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    Page from a Tennessee Journal: A Novel
    Page from a Tennessee Journal: A Novel
    Page from a Tennessee Journal: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Page from a Tennessee Journal: A Novel

    Written by Francine Thomas Howard

    Narrated by Casaundra Freeman

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the author of The Daughter of Union County comes an intimate and heart-pounding novel about two families—one black, one white—colliding against the explosive backdrop of the post–Civil War South.

    It’s been fifty years since the Civil War ended, but the racial divide is as rigid and unforgiving as ever. For two families in the rural South, that boundary will be crossed.

    Alex and Eula Mae McNaughton own a tobacco farm in Tennessee. Black sharecroppers John and Annalaura Welles work it. In this particular summer of 1913, John has left without a word, and Annalaura is expected to bring in the crop by herself. Alone, fearing eviction, and desperate to feed her four children, Annalaura is forced into becoming Alex’s mistress. The only thing forbidden is Alex’s growing affection for Annalaura. She isn’t the only one faced with terrible choices. Eula Mae is waging her own battle against her husband and her assumed indifference. John, too, is bent on revenge. His sudden return will set in motion a devastating chain of events that will change all of their lives forever.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 20, 2011
    ISBN9781455827114
    Page from a Tennessee Journal: A Novel
    Author

    Francine Thomas Howard

    Francine Thomas Howard is the author of The Daughter of Union County, Page from a Tennessee Journal, and Paris Noire. A descendant of an enslaved African, Howard writes stories that explore the multicultural legacy of African-descended people throughout the diaspora and reflect her own African, European, and Native American heritage. Raised in San Francisco, Howard earned a BA in occupational therapy from San José State and an MPA from the University of San Francisco. She left a rewarding career in pediatric occupational therapy to pursue another love: writing. Desiring to preserve the remarkable oral histories of her family tree, she began writing down those stories with little thought of publication. That all changed when she turned a family secret about her grandparents into Page from a Tennessee Journal. Francine Thomas Howard resides with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information visit www.francinethomashoward.wordpress.com.

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    Reviews for Page from a Tennessee Journal

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      The writing style of this novel seems to be typical of the new writers coming out of Writers’ Workshops these days; generic. While the stories and settings are different, the overall style and tone of these new “serious” novels are the same. It’s as if they are all part of an upscale chain of restaurants. The formula seems to be: write prose that are better than average (but nothing too difficult, esoteric, lyrical or original), and write about a serious subject (war, slavery, Jim Crow laws) and you will get critical acclaim and sell a lot of books. After reading just a few pages in one of these books I know I am reading a book by an author that was part of a “workshop or writers group.”

      Set in 1913 in rural Tennessee, this story is about two couples one white and one African-American. The African American couple, the Welles’, sharecrop on the farm owned by the white couple, the McNaughtons. Trouble brews when the John Welles abandons his wife and 4 children with nary a word and Alex McNaughton falls in love with Annalaura Welles, John’s wife.

      While the story held my interest and attention, I did not find the characters all that believable. Alex McNaughton actually believes that his wife will have no problem bringing his black mistress and children into their house to live with them--Really? He is a Southern born and bred man who knows the order of things in the South at the time; not even he could be that obtuse or love-stricken to think this was going to fly. Most of the secondary characters are stereotypical white Southerners. Eula, John’s wife seems to be the most believable character, but she is really not a pivotal character. And I think the hardest thing to swallow is we are led to believe Annalaura is a smart woman, but with the last paragraph of the book I think we have to re-think that notion too.

      Between the generic writing style and the less than believable characters I think this book is about 2 ½ stars. I also did not come away from reading this book feeling I had read something original or had any new insights.
    • 4/5
      A tale of the Old South. Having lived with grandparents who were young in these years, I know the sentiments are true to the times. Females were as restricted and controlled by societal norms as told in the novel.
    • 4/5
      The separation of blacks and white in the early 1900's are depicted through the lives of a married sharecropper family and the white farmer family they work for. Annalaura, the sharecropper's wife, is left without money or food for her children and faces being evicted from her ramshackle room (a loft at the top of the barn above the cows and pigs), since her husband is not around to harvest the tobacco from the fields. When the farmer, McNaughton, comes to see what progress has been made with in the fields, he finds Annalaura and her children working with no idea of when the husband, John, will return. McNaughton takes a shine to Annalaura and makes a deal to allow her to stay and to provide her with food and clothes for her children at a price. Annalaura's life turns upside down while trying to balance her husband, the farmer, her four children, plus another one on the way. Annalaura's decisions change everyone’s' lives and shows that no one was truly benefiting from the drastic class level differences during this time period.
    • 4/5
      Annalaura and John Welles are sharecroppers for Alex McNaughton in 1913 Montgomery County, Tennessee. John has abandoned Annalaura and the four children to seek money in Nashville; for John, the idea of getting out from under the white man’s oppressive ownership of his labor outweighs all other concerns. Annalaura and the children live in a corner of a drafty, broken-down barn; she can barely feed the kids, and fears she cannot bring in the tobacco crop by herself. Alex, worried about his profits, rides out one hot summer day to check on the fields. Alex is 43, and married to a plain woman, Eula Mae, in a passionless marriage. When Alex sees twenty-nine year old Laura with her skirts hitched up in the heat, he feels desire. It is considered acceptable in this time and place for white men to take up with black women if their men aren't around: “blackberry juice kept a man young. Every white man in Montgomery County knew that.”The white women adjust; as Eula Mae’s sister-in-law tells her:"If you complain that yo’ husband is cheatin’ on you with a nigger, then you’re telling everybody in all of Montgomery County that a colored woman is the same as you. That she’s as good as you. That she’s even better, because she’s got yo’ man. … White men ain’t supposed to love black women over us. My Lord, if we acted like that was true, there wouldn’t be no sense to this world.”The black women must adjust as well; Annalaura's Aunt Becky spits out:"If a Tennessee white man comes ridin’ along and spots an apple orchard and decides he wants him an apple, ain’t nothin’ that apple can do to make him pick a different one. .. A colored woman in Tennessee is just like that apple. Ain’t never been a brown-skinned woman who had any say over what a Tennessee white man can do with her body.”Both white and black women are advised by their friends and relatives to suck it up. If a man is your husband, "It’s up to you to lay in his bed, lumpy as it may be, let him do what he’s got to do, and act as happy as if you’d gotten your gold, heaven crown right now.”When Alex comes back to see Annalaura, and unbuckles his pants, her attempts to protest (albeit in a subservient manner so as not to get beaten) don’t make any difference. But something else unexpected does. Alex falls in love with Annalaura.The drama and tension that ensue when Eula Mae and John Welles get wind of what’s going on take over the remainder of the book. You won’t want to put it down until you discover how it all gets resolved.Discussion: The status of Black Americans in 1913 that set the stage for the behavior of the characters in this book was actually worse in many areas of the country (particularly in the Deep South) than was the case in this book’s setting. Race relations in the South had reached a new low in the first decade of the new century. Black men in the South were arrested on any pretense and imprisoned in work camps. In Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Slavery by Another Name, the author reports that:"The horror of the mortality rates and living conditions was underscored by the triviality of the alleged offenses for which hundreds of men were being held.”The arrest and conviction of these men for such crimes as cursing and vagrancy and even “cause not given” became a lucrative source of compensation for the law enforcement community, which started operating a trading network for the sale and distribution of blacks to be used as slave laborers. (The author notes that while the Civil War may have destroyed the South as a military threat, there was no opportunity for the white population to learn new attitudes about labor; they could not conceive of doing the worst jobs - such as dirty, dangerous mine work - themselves, nor could they conceive of blacks living amongst them as equals. Thus, they came up with creative solutions to restore the old order.)By the end of the Union occupation of the South in 1877, Blackmon reports, "every formerly Confederate state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black prisoners into commercial hands. ... In return for what they paid each state, the companies received absolute control of the prisoners." He indicates that prisoners were "routinely starved and brutalized:"The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed."Black women were vulnerable in a different way; there was absolutely no recourse for them against sexual exploitation by white men. Sharecropper families were especially at risk because they could be accused of owing money to the landlord (legitimately or not) and then threatened with a prison camp if some sort of quid pro quo were not worked out: rape was considered an issue of entitlement.So many blacks left for the North between 1910 and 1930, the movement was known as "The Great Migration." The black characters in this book must be seen as actors in a system that left them few options for self-respect.Evaluation: This book is one of four selected in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, the international contest co-sponsored by Amazon.com, CreateSpace and Penguin Group (USA) that seeks to discover the next popular novel. And what a wonderful effort from a first time author! Apparently the story is “loosely based” on the author’s family history. I thought the author took a chapter or two to work into her stride and feel comfortable, and after that, it was smooth sailing for both author and reader. I really liked this book, and look forward to more from this author – hopefully, a sequel!