Reviewed by Leigh Cuen
On a Virginia plantation in 1852, a teenage slave stashes several of the exquisite artworks she painted in an improvised sack, as she secretly plots her escape. In 2004 New York, an ambitious lawyer at a prestigious law firm is given the biggest case of her young career—a reparations lawsuit to acknowledge the horrors of slavery. The House Girl hinges on interconnected stories, told through memories, art criticism, and letters, and tells a tale of love, art and freedom.
In her debut novel, Tara Conklin layers the stories of two young opposites. Lina Sparrow is “a twenty-first century white girl from New York,” the daughter of a successful artist, a recent law school graduate who is hungry for success. Josephine Bell is a house slave in the rural South, abused by her “owners,” and forced to serve an ailing barren wife, Lu Anne Bell, who looks the other way and quietly allows Josephine to use a dusty library full of art supplies and forgotten books.
After her death, Josephine’s mistress, Lu Anne Bell, becomes recognized as a groundbreaking American artist. Her heirs, a powerful Southern family controls the collection of artworks in Lu Anne’s estate. But her acclaim is challenged when several historians and art experts reveal that it may have been the slave, not the mistress, who created these masterpieces.
When Lina is charged with finding a candidate who can sustain a media-worthy lawsuit claiming $6.2 trillion in unpaid wages and crimes against humanity he begins a search that will mine her family’s history, the lingering
financial benefits of slavery, and race in America. Lina’s ability to find evidence of the slavery-contemporary plaintiff connection proved fruitless There few complete records of the slaves she is asked to investigate. A chance conversation with her father, an art dealer, finally provides tangible clues to the Josephine Bell and Lu Anne Bell connection.
Conklin says she never planned to write a novel about art, race, slavery, or gender. The book began as a series of short stories about a white “slave doctor” named Caleb Harper, traipsing across the Antebellum South with a runaway love. In the course of her research, she discovers that there is no easy way to track African-American ancestry. Only a select few historic plantations maintained any records that slaves once lived there. “Perhaps these things should not have surprised me,” says Conklin, “But they did.” The scant historical accounts of slaves she found described rampant brutality. She felt overwhelmed by magnitude of raw, untold history.
Conklin drew from her experience as a lawyer to create Lina, a modern character with the privilege and the determination to unravel an untold story. Caleb Harper, became a supporting character in a larger story about a single slave and her humanity. Visual art is the perfect medium through which her characters communicate across centuries and space to express emotions.
As the legal investigation grows more complex, art collides with undiscovered truths. Her father’s surprising new art exhibit forces her to confront the mother she never knew in a series of 18 vibrant and layered portraits. Lina realizes that her father’s art holds a hidden message. For the first time, Lina watches her mother’s image smile, scream, laugh, cry and take on distorted, surrealist proportions. Lina is forced to look at her past in colorful, inanimate frames that reach far beyond the borders of her comfort.
Conversely, Josephine experiences art as a medium for exploring both her world and her fantasies. She creates portraits of other slaves, where they live, and the world beyond their grasp. Her paintings reflect the lovely, peaceful landscapes depicted in books in the estate’s library, the swirling blues and grays of the ocean, complex graphs that measure the shape and volume of waves. Josephine thinks in pictures. When Josephine wonders where her mother is buried, she imagines a woman’s body carved into a valley and mountaintops, her hair made of clouds.
By wrapping these two personal journeys together, Conklin has created a helix of art, history, relationships, and a fictitious legal investigation. The author bravely breathes personality and warmth into the harsh tales of race, injustice and freedom in American history.