Property (Vintage Contemporaries)

Table of Contents

Acclaim for Valerie Martin’s

Property

“Chilling . . . disturbing . . . intriguing. A compelling contest of wills between two women . . . against a chaotic backdrop of black night and leaping torchlight.”

—
The New York Times

“Sharply observed. . . . A strikingly unsentimental voice. . . . In fewer than 200 pages, Martin is able to summon up historical landscapes her readers have never seen.”

—
Newsday

“Quietly devastating. . . . Shows a dimension of American slavery that nonfiction could not get across. . . . A work of sustained irony. . . . As chilly and arresting a picture of slavery as you’ll find anywhere.” —
The Boston Globe

“It is possible that we have never heard a voice like this before . . . a timeless, chilling voice, eerily like the voice of the German people after the Holocaust. . . . [With it] Valerie Martin opens a window on that evil of human nature that makes one group of people less than another.”

—
Winston-Salem Journal

“So riveting that once you start reading this slender novel, it’s unlikely you’ll put it down. A bitter, mesmerizing account of the caustic costs of slavery.” —
Detroit Free Press

“Confirms that Martin is a vibrant force in American fiction. . . . Martin uncovers the violent nature of slavery, ownership and property.” —
The Times-Picayune

“A ferociously honest book [on] a subject long wrapped in ‘lies without end’: race in America. . . . Manon is a shadow sister to Scarlett O’Hara, offering [us] the unvarnished voice of her time. . . . [This is] fiction that can remake the way we understand ourselves.” —
Salon

“Martin’s explorations of character are unsparing as she reveals both Manon and Sarah in all their desperate humanity. A brave and riveting book.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“The real achievement is that Martin leaves us wondering what ‘peculiar institutions’ we are embracing in our own world.” —
The News & Observer

“Martin tests us, prompting us to detest and sympathize with her narrator. . . . She isn’t trying to whitewash facts or revise the truth. She highlights the complexities of the past and gives voice to what was never fully acknowledged by American history textbooks.” —
The Plain Dealer

“Brilliant . . . chilling clarity. . . .
Property
is historical fiction that is both literary and literal in that it poetically bares a truth.” —
New York Daily News

“Vivid and gripping. I read it in one gulp.”

—Marilyn French

“Martin’s heroine is as complex and disaffected as Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
—how could she be otherwise when she is herself no more than ‘property’? A wonderful novel, vivid, revealing.” —Carol Shields

“Stunningly powerful. . . . Valerie Martin’s gifts—a fearless originality and seemingly limitless perspective combined with a cool and elegant intelligence—are all on splendid display.” —Barbara Gowdy

“Chilling. . . . An historical novel that brings us bang up to date.” —The Times (London)

From the Orange Prize citation:

Exuberance in a novel is a wonderful quality.
Property
is the opposite of exuberant—but the great quality of this novel is fairness. It takes a very specific, dated subject and makes it universal. It looks at relationships of power and ownership among people living in a system which is manifestly evil. Yet they are ordinary, often good people. They are being damaged by their system, you can see it damaging them, and yet they never question it. The story is told through an unsympathetic narrator, yet the book is utterly where its moral heart is. This is a terribly difficult thing for a writer to do. The gaps in the book, what is left unsaid, are very important.

—Ahdaf Soueif, head of the 2003 Orange Prize Jury and author of
The Map of Love
and
In the Eye of the Sun

Also by Valerie Martin

Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis
Italian Fever
The Great Divorce
Mary Reilly
The Consolation of Nature: Short Stories
A Recent Martyr
Alexandra
Set in Motion
Love: Short Stories

Valerie Martin

Property

Valerie Martin is the author of two collections of short fiction and six novels, including
Italian Fever
,
The Great Divorce
, and
Mary Reilly
, and a nonfiction work on St. Francis of Assisi entitled
Salvation: Scenes
from the Life of St. Francis
. She resides in upstate New York.

This one thing we wish to be understood and remembered,—that the Constitution of this State, has made Tom, Dick, and Harry,
property
—it has made Polly, Nancy, and Molly,
property
; and be that property an evil, a curse, or what not, we intend to hold it.

—Letter from A. B. C. of Halifax City to the
Richmond Whig
, January 28, 1832

Part I

Plantation Life 1828

IT NEVER ENDS. I watched him through the spyglass to see what the game would be. There were five of them. He gets them all gathered at the river’s edge and they are nervous. If they haven’t done this before, they’ve heard about it. First he reads to them from the Bible. I don’t have to hear it to know what passage it is. Then they have to strip, which takes no time as they are wearing only linen pantaloons. One by one they must grasp the rope, swing over the water, and drop in. It’s brutally hot; the cool water is a relief, so they make the best of it. He encourages them to shout and slap at one another once they are in the water. Then they have to come out and do it again, only this time they hang on the rope two at a time, which means one has to hold on to the other. They had gotten this far when I looked.

Two boys were pulling the rope, one holding on while the other clutched his shoulders. They were laughing because they were slippery. The sun made their bodies glisten and steam like a horse’s flanks after a long run. The boy on the ground ran down the bank and off they went, out over the water, releasing the rope at the highest point of its arc and crashing into the smooth surface below like wounded black geese. He hardly watched them. He was choosing the next two, directing one to catch the rope on its return, running his hands over the shoulders of the other, which made the boy cower and study the ground. I couldn’t watch anymore.

They have to keep doing this, their lithe young bodies displayed to him in various positions. When he gets them up to three or four at a time, he watches closely. The boys rub against each other; they can’t help it. Their limbs become entwined, they struggle to hang on, and it isn’t long before one comes out of the water with his member raised. That’s what the game is for. This boy tries to stay in the water, he hangs his head as he comes out, thinking every thought he can to make the tumescence subside. This is what proves they are brutes, he says, and have not the power of reason. A white man, knowing he would be beaten for it, would not be able to raise his member.

He has his stick there by the tree; it is never far from him. The boys fall silent as he takes it up. Sometimes the offending boy cries out or tries to run away, but he’s no match for this grown man with his stick. The servant’s tumescence subsides as quickly as the master’s rises, and the latter will last until he gets to the quarter. If he can find the boy’s mother, and she’s pretty, she will pay dearly for rearing an unnatural child.

This is only one of his games. When he comes back to the house he will be in a fine humor for the rest of the day.

Often, as I look through the glass, I hear in my head an incredulous refrain:
This is my husband, this is my husband.

IN THE MORNING he was in a fury because Mr. Sutter has gotten into such a standoff with one of the negroes that he has had him whipped and it will be a week before he can work again. They are cutting wood in shifts and there are no hands to spare, or so my husband has persuaded himself. The negro, Leo, is the strongest worker we have. He maintains Leo was never a problem until Sutter decided he was insolent. Sutter’s real grievance, he says, is that Leo has befriended a woman Sutter wants for himself. I had to listen to all this at breakfast. He cursed and declared he would kill Sutter, then sent back the food, saying it was cold. Sarah went out with the plate. He leaned back in his chair and put his hand over his eyes. “She’s poisoning me,” he said.

When Sarah came back, he pretended to soften. “Is Walter in the house?” he asked. “Send him to me.”

So then we had the little bastard running up and down the dining room, putting his grubby fingers in the serving plates, eating bits of meat from his father’s hand like a dog. Sarah leaned against the sideboard and watched, but she didn’t appear to enjoy the sight much more than I did. The child is a mad creature, like a beautiful and vicious little wildcat. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him clawing the portieres. He has his father’s curly red hair and green eyes, his mother’s golden skin, her full pouting lips. He speaks a strange gibberish even Sarah doesn’t understand. His father dotes on him for a few minutes now and then, but he soon tires of this and sends him away to the kitchen, where he lives under the table, torturing a puppy Delphine was fool enough to give him. Once the boy was gone, he turned his attention to Sarah. “Go down and see to Leo,” he said. “And give me a report in my office when you have done.”