Saturday, April 13 @ 10:30 am
Grissom's unsentimental debut twists the conventions of the antebellum novel just enough to give readers an involving new perspective. Lavinia, an orphaned  white indentured servant, arrives in 1791 to work in the kitchen house at Tall Oaks, a Tidewater, Va., tobacco plantation owned by Capt. James Pyke. Belle, the captain's illegitimate half-white daughter who runs the kitchen house, shares narration duties, and the two distinctly different voices chronicle a troublesome 20 years.