“Young people see cotton as beautiful, something to roll around in until their eyes bob like apples... .” With these words, Bernice, the narrator of Pale, by Edward A. Farmer ’05, makes way for a sober examination of mundane human cruelty. Cotton owns the pages of this novel—its planting, its care, its ownership, its seasons, its dominion over the vast land and over black bodies. There are only two states: working cotton under the unforgiving sun and watching others work cotton. Indeed, a young black man demands of Bernice, “How are we not slaves?” This is the central question of Pale: How much has truly changed for African-Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation? It’s a novel in deep mourning for all that black people in the American South have lost and continue to lose.
Pale
By Edward Farmer ’05
Blackstone
The period is roughly 1966 to 1973. The location is the Kern family plantation in Greenwood. Bernice’s husband has abandoned her in his escape from Mississippi, taking all their savings with him. She arrives at the plantation to serve in the house and to be near her brother, Floyd. But the plantation proves a place of deep unhappiness and veiled tensions. Bernice, so compassionate that she never has a word of rebuke for her husband, tries to remain neutral, to understand the hurt behind each cruelty she witnesses in the household, and to protect everyone. Little does she realize this neutrality will bring about the destruction of a young man’s soul. It will also instigate a murder.
Before all this happens, Bernice must contend with the cast of the plantation: Mr. Kern, the plantation owner, in his late 60s, seems to always be angry, but he’s also like no other white man Bernice has ever met, in that he extends kindness to a black person when he does not need to do so. Miss Lula, his wife, suffers from enigmatic ailments. She lives in the gloom of her dim, curtained room, making demands and nursing grief. Silva, the unfriendly housekeeper, is the mother of two boys, Jesse and Fletcher, who could not be more different in temperament and physique. Theirs is a stratified world with a strict division between the field and the house, spheres kept carefully separate until Jesse comes in from the field to move some furniture.
And so begins the tug-of-war between, on one hand, Bernice’s belief that she is no slave and that she can choose her life, and on the other, the everyday evidence that her people may not be as separate from slavery as they imagine, even with no one standing over them, whip in hand.
There are perhaps a hundred ways to tell this story; the one Farmer chooses is striking for its patience. He allows his novel to germinate, to uncurl its stalk and lift its head to the sky, then swell into a white, menacing bloom. We find ourselves deep in the machine of the plot without knowing just how we ended up in there, having unwittingly gathered for ourselves all the necessary characters and important past events, like static attracting lint. But the story does not then take off in a trail of dust, leaving us coughing and shielding our eyes. No, Farmer continues to measuredly turn the screw, tighter and tighter, making the act of turning the page as essential as drinking to sate thirst.
Pale is an explosion in very slow motion, and what slows it down is powerful, lyrical language. Bernice describes the land and its people with such deep keenness: “The air sat thin and harsh to breathe as if no air was actually there at all, and I felt this was indeed how I would die.” And, “The buds of the pagoda dogwood hung low, fanned out over the horizon in a white pageantry of pomp and dance, circumstance enough for us to walk amongst
the fields in admiration of their splendor… .” These words are not beautiful for the sake of bedazzling the page. Rather, they’re a lament, illustrating this blessed land’s inability to right itself and to do justice, generation after generation.
The lover of literary craft will especially savor Farmer’s mastery over point of view. How seamlessly Bernice transitions from a first-person eye, seeing and thinking for herself, to a first-person plural in empathy with the masses, and finally to the God-like eye that peers at will into the minds of others. This transformation of Bernice into God provoked a question in me that Farmer may or may not have sought to explore: Can one person swallow the whole of an ugly history, stand in the gap and change its trajectory? Silva, at least, believes this is possible: “It takes one person bold enough to stop those generational curses, one person bold enough to say it ends here.”
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...
Onjerika, 2018 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, started the Nairobi Fiction Writing Workshop.