Tale reveals antebellum Cincinnati
In a complex, lively and thought-provoking novel based loosely on the lives of some of her ancestors, Terry Gamble examines life in Cincinnati and the vicinity in the decades before the Civil War.
Gamble's Scots-irish great-great-uncle James Gamble, who immigrated to Cincinnati in the early 19th century and went on to co-found Procter & Gamble, appears here in the guise of James Givens. The story of his determined rise to wealth, power and social position in "a mosquitoinfested backwater at a bend in the Ohio that muddled up rich, poor, black and white, fifteen versions of English, a growing German population, and a smattering of French" makes up one thread of the narrative.
More central to the novel, and even more intriguing, is James' younger sister, Olivia. From the vantage point of the late 19th century, in her 80s and nearly blind, she reflects on her life and eulogizes those who have gone before, though certainly not without noting their failings.
Observant, independent and prickly, and with a taste for wearing men's clothing, Olivia contributes to the family income by reluctantly tutoring wealthy young Cincinnatians. She also, more enthusiastically, joins renegade doctor Silas Orpheus in performing illicit autopsies “to observe the rotten liver of the inebriate, the wizened cranium of the syphilitic, the clotted arteries of the corpulent.”
Her younger brother Erasmus, the black sheep of the family, takes up the life of an itinerant frontier preacher, which allows him to indulge a taste for liquor and an eye for the ladies. Later, he settles in Ripley, where he develops a sideline in transporting runaway slaves across the Ohio River.
Sharing Silas' household is Tilly, a light-skinned black woman who assists him with childbirths and autopsies and makes money of her own by doing the hair of Cincinnati's elite. Tilly grew up across the river in Kentucky on a failing plantation owned by Silas' brother Eugene, the novel's only unequivocal villain.
Gamble not only makes it easy to follow the intertwined lives of the characters over many years, but she also allows each of those characters to grow and change. She's equally at home in the world of society gossip or chat about fashion and in the rougher aspects of life in this time and place, including cholera, slave auctions and rape.
She is particularly deft at exploring the wide range in attitudes toward the abolition of slavery on both sides of the river, and at depicting the restrictions, both subtle and horrifyingly gross, on women and people of color.
Although the final few chapters sometimes feel cluttered with the effort to tie up every loose strand, the novel is never predictable.
This nuanced novel should satisfy those curious about the rich history of 19th-century Ohio and is sure to prompt discussion about the parallels between the issues of race and gender then and now.
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