THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508040676
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
THE PRICE OF A CHILD
LORENE CARY
Alfred A. Knopf. 318 pp. $23.
GINNIE IS on the threshold of reinventing herself. The year is 1855. Ginnie is a slave with three children and a master who fancies her - so much so that he's the reason for two of her children.
That master, a Virginia planter named Jackson Pryor, is bringing her to Philadelphia and then on to Nicaragua, where he is to assume a diplomatic post. Or so he thinks.
In her powerful first novel, The Price of a Child, Lorene Cary travels back to a time when slaves were bought and sold, beaten and bedded at whim - a time not so long ago. Cary also wrote Black Ice, the memoir of a black student's experience at a New England prep school in the 1970s.
The dream of freedom churns in Ginnie's mind as it has forever.
``She began to accept the uncertainty of it, and the costs; and when she could, she felt as clear and as strong as a waterfall pouring over sadness hard as bone,'' Cary writes.
In language that stirs shame, rage and patriotism, Cary writes a fast-paced book about the Underground Railroad based on the true story of a Philadelphia freedwoman. Cary's words drink deeply of her past, and in Ginnie, she creates a character ever conscious of her kinship.
On the top deck of the ferry, as her master stares her down, Ginnie embraces the chance she knows may never come again - the chance to live in freedom, to love as she wishes. But the price is haunting - the boy-child named Bennie whom she was forced to leave on the plantation.
``She was going to lose her baby boy. Ginnie knew it again. This time the knowledge came suddenly. It came like the devil and sat on her chest. Right in broad daylight. She couldn't breathe.''
Her voice is at once raspy and scared that day on the boat, but the message is strong: ``I want my freedom. I always wanted to be free,'' she tells the world.
Instantly she and her children are enveloped in the warmth of the Quick family, who ward off slave catchers and usher the fugitives into the free world.
It begins as simply as taking a new name. Ginnie's will be Mercer Gray. It is as basic as allowing herself to be attracted to Tyree, one of the men who came to free her at the ferry.
Unfortunately, Tyree is married, and his family are Mercer's hosts in her new life.
When members of the Vigilance Committee are arrested for their role in her freedom, Mercer tells the judge: ``Nobody forced me away. Nobody pulled me, and nobody led me. I went of my own free will.''
Soon, she lectures for abolition and shows the scars from her beatings to an audience too eager to see. She tells of seeing her slave father tied to the ground and beaten so hard that one of his teeth was knocked from his mouth.
A perceptive child, she knew that her father would need the tooth and plucked it from the ground before the overseer noticed, popped it in her mouth and went back to sucking her thumb.
Mercer becomes a master at captivating her audience and sharing the horror.
In The Price of a Child, Cary gives us a history lesson woven into a sensual tale with twists both eloquent and painful.
- MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Lorene Cary
by CNB