Know Nothing by Mary Lee Settle
Know Nothing by Mary Lee Settle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I took up this book after having attempted to read it once and failing. I have much respect for Mary Lee Settle but, at times, I have very little liking for her work. (And at times I have a very great liking for it, as well, but that is for another day.) As she states in the introductions to most of the Beulah Quintet, it is her purpose to submerge herself in history and to become a creature of the era of which she writes. In the case of Know Nothing, this means inhabiting the mind of slave holders, poor settlers, and sometimes, at least in passing, of enslaved people. While it is impossible to write of this era of history without using the n-word, which is now among the most taboo of all words, the way in which an author conducts herself in the employment of the term and the inhuman purpose that lay behind its application is important. In the case of this novel, the shape of the minds of the white people feels true and harsh to the point that it is almost impossible to read passages of the book. She both represents the holding of people as slaves as a necessity and as a curse but her focus is on the slave owners and those who supported them. The presence of the slaves is almost incidental to the novel. Black people are only seen in their relations to the white people around them and not as people in themselves. This becomes an overwhelming concern when reading this book in 2021. We are still writing and rewriting this history and battling over its implications and consequences to this day. So that the novel itself feels incomplete and unsettled in its approach to the core of the story. The story she is telling is overshadowed and feels almost trivial. The struggle to tell the story becomes the foreground of the novel.