The keepers of the house Book

When Money and Power hurts really badly, it lashes out and destroys as much as it has lost. When Money and Power looks back on the cadavers left behind after the battle was concluded, it sees a drought-shrunken river which turns back the sky, dully, like an old mirror.

Over the vast expanse of the Alabama heartland, belonging to seven generations of William Howlands, destiny spanned invisible woven threads over Howland Place, Madison City and the county. Abigail Howland Mason Tolliver, a Howland descendant, stumbled and fell into it. The sins of the fathers revisited the children. It was a God-awful reality.

There was a time when Money-power had a human name. It all started out in the spring of 1815 when William Marshall Howland from Tennessee, settled down in the county and named the river Providence, after his mother. Through seven generations, the Howlands worked hard. They farmed and hunted; they made whiskey and rum and took it to the market down the Providence River to Mobile.

However, it was Mrs. Aimeé Legendre Howland, wife of William Carter Howland's brother, who changed the shape and size of the Howland fortunes during the Reconstruction. She had a craving for land, and as other farms were sold (in the poverty-stricken '70's and '80's) she began buying. All sorts of land. Bottoms, for cotton. Sandy pine ridges that weren't used for anything in those days except woodlots.

It was Methodist and Baptist country, where Coonshine was popular; Catholics and Freejack Negroes were unpopular; Ridge runners brewed likker in the middle of the Honey Island Swamps; the New Church community of proud Freejacks settled the pine uplands and the swampy bottomlands between the east and west branches of the Providence River, had Indian Coctaw ancestry, with their customs and traditions intact, keeping them even more away from the other Negros and spawned a half-breed called Margaret Carmichael. She borned three red-headed, blue-eyed children to William Howland and sent them away forever to the North, to save them from a life as quadroons, or Negroes in the South, grubbing in the mud. After all, Margaret traveled by train to Cleveland to give birth to all three her white children. That way the word 'Negro' was not on their birth certificates. In the South they were still regarded as William Howland's wood colts.

One of them was Robert Howland Carmichael, William Howland's half-breed and only son, who could never claim his rightful name, which should have been William Howland the Eighth, or better yet, William Carmichael Howland. Neither could he claim his heritage. He became Abigail's biggest threat. In the South, most people could tell that Robert was a Negro. In the North, he would have been white. Abigail wished him dead. But their common atavistic destiny dictated a different path ...

With a ruthless vengeance the wrongs of the past came tumbling down and shattered the illusion of heaven on earth when Ms. Abigail Howland Mason married the ambitious lawyer John Tolliver, a gubernatorial candidate. Sleeping dogs would have blissfully slumbered forever, was it not for John's indefatigable political hunger and Robert Carmichael's visit to his legally white family of Howland Place.

William Howland once told his granddaughter, Abigail, that she was a child and like her mother Abigail, his daughter, had very little sense. He also said: "Our children grow old and elbow us into the grave." And that is why Money and Power would finally get a human face: Abigail Howland Mason Tolliver. It was all she had left to fight back.

And that's when history burst out in tears.

My comments
A tragic, beautiful tale, told in picturesque, cinematic, lyrical prose. The misleading serenity of the woodlands and the swamps; the volatility of the times; the hatred and hypocrisy of the inhabitants; the cruelness of history - it all burst open like an overripe boil that has been foisted for too long on a toxic body.

What if William Howland did not venture into the swamps to find the hidden stills of the Robertson brothers and met Margaret Carmichael washing her clothes in a remote spot of the river?
What if Abigail, his daughter, did not marry Gregory Edward Mason?
What if Abigail, his granddaughter, did not marry John Tolliver?
What if William Howland made his only son, Robert, his rightful heir?
What if Abigail did not inherited his power and wealth from her grandfather?
What if Abigail blamed her own choices for the tragedy that ensued, and not other people? For instance, who forced her to marry her husband?
What if Abigail has done right to Margaret Carmichael's children? She could have changed their lives, but decided not to?

Would it have changed the racial conflict or the white perceptions in any way?
Was Abigail's revenge the only option to resolve the bitter conflict?

My guess is that this book did not receive the accolades it deserved due to the 'unrealistic' ending. Added to that was the almost never-ending painting of the canvas as the background to the final events. Although beautifully described in almost microscopic detail, the too elongated, tedious descriptions of the wilderness and the swamps, and the history of violence and vengeance of the people surviving in it, discouraged more readers than it should have.

The book also confronted an America during a volatile period in the Sixties, when people died in an effort to bring justice to all citizens of the country.

The book could have made a difference if it was edited into a streamlined, focused story of a woman who had to face the consequences of her heritage alone, against an angry mob of cruel bigots who all leeched off her grandfather's wealth and his sense of humanitarian compassion. There were too many word dumping taking place, lessening the drama considerably.

The book was also a story told a million times before. It added nothing new to the debate that was raging through the country.

What it did do, though, was bring a deeply heartfelt tale to the table where anger and resentment ruled at the time, and presented a story in a musical rhythm of words. It was a saga which needed to be told. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for exactly this reason.

"Do what you have to do, " William Howland told his granddaughter from his grave, when she lay emotionally wounded, bleeding, hurting, alone.

And so she did, with the blood of seven generations of Howlands raging through her body, and the well of anger drenching an ancestral thirst for revenge. She did it the best way she knew how.

A gripping tale. A touching story. A thought-provoking experience.