“Conjure Women” opens in the 1860s (“Freedomtime”), and skips back and forth before and after the civil war
she was a liar. When she was enslaved, and then during her first years of freedom, she often said, falsely, “I know.” As a child, she only pretended to understand why her mother’s love felt so fierce and unforgiving. Years later, as her plantation’s resident healer, she was not sure why so many babies fell ill, or why women felt certain pains in childbirth, but she assured people otherwise.
“Conjure Women”, Afia Atakora’s atmospheric debut novel, is largely Rue’s story. Born into slavery in America’s South, she tends to the plantation’s pregnant and sick in the years after the civil war. Her mother, May Belle, made her name and living crafting curses for fellow slaves. “Hoodoo”, May Belle would say, “is black folks’ currency.” From her, Rue learned to heal, but she is wary of witchcraft—and troubled by a shameful secret.
The book opens in the 1860s , when Rue is around 20, but it skips back and forth before and after the war. By juxtaposing the brutality of slavery with the uncertainty of freedom, Ms Atakora captures the disorientation of the era. After Rue’s first whipping, her father reassures her that her cuts will “harden so’s the next time and the next time they beat you it won’t hurt quite so bad.
Ms Atakora poetically evokes the anxious, cloistered life of newly emancipated slaves. She notes “the aroma the earth made when it sighed”, and the stale air in the bedroom of the master’s daughter, which “smelled of rosehip and burning hair and sweat”. Repetitious as it sometimes feels, her novel is a vivid portrait of a time in American history that remains both haunting and unresolved.
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