Fox Creek

The antebellum period of American history has captured the American imagination since not long after the Civil War. It has been romanticized and exaggerated, told and retold in many different ways from many different perspectives. Some tell a story sympathetic to the slaveholders; others focus on the plight of the enslaved.

In this, Fox Creek is little different from many other books focused on the pre-Civil War South. It is softer than some stories, with plantation owners who are relatively kind, and the focus is much more on the blurry lines that might have existed between slaveholder and enslaved, the strange loyalty and affection that some called love, and may have even meant it as such. The story shifts between different perspectives; sometimes readers see through the eyes of enslaved children, other times through the eyes of the adults who own them, and still others through the eyes of the white children coming to realize that the very children they are growing up alongside must live a different life from them.

At times, it seems that Torrey is trying to have it both ways, to tell a story about so-called “good plantation owners” while still recognizing that slavery was an evil entrenched in our early nation. Certainly, the way the enslaved characters speak at times rings false, their vernacular sounding like an echo of those books that presented black people as condemned to their station in life due to ignorance. However, it is clear this is not Torrey’s intent. The empathy and humanity with which she writes Cyrus and Monette, her enslaved protagonists, shows this.

If Torrey is having it both ways, it is in writing most of her viewpoint characters with that same empathy and humanity. Whether this is a softening of history or an accurate look at what some people were like is open to interpretation. Fox Creek does seem like a softened, even sanitized version of history at times, but at others, the cruelty of reality shines through.

Taken by its own merits, the novel does what it does very well. It presents a deeply human story, and it tells it beautifully. I found it a compelling story and was very glad to have come across it. It may not have told an entirely new story, but neither did it have to. It was enough that it told the story that it did. Torrey is a powerful writer, and I’ll be looking for more of her work in the future.