How Far We’ve Come
The seventeen-year-old protagonist of this novel has two names, two identities: she is Orrinda, her slave name for services to Miss Frida up at the Big House; and she is Obah, her African name, given to her by her mother, who was forcibly trafficked from Ghana to the Unity sugar cane plantation in Barbados. Her mother miraculously escaped but left her daughter behind. Obah suffers the rapacious degradations of 18th-century enslavement, but she dreams of being a ‘proper person’. One day when she is taking the secret messages between her mistress and the brutal slave overseer, Leary, she meets Jacob, a white boy her own age who is strangely dressed, hatless, and speaks to her gently, unlike a white man. At first believing he is an apparition, they become friends and then he offers her an astonishing means of escape. The reader might assume this is an easy choice, but as Obah struggles with the prospect of a new life, her choices are shown to be more complex than they at first seem.
What strikes the reader on opening this debut novel is the immediacy of Obah’s voice: the creative grammar of her given language, with its own logic, telling an authentic story of her inner life. This is a story of going home, no matter what that entails, and it is very powerfully told. The mechanics of time travel are of course mysterious, but I would have liked a little more focus on this to avoid a prolonged feeling of suspended disbelief. The time travel conceit does, however, shine a forensic light from the long 18th century onto the present. The title of this novel invites the question, asking us to honestly acknowledge the stain of racism still seeping into Black lives.
