Book of Addis: Cradled Embers by Brooke C. Obie (review)

CLA JOURNAL 513 Brooke C. Obie, Book of Addis: Cradled Embers. New York: For the People Press, 2016. 290 pp. ISBN: 978-0-692-72106-3. Paper: $16.99. Attorney Brooke C. Obie is receiving well-deserved praise for her arresting debut novel, Book of Addis: Cradled Embers. A Virginian, Obie chose to set much of the novel in her native state, drawing largely on locales steeped in Civil War history. After high school, she attended Hampton University, then Mercer University’s School of Law, and finally The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She recalls that while in college, classmates would often ask if she were Nigerian because of her last name, as Obie “is a very popular first and last name for Igbo Nigerians.” Eventually, Obie took a DNA test and found that her ethnicity is, in fact, majority Nigerian. Fascinated by this discovery, she researched the Igbos and learned of their rebelliousness and bravery in fighting the European enslavers. She then re-imagined many of the rebellious acts of the Igbo slaves. This resulted in Book of Addis, a riveting narrative which traces three generations of enslaved people and their enslavers through antebellum “Amerika” to the years just prior to the Civil War. From start to finish, this complex, beautifully imagined work is replete with suspense, poetry, pain, romance, and horror. Asthestorybegins,theslavewomanDidoisrebellingagainstyearsofoppression and violence inflicted upon her and her family by the wealthy plantation owner Ambrose Burken.Dido’s breaking point comes as she eyes Burken making advances on her twelve-year-old daughter, Taddy. The desperate effort of enslaved mothers, regularly the victims of sexual torture, to protect their children, husbands, and others becomes a recurring trope. In fact, much of the novel’s landscape revolves around Taddy, as a young woman and mother, resisting Ambrose’s son, William Henry Burken. Taddy pays a heavy price, much like her mother Dido before her, in trying to create safe spaces for her husband and daughter, Bernard and Addis, as well as for her two sons, fathered by Burken. Early on we learn that Burken and his wife must leaveVirginia for Philadelphia since he has been elected the country’s first president. With William Burken and his massive Wellesbury Plantation, which recalls Mount Vernon, the novel openly interrogates America’s founding narratives. Addis’s love, Ekwueme, explains how “Burken taking great pride in folk thinking he fair and good and, above all, Christian.”Of course, rather than a benevolent figure, Burken is the exact opposite. Obie also sheds light on American history, via the heroic character Dido. Though I initially thought that Dido was based on the Carthaginian queen, historian Jill E. Kelly writes in Enslaved Women in America (2012) that Dido, Pompey, and Turk were African-born Igbos enslaved in the early Virginia colony. They used poison plants, as in the novel’s opening scene, to murder their enslaver Ambrose Madison—James Madison’s grandfather. While the efforts of these three to gain Book Reviews 514 CLA JOURNAL their freedom are not well known, readers will instantly recognize the portraits of other, more famous warriors, such as Rit Greene. Now on her fourteenth trip to the South, Rit has led nearly three hundred captives north to freedom, and, she proclaims,“Never lost one.” In terms of narrative technique,each chapter is headed by the name of a specific character, similar to the method of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men (1983). But where those works rely on individual characters,speaking in first person,Book of Addis employs a third person omniscient narrator, speaking from the perspective of the various characters. The inspiring young heroine Addis has the most chapters, with twenty–seven, followed by Taddy and other Black women, in keeping with the novel’s feminist core. However, one chapter is told from the perspective of the brutal White overseer Haynes, and three are through the eyes of the traitor Reuel. In this way, Obie is able to render vivid character portraits, rich in interiority. Significantly, the characters all exist on a continuum: Reuel for instance willingly betrays other Blacks, for a few...