Call Your Daughter Home, Deb Spera, author; Robin Miles, Adenrele Ojo, Brittany Pressley; narrators
This book is superbly performed by the narrators who interpret each character’s tone and character with authenticity and never overtake the thread of the story with their own personalities or political proclivities. Rather, they enhance it.
The time is 1924, the place is Branchville, South Carolina. Three women from different backgrounds and social classes are interconnected and forced to rely on each other due to unforeseen circumstances. One of the women is the daughter of a former slave, Oretta Bootles, now quite old, still works, as a free woman, for the wealthiest matriarch in town, Anna Coles, a demanding and arrogant woman who was nevertheless, not unkind to her. Retta’s mother had worked as a slave and a free woman for Annie. Retta loved her husband Odell. Their only child, Esther, did not survive. Odell was a G-d fearing, one-legged man, injured in an accident at work, who simply wanted to be able to be independent and not overprotected. They were devoted to each other.
Then there was Gertrude Pardee who was married off to Alvin just after she became a teenager. He was a violent drunk who physically and emotionally abused her and their four daughters. Gertrude lived a hardscrabble life, from hand to mouth, trying to feed her children while her husband spent the money on drink. He was a mean and violent drunk. His father Otto was Just as mean and cruel and showed her no respect. She worked for the Sewing Circle run by Mrs. Coles and her son Lonnie. They lived in fear of Alvin, dead or alive.
Annie Coles had seven children, two sons and two daughters survived. One young son had taken his own life, at age 12, and two more did not survive the birth. When she discovered secrets about her husband Edwin, she also discovered why her daughters were estranged from their parents. She had never understood why they had abandoned her. Edwin Cole, with his influence, money and power, controlled everything where they lived. Although these women were each polar opposites of each other, they came to care for and respect each other as events of the times and tragedies of the day influenced their lives.
There was an overlay of the supernatural that added texture to the story as superstitions often guided the less or more poorly educated and also affected others obsessed with religion. Gossip abounded in all circles and it was necessary to have a strong constitution or some other kind of power to withstand it. Life in the South is authentically revealed with all of its warts and foibles as hard times, a boll weevil infestation that destroyed the crops of the farmers, a Diphtheria epidemic that raged, and a storm that destroyed everything in its path illustrated their hard lives, vividly, on every page.