The Indigo Girl
The good is that the story is well-crafted, generally well-written, and it incorporates information and concepts that aren't part of everyday experience. Without a doubt, "learning" through reading fiction is a bonus.
The bad is that the writer adopts a few themes that readers will know sometimes challenge my tolerance.
One of my peeves is first person narration, which in and of itself isn't wrong, though perhaps overdone in modern fiction. My biggest objection to it is that, lacking an omniscient narrator, we seldom see the main character with any objectivity, and that can reduce the complexity of all the characters. We're seeing through the eyes of one individual, and hearing that "voice" only.
The story is about a very young, though marriageable-age girl, Eliza Lucas, a real person who lived in the 1700s in North Carolina. The family has a handful of plantations, and the father leaves young Eliza and her mother to tend to the properties while he returns to Antigua, secretly pursuing his ambitions in the military. It falls to Eliza to carry out his instructions on the plantations in his absence.
Eliza isn't interested in marriage, and wants to fulfill herself as if she were the heir to the family property. The more she learns about the state of affairs of the estate, and about the value of crops, the more she is determined to try her hand at actually calling the shots.
She learns about indigo, and the possibilities it has as a cash crop of value, particularly if it can rival French indigo and the price it will fetch.
The story then revolves around Eliza's attempts to grow the crop, to navigate around her mother's determination that she will be on the marriage market, her interest in a young slave she befriended as a girl in Antigua, and her growing appreciation for an "older" married man, who treats her as the independent and intelligent woman she believes herself to be.
Those are both the tropes and the tales that made my reading alternately a pleasure and a pain.
The story of pre-revolutionary North Carolina, the challenge of life and farming, the roles of women and slaves in the economy, and even Eliza herself, a unique blend of insight and innocence, is a good one. The more modern takes on women's "place" and the comparison of the plight of the slave and the woman, the part that had me looking up with annoyance, often seem to overpower the story itself.
One way in which that modernizing showed up was with author Natasha Boyd's choice of words: often she wrote (again, this is a first person narrator) in the somewhat "quaint" language of the day, with idioms and verbs that matched the times, at least as we "hear" them in the writing of the day. But occasionally she would slip a word or idea in that reeked of the 21st century such as "marginalized" and "okay." Okay always bothers me when spoken in an historic movie or book even as far back as the early 1800s when young people did begin using it to mean "oll korrect." It has become a filler word these days, though we know it wasn't used when Eliza's adventures were unfolding.
Another interesting, to my way of thinking, inconsistency, is Eliza's gritty determination to run the show at the plantations, and her delicate stomach when it comes to her interest in men. Her tummy always seems to be roiling, contracting, clenching, tightening or causing pain when she catches the eye of the handsome, brilliant and angry young Ben, the family's slave from Antigua, whose skill with indigo Eliza covets, and whose person she favors, though he is not the responsible husband her mother is trying to find for the girl. At the same time, Eliza is more than a little interested in the older-but-still-attractive (and married, trying-for-a-child) Charles Pinckney, who isn't too subtle about his interest in her.
While Charles is portrayed as a good and decent man, and Eliza at first idealizes his marriage to his intelligent and loving wife, the interest the two have in one another is clear from the outset. And Eliza, while she doesn't act on it, also never seems to have any remorse at both being a dear friend of Charles' wife, and being so interested in a man who is clearly intrigued by her, as well.
There are a few other symbolic characters: a female slave who fears nothing and wears her pride like armor; a nasty, good-for-nothing sabatoging overseer who refuses to take down the whipping post; an innocent and too-good-to-be-true young girl whose willingness to be married off by the older women is more or less a contrast for Eliza's willfulness.
But in the final analysis, the book does keep the reader questing after the outcome, and though it's not an ending we don't see coming miles and miles away as we read, it is nevertheless satisfying when all is well and everyone has played the cards in their hands.
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