This Here Is Love
Perry, an award-winning author, has created an unforgettable set of characters in a multi-point of view story tracing the lives and struggles of enslaved and indentured people in the Virginia colony at the turn of the 18th century. Andrew Cabarrus is a free, land-owning Black man whose wife and children are still enslaved and whose desperate desire to free them has predictably disastrous consequences. His son David becomes the property of Jack Dane, an Irish émigré who inherits the farm his indentured master contracted him to help work. David’s enslavement is lightened by Jack’s purchase of Bless, a young woman Jack hopes will produce human capital in the form of enslaved children.
Perry follows these characters, each one with a unique and sympathetic voice, deeply and intimately, creating a moving study of the emotional damage wrought by slavery on both those who suffer it and those who profit from it. But the novel is far from depressing. Perry writes about the lives of people who live close to the land with gorgeous detail and allows her characters their hard-won moments of joy and fulfillment. Ultimately, the novel celebrates this capacity for joy as the key to survival for a people who were tragically treated as property. By setting her narrative at the time when the American laws enabling chattel slavery were being created, the reader gets a vivid, moving depiction of the many varied ways humans both exploit one another and form communities to resist such exploitation.
