I loved Nathan Harris’ debut novel The Sweetness of Water, which I read soon after it was published in 2021. This second book, Amity bears several similarities to his first book, both set in Reconstruction era America, and both telling the story of a journey. Given that these were the qualities that attracted me to The Sweetness of Water, encountering them again was a pleasure rather than a drawback.
Set in Louisiana in 1866, it is a journey saga, told in two alternating parts. It is not immediately clear who is the author of the first-person frame story, focussing on Coleman, or what is the status of the interspersed ‘June’ stories, that focus on Coleman’s older sister June. Both June and Coleman had been ‘owned’ by the Harper family, and although ostensibly liberated after the Civil War, both were still bound to the family, if not legally, then through coercion and emotional manipulation. Two years earlier the siblings had been separated when Mr Harper took June, whom he had pressured into a sexual relationship, on a wild-goose-chase into Mexico in search of silver. Coleman, a sensitive and rather stilted house servant had been left with Mrs Harper and her adult daughter Florence in Mr Harper’s absence. When they received a letter from Mr Harper summoning them to Mexico, they followed: Mrs Harper and daughter expecting to reap the benefits of the get-rich-quick scheme, and Coleman hoping to find his sister June. Unknown to Mrs and Miss Harper and Coleman, June, revolted by Mr Harper had escaped and finds sanctuary in Amity, a town of emancipated African-Americans surrounded by displaced Native American tribes. As she is heading north, in search of safety and the dream of reuniting with her brother, he is heading south with Florence in response to Harpers’ summons, which Mr Harper wrote more as a lure to bring June back, rather than any intention to share his never-found wealth with his wife and daughter. In the harsh frontier territory the two separate journeys confront bands of Indian and Mexican army renegades, hustlers and refugees as any sense of safety is shattered by multiple betrayals and power switches.
Coleman is an odd character. Self-educated, he speaks in a formal, stilted tone and his loyalty to Florence breaks down in the face of so many threats that he feels unable to overcome. His formality makes it hard to warm to him, but by the end of the book you know why Harris has written him this way.
Harris writes landscape beautifully, and he captures well the ingrained cruelty of enslavement revealed not only through actions and betrayals, but also through the brusque and frankly shocking way that the Harpers spoke to their ‘servants’, despite the legal change in their circumstances.
I really enjoyed this book. Perhaps Harris could be criticized for re-writing his first book again and not moving beyond the Reconstruction Era of the immediate post-Civil War, but given that this era has been so shoehorned into a pro-South Gone With the Wind narrative, we need to hear more about the Black and Native American experience instead.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 