sept.)