Octavian Nothing

I just finished reading The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Traitor to the Nation, Volume II The Kingdom on the Waves. Having loved Volume I The Pox Party, I expected to love this book as well. 

M. T. Anderson, in his acknowledgments at the end of the book thanks “the Sales and Marketing Department at Candlewick, who were confronted by a book that had missed its audience by two centuries.” The 18^th century writing style certainly is tough going at times. Anderson insists upon writing absolutely authentically to his time period and his characters. For example, Octavian says at one point, “I returning in my old white shirt, with my oznabrig and breeches in my hand, I found the two of them engaged in lively converse.” From the context, I figured “oznabrig” was a shirt of some kind, but when I tried to look it up in the dictionary, I came up blank. I finally found the definition on wmboothdraper.com.

Oznabrig (with many spellings) was first named after the German city that first produced considerable amounts of it. Later in the 19^th century, as with many fabrics, oznabrig began to be made of cotton. Oznabrig is a cheap unbleached fabric related to tow and rolls and was often used to make men's shirts, hunting frocks, trousers, and overalls and women's shifts, gowns, petticoats, aprons, and pockets. 

Clearly, if I gave this book the attention it deserved, I’d be spending lots of time looking up the words I did not know. Anybody who reads this book cannot allow himself to be intimidated by a little vocabulary.

Secondly, readers of this book must be prepared to stand slack-jawed in awe of M. T. Anderson’s skill. His intelligence, hours of research, and brilliant mimicry of the past is unsurpassed. Marketing this book as a Young Adult novel alone seems like suicide, but perhaps the intelligent young adult is the only audience open enough to swallow the bitter pill Anderson proffers. Still, I hope that the adults who would enjoy this book find it and read it. 

Because the bits that shine, my, they just glow and burn.  Here is an example from page 217.

She brought out her dolls for their games, and one of the dolls was a black doll made from rags that was given her when she was a little girl by her maid, who’d suckled her, her mother being too tender to do so herself. Fanny and these neighbor girls, see, were at play, and one of the small girls took a white doll in a dress and began having fits yelling at the black doll, making all this chastisement in some high, squeaky voice. ‘You breaked another plate, Masie, and you ain’t fit to serve in a respectable house’ and such-like. Like she must hear her mommy or her dada say.

“And Fanny—who could tell her halt, that ain’t what a lady does—instead Fanny breaks off a stem of grass, and gives it her, and puts it in the doll’s hand, and together, they make the little white doll whip the black one.

“And Fanny puts on some African accent, and starts begging mercy—‘oh, de missus whip me some! Oh, missus!’ and such-like. And these tiny girls, they start to laugh and whip the doll harder to urge the whole jest longer.

“It made my heart sick, and I could not barely stand in that yard without fleeing. . . . 

That is a story told by one of my favorite characters in the book, he who begins as Pro Bono and ends as William Williams. Identity is one of the many themes of the book, because when a slave becomes free, he becomes nothing and must reinvent himself from scratch. These men and women do invent themselves, with valor and style. Many die of disease or in battle or at the hands of former masters, making this a difficult book to read. The slaves who have run to the British for their freedom and to fight their oppressors, in the end, have no real place to go. They are visible targets to every bully alive and to the established political and social conventions of the time. 

M. T. Anderson writes a complex story and not everybody falls into easily compartmentalized slots. As he says in his Author’s Note, “Yes, our Revolutionary forefathers espoused a vexed and even contradictory view of liberty. But it is easy to condemn the dead for their mistakes. Hindsight is cheap, and the dead can’t argue. It is harder to examine our own actions and to ask what abuses we commit, what conspicuous cruelties we allow to afford our luxuries, which of our deeds will be condemned by our children’s children when they look back upon us. We, too, are making decisions. We, too, have our hypocrisies, our systems of shame.”