cover image SAPPHIRE'S GRAVE

SAPPHIRE'S GRAVE

Hilda Gurley-Highgate, Hilda Gurley Highgate, . . Doubleday, $24.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-385-50323-5

Gurley-Highgate makes her debut with an overplotted tale tracing the fortunes of a line of African-American women over two centuries. The story begins in 1749 with a defiant, unnamed woman kidnapped in Sierra Leone and sold as a slave in South Carolina. She gives birth to a daughter, Sapphire, who is sold at age five. Sapphire's life, like her mother's, consists of trials "that exceeded the limits of human tolerance"—she is beaten and raped, and she develops a hardness and a rebellious streak that she passes on to her three daughters and their offspring. Sister, the last of Sapphire's descendants to be born a slave, finds herself struggling to raise two children while enduring the betrayals of a philandering husband after the Civil War. Her granddaughter, Vyda Rose, defiantly embraces prostitution and eventually commits suicide to avoid arrest for killing a white man in self-defense. Vyda Rose's daughter, Jewell, bucks tradition in another way: she has a child by a white lover. Her biracial daughter becomes an acclaimed artist, expressing the legacy of her forebears in her paintings and sculptures of women. The dramatic developments come fast and furious, but though some of the women's stories are affecting, the characters themselves are thinly drawn. Gurley-Highgate waxes lyrical about Sapphire's legacy ("in the blood and the spirit and the person of this child lived all of the ancestors; and the child's own spirit, rising, on great black wings bearing without shame the scarlet past"), but her hurried sketches don't allow for a nuanced examination of slavery's toll. (Dec.)