The Undertaker’s Assistant
As a former slave, Effie Jones, in Amanda Skenandore’s The Undertaker’s Assistant, has had to rely on her rational, keen mind to survive. She has dedicated herself to her profession and takes great pride in her work, a pride that sometimes borders on haughtiness, for which some people dislike her. Consequently, she has closed the door to the possibility that she might fall in love. That door is flung open when Effie meets Samson Greene, a black Republican legislator who awakens previously unexplored feelings in her. But it is Effie’s contentious relationship with a rival, Adeline Mercier, which will provide the novel with its most dramatic sparks.
Effie’s story is a quest narrative. She is desperate to know her family history, why and how she was abandoned at an early age. She is a woman in search of herself. We sense, in Effie’s chosen profession and deep respect for the dead, that she is after something loftier than what to wear at soirées. Her sharp intellect, which she wields like an invisible sword, is a drawback in the pretentious world of Creole society, where many have adopted the prejudices of the whites who rule over them. Samson Greene and the activists who work for racial justice provide Effie with opportunities to rise above such a superficial world.
Our immersion in that world—from the particulars of baking marble cake to the grisly minutiae of embalming corpses to the messy and violent politics of the Reconstruction South—is so complete that the reader never doubts it once existed. That said, one of this novel’s many virtues is how it subtly conveys how many black citizens in the post-Civil War era took it upon themselves to improve their own lives.
