His aunts, often kind and nurturing, willingly set those instincts aside when pragmatism dictates a more ruthless approach. His desperation for the enlightenment gleaned from knowledge is perfectly balanced by his mother’s love of the shelter ignorance provides. In this novel our hero is Marcel, the young son of a kept black woman and a white planter. She rejects the debate of whether it’s nature or nurture that forms us and instead celebrates what should be obvious: it’s both. But instead Rice creates a host of complicated individuals with distinct personality traits, some admirable, some not. It would have been easy for Rice to follow the tradition of lesser writers by making these characters angels, hardened only by circumstance. Their racial identity both hindered and elevated them. Rice deftly pulls her readers back to a time when free, biracial individuals lived in the no-man’s-land between utter subjection and equality.
It’s a book that delves into the complex social hierarchy of the gens de couleur libres who lived in New Orleans during the 1840s. Her second novel, written in 1979, The Feast of All Saints, is the first of many departures Rice has made from the fantasy genre she so brilliantly revolutionized with her stories of vampires, werewolves, and Mayfair witches. Their unnuanced goodness feels more patronizing than complimentary.īut there are authors who don’t seem to struggle with these issues at all. They’re obsessed with not fitting in (not black enough for the African-American community, not white enough for the white world).Īs a biracial woman, I don’t relate to their particular obsessions about the inability to fit into a race. Any flaws these characters have can be easily attributed to the hardships they have endured rather than any weakness of spirit or inflation of ego. As a result their creations often feel a little one-dimensional. Inhabiting the mind and body of characters who are completely different from us is what novelists do.īut I’ve noticed that frequently writers who believe they have come from “white privilege” demonstrate excessive sensitivity when crafting characters who come from a history of oppression. After all, I’m African American and Jewish and I’ve written several white and Latino and Christian protagonists. It’s not that I have a problem with someone of one race writing the words and thoughts of another. It’s probably not PC to admit this, but I am always hesitant to pick up a book in which a white author has created biracial protagonists.
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