REVIEW OF THE SALT ROADS

• Published in: Femspec 2005, Vol.6 (1), p.178
• Main Author: Michlitsch, Gretchen J
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-1867); Black literature; Folklore; Gilroy, Paul; Greek language; Hopkinson, Nalo; Literature; Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Mythology; Racism; Verne, Jules (1828-1905); Women
• ISSN: 1523-4002

Their African roots and the presence of this young, traveling goddess further link the women whose tales [Nalo Hopkinson] weaves together. Her readers first meet Mer, brought from Africa on a slave ship, from the kingdom of Dahomy on the Guinea Coast, and now midwife, healer, and sugarcane field worker on the Sacré Coeur plantation in San Domingue. Mer moves, in the opening scene, from appraising the condition of a pregnant woman, a griffone, to the side of a man poisoned by trickery in the cane fields, a man whose woman is not even allowed to pause in her work as she waits to know whether he will live or die. We are next thrown ninety years ahead in time, into a love scene, sometimes uncouth, between two theatre girls who perform in Paris during the 1840s. Jeanne Duval's lover Lise is white-skinned, as is her "new beau," the poet Charles Baudelaire, but Jeanne's grandmother had been brought from Africa, sold to pleasure gentlemen, and the racist limitations on Jeanne's hopes for success lead her to wish sometimes that "[her] mama had fucked a thousand more white sailors if it would have made [her] less brown!" (50). Once these first two story lines are established, the setting changes once again and we encounter Thais in a bathhouse in Alexandria, Egypt, 345 CE. Whereas Mer is all African, and Jeanne's grandmother came from Africa, Thais is half African -- she comes from Nubia, where her Nubian mother and her Greek father had sold her north into slavery in Egypt. After working for years as a sex slave in a tavern in Alexandria, Thais decides to travel and convinces her friend Judah to go with her to Aelia Capitolina, the Mediterranean city previously and since known as Jerusalem.