Keeper of the House
A Novel
-
-
4.9 • 10 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Keeper of the House is Rebecca T. Godwin's unforgettable novel narrated by the lively Minyon Manigault, a young black woman from a coastal South Carolina Gullah community.
In 1929, due to mysterious family circumstances, Minyon is given up by her grandmother to the employment of Ariadne Fleming, a white madam in the famously elegant brothel called Hazelhedge. At the age of fourteen, she becomes a pair of eyes and hands, watching and working almost invisibly in a world where men and women leave their inhibition, and their pasts, at the door. As Minyon grows up in the household with other black people who provide behind-the-scenes support of Hazelhedge, she cannot escape her haunting childhood memories. Even while bearing witness to the events unfolding around her, Minyon seeks to find her place in the world, and her pace within herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this deft, entertaining novel by the author of Private Parts (1992), an effervescent 14-year-old African American girl is taken from her grandmother's side in 1929 to be the housekeeper in a South Carolina brothel. With warmth, wit and whimsy, Minyon Manigault offers her unique perspective on the next 40 years at Hazelhedge, where she remains virginal as many of the ``hoes'' lose their youth before her eyes. Mizz Addie, the madam, keeps a sharp eye on her frequently changing charges and gives Minyon, the only woman of color in the house, power and freedoms she would not find elsewhere (such as being able to talk back to the ``hoes''). Godwin's greatest achievement in this fiction ``born of fact'' (a noted house of prostitution existed in the same setting as Hazelhedge) is Minyon herself-her lively and amiable voice displays notable variation, complexity and depth. Narrated in the colloquial Gullah dialect spoken by many African Americans in the South, the novel touches on 20th-century race relations, but readers will be more affected by its human issues of motherhood, self-discovery and moral strength. First serial to Paris Review.
