Nevertheless, They Persisted: Six Enslaved Women Rebel in “Night Wherever We Go” https://ift.tt/o1SB48a
Tracey Rose Peyton’s Night Wherever We Go opens on a struggling cotton plantation in Navarro County, Texas. An unnamed narrator introduces the “Lucys”: “A quick word about the Lucys, if we must. To most, they were known as the Harlows, Mistress Lizzie and Master Charles of Liberty County, Georgia… But to us, they were just the Lucys… spawn of Lucifer, kin of the devil in the most wretched place most of us have ever known.”
Throughout the novel, Peyton utilizes this first person collective “we,” allowing the voice of the overarching narrative to exist in a space somewhere between the real and the intangible. Interspersed with this collective voice are individual moments of third-person-limited narration for each of the six enslaved women: Nan, Serah, Junie, Patience, Lulu, and Alice, focusing mostly on the oldest woman, Nan, as well as the youngest of the group, Serah.
Attempting to stave off financial hardship, Charles Harlow hires a “stockman” named Zeke to “breed” with the women, exercising yet another layer of oppression against their bodies: the violence of taking away their reproductive autonomy. One of several anchoring threads throughout the novel, Nan, in her elder wisdom, communes regularly with the natural world, as well as with the spirit realm, offering the women a remedy against pregnancy. The women begin secretly chewing cotton root at all hours, enacting a quiet rebellion against the Harlows. While the plot revolves around this act of collective resistance, the women’s individual stories offer the texture and depth that make this story memorable.
Peyton’s source material informs the stories and lives of these women, weaving in intimate detail regarding their relationship to religion, views on love, and the importance of children and family. These details allow Peyton’s characters to resist the one-dimensional archetype of enslaved women too often presented in similar stories. Instead, Peyton uses firsthand sources and historical accounts to illuminate the short- and long-term horrors of enslavement as well as offer beautiful moments of transcendence. Her dialogue is vulnerable and intimate despite the guardedness of some of the women. This focus on character leads to a slower paced plot, one that creeps forward with a steady, burning tension. Peyton maintains this tension by way of placing the individual women in conversation with the imagined collective, lending a tone of ancestral presence most often seen through Nan and her communion with the land or at nightly gatherings in the woods.
Throughout the story, we learn that each woman has just as much at stake as another. Serah, not yet eighteen, finds herself smitten by a man from a neighboring property, despite the Lucys forcing her to marry and live with another enslaved man in another attempt to produce more offspring. Peyton demonstrates the consequences of such relentless violence and cruelty through the resilience of the women. Deeply felt injustices are often talked about casually, like Junie’s children living on a plantation back in Georgia while she wonders about their fate from Texas.
Junie’s story demonstrates the pain specific to Black mothers. Junie grew up with Mistress Lizzie’s family in Oklahoma, her mother acting as a wet nurse for Lizzie’s. “She was supposed to be a mini-Roberta moving in lockstep with every season of Lizzie’s life. She was to have children at the same rate, within months of Lizzie’s own, so she could wean her own babies quickly, in order to nurse Lizzie’s offspring fully and as long as they needed.”
Ultimately, this is a story of resistance and solidarity, one in which rebellion does not always take the form of violent, direct acts of revolt, but rather as small acts of quiet, persistent defiance. Night Wherever We Go is an accomplished novel despite working toward many things at once. The storyline itself is engrossing, but the internal lives of these women are rich. Peyton shows the women in all their hues, connected by an overarching thread of camaraderie, but not without the reality of what the circumstances inevitably elicit – moments of bickering, mistrust, frustration, and tough love.
The story’s slow burn culminates in a swift ending that is both resolved and emotional. Referencing slave narratives like those of Harriet Jacobs and Charles Ball, Peyton gives texture to the continuous horrors of life under enslavement, including those both quiet and loud. This is a story of violence, surrender, persistence, and connection. The last few pages paradoxically feel as though the narrative comes to both a screeching halt and a controlled, soft landing. For fans of Let Us Descend (Jesmyn Ward) and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois (Honorée Fanonne Jeffers), Night Wherever We Go offers a window through which slavery and its poisonous consequences are on full display, balanced against the generosity of Peyton’s women and their transcendent connection to both the land and to one another.
FICTION Night Wherever We Go
By Tracey Rose Peyton
Ecco Press
Published January 3, 2023
Paperback published January 30, 2024
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