This is one of the most powerful scenes in the novel. She murders the overseer who’s raped and abused her for so many years and almost kills his right hand man. Kitty takes the wide-spread riots of the slaves to as an opportunity for revenge.
Levy does a great job at tugging at the old heart strings. July is sold by the overseer at Amity when she’s very young and Kitty doesn’t see her daughter for many years. Levy interjects little snippets of how the outside world is affected by events. The main focus is what happens to Kitty and July and the plantation. It’s a historical period I’m not familiar with and want to read more about. The Long Song is set just before, during and after the end of slavery. July’s birth is unremarkable – Kitty has a dizzy turn while cutting down sugar cane and doesn’t realise her daughter’s been born until the baby cries. The story starts with her conception when her mother, a Negro slave called Kitty is raped by a white man, the overseer on the plantation ‘Amity ‘where she works. The Long Song focusses on the life of a Negro slave in Jamaica called July. I must confess, I’ve never read any fiction about slavery so I went into The Long Song and didn’t know what to expect. The one that springs to my mind is the TV mini-series Roots based on the novel of the same name. There have been countless novels and films made about it. The subject matter of slavery is a familiar one. The Long Song isn’t as good as Levy’s novel Small Island I read a few weeks ago but I thought it was great. Come, let them just read it for themselves… All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a novel they might care to consider. Perhaps, my son suggests, I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it.
But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July’s mama Kitty, of the Negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides – far too many for me to list here. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was present when slavery was declared no more. July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages.
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