Home Across The Road
   Nancy Peacock
  2000 Longstreet Press, Atlanta, Georgia
    ISBN: 1563525097


In 1861, the plantation called Roseberry binds masters & slaves, children & loss, reliquaries & waiting.

China Redd has been waiting all her life. Waiting on the Redds across the road at Roseberry or for a child to be born or a son to come back or, as now, waiting for death, starting each day with the question: “Is this the day, Lord?”

In 1861, China Redd's family matriarch, Cally, gives birth to the son of two endangered marriages. In less years than a boyhood can be lived, one son dooms the other all because he took his mother's glowing earrings. One mother's heart is mortally wounded & a deep, abiding separation between families settles in.

100 years later, China waits for death with her own story to add to the generations buried in the slave graveyard up the hill from Roseberry.

One day one of Cally's sons will be born free & one of the master's sons will die young. Another mother's heart survives mutilation.

100 years later, the earrings come back to China as her grand daughter adds her story & Roseberry molders into ruin.

Nancy Peacock has brought the kitchen window to life. Has breathed, for a bright moment, Technicolor into sepia-hued photographs. Of men ravaged by slavery & women savaged by loss. Of a son who took a pair of abalone shell earrings & for that another son is sold. One dark night the earrings are stolen, cursed & hidden away.

Those earrings pass through China's ancestors' lives, from mother to son to wife to daughter, always with the telling the stories.

If a person, with no knowledge of American slavery, were to read this book they might be forgiven for thinking this a Twilight Zone read. I respect that program immensely; it made me uncomfortable; it made me think further outside the envelope than I cared. So Home Across The Road invites us further afield into a world where two families' lives are inextricable; one ever alert to the nuances of the other while one doesn't give the other any thought other than that of chattels.

Home Across The Road is for everywoman who has ever felt the flicker of enslavement, whether it be stuck in the kitchen while the boys are out playing or pinned beneath the desires of a man who thinks he's a master. For everywoman who has stared at the home she is cleaning & knows her own is a shambles.

This, this is the way I can become one, for a brief depressing eon, with all my mothers who lived under the yoke of the marriage between family & slavery.

This storyteller, with her profound & lilting language, surprisingly spare & intensely evocative, offers us a read like the bursting of summer's first raspberry upon your palette. Tart & sweet, fetid & gleaming, heart breaking & redemptive.

A story for the ages, a wholly, holy woman's book. Very well done! Buy it now -- you will not be disappointed if you love a good womanly household history of families & the weaving of their lives.

A different kind of morality. Set aside your stuff & come Home Across The Road to step into another world where women wait to see what life brings them. A madness I understand. A rage I have known & a passivity that has my daughter snarling at every word spoken. Fascinating!

Nancy Peacock's other novel is: Life Without Water.
(07/22/01)

Rebecca