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B O O K
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R E V I E WS
Rainbow Reviews
PFLAG Book Review - By Dave Parker
Cleveland Scene- FREEDOM RINGING
Black, white and gay in the antebellum South - by Jo Steigerwald
Word Press - By Erastes
The Heights Observer - Susan Schnur
RAINBOW PLANTATION BLUES
Gay Love in Slavery Times (1850)
reviewed by Barbara Louise
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It is a rare and special event when a first novel by a new
writer can give us so many beloved human characters with believable frailities and amazing
fortitude. Robert L. Sheeley's new book illuminates the horrors of slavery as it existed
in the United States of America in the nineteenth century, particularly in South Carolina.
In the midst of that horrific time, the reader is also treated to the wonderful
strength of gay love between two young men of different colours in the midst of a society
saturated with the ever-present threat of death on the gallows for those whose way of loving
was different from the "norm."
.....
Jonathan Thomas is a rich, privileged young white man who,
when his father dies, inherits a prosperous plantation built with "the bloody whip." He
knows he is a "sodomite" - the only word available to him at that time in history - and
although he tries to deny his "unnatural" desires to himself, he cannot help loving, and
lusting for, one of his slaves, a former childhood playmate, Kumi, a beautiful Black
Adonis. Kumi's intelligence, humanity, and strength as a slave surviving under the
oppression of back-breaking labor - as well as his owner's almost nightly demands
that he provide stud service and impregnate the healtiest female slaves to produce
stronger slave children (who were sold away from their mothers for the slaveowner's profit) -
make Kumi one of the most memorable characters we have in modern American literature. The
image of his owner, Jonathan, whose story of internal torment as a hidden gay man occupies
much of the novel, pales in comparison to the strong Black nobility of Kumi, Jonathan's
human property, the descendent of kidnapped African people, who is himself struggling with his
"unnatural" desires.
.....
Feminism is a philosophy, not gender-specific.
And I believe Robert Sheeley is a feminist. (He is a much better feminist, and an advocate
for women's equality, than this
reviewer is an anti-racist.) Sheeley gives us an interesting character, Stephen,
a friend of Jonathan's, who
brilliantly articulates the oppression of women belonging to the "aristocratic" plantation
class. Then, in his narration,
Sheeley himself addresses the oppression of "common" women, and especially enslaved Black
women.
.....
Despite the obvious political lessons, and a vision of slavery
which opened the eyes of this white reviewer - who had thought herself to be well-educated
about Black History in the U.S.A. -Sheeley's novel is a rollicking good read, filled with
humor, pathos, and great descriptions of the ways of life of both the owners and their
Black slaves on southern plantations shortly before the Civil War.
.....
Rainbow Plantation Blues could be called a Gay and a
Black novel as well as a feminist novel, but I suspect it will fit most easily into the
category of a mainstream historical novel. Any human being who reads it will learn much,
as this reviewer certainly did, about the realities of the South's
"peculiar institution."
.....
Hopefully, homophobia - and a few mild
descriptions of gay male sex - will not prevent any reader from
meeting Kumi and Jonathan, as well as their
umforgetable families, friends, and enemies.
Barbara Louise is the author of
the Lesbian-Feminist SF novel
Horned Humons in a Strange Utopia
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