HA Maxson and Claudia Young have crafted a crackerjack historical drama with savagery and grace. Comfort is one of those novels that unnerves the reader, the characters are vile, beautifully rendered, and it action unfolds cinematically. It’s 1816, the summer that wasn’t, and Comfort, a freed slave, is sold back into slavery by her alcoholic, gambling-addicted husband, Cuff, who is as bad as his name suggests. Comfort’s historical premise is based in fact, and meticulously researched, but history doesn’t weigh the narrative down, in fact Comfort’s prose is poetic, moving, even when describing the evil that people do to each other.
Cuff is the low life kind of antagonist that readers love to hate. He gambles, is superstitious, takes advantage of everyone. Cuff is ostracized for selling Comfort back into slavery. That’s one of the books’ hooks. Comfort has already escaped slavery once by buying her freedom. Talented and capable, she’s just barely free when Cuff betrays her. Cuff is in the grips of addiction when he sells his wife to the reverse underground railroad (Google it...it’s real), and spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out why he’s the most hated man in town. He’s fogged up with gambling dreams, shakes, and bottle madness. You almost feel sorry for him, but reserve it. Cuff is necessary, and provides the moral backboard for the reader to hate equally Joe Johnston, a slave trader, and the master and mistress of the Osborne plantation, a dilapidated gothic hell-hole that as ugly as the villains who run them. Master Osborne is nearly blind, and Mistress Osborne is jealously hateful of her slaves, and between the two of them, Comfort, sold to them by Johnston, finds no peace.
This isn’t a novel whose purpose is to embrace the complexities of the villains. The Osborne plantation is emblematic, perhaps realistic, but Maxson and Young make the place feverish, fetid, rotting; there is nothing remotely sympathetic about the place, or their masters. Mistress breaks Comfort’s fingers early in the novel, forcing Comfort to the fields where she will be broken by the hard labor; and its just what Mistress wants, for no one, especially not a slave, can possess domestic talents that surpass that of the lady of the house. Petty? Cruel? You bet, but it’s not grossly over the top either. The Osborne place is full of violence, but it’s the underlying hate under the characters hearts that make the place reprehensible, to the reader, and to everyone else in the novel. White people, respectable Christian land-owners, hate the Osbornes. The kind of slave owners that slave owners hate and view as scum of the earth.
The novel’s protagonists are Comfort, and Esther, an octoroon slave who flees her home and heads South, pretending to be white, to save Comfort. While Comfort is the title character, Esther’s story is possibly the most dramatic, and the most harrowing. Esther must pass for white, and take Comfort’s baby south. She’s paranoid, out of her element, and terrified. Yet, It is this storyline that is the heart of the novel, and where Maxson and Young’s storytelling shines.
Grace, in the face of evil, grace in the face of danger is how Comfort, and Esther survive. “Comfort cut her glance toward from time to time, but mostly she stared ahead at the smooth unbroken motion of the hoe tearing weeds away from full grown plants, smoothing out wrinkles in the earth, piling rocks and pebbles, making hours disappear as the sun spun another cycle across the warm blue sky.” Comfort disappears into the work of the field. The suffering is beautifully rendered, but doesn’t feel exploitative, or hypersensitive.
In the end, Comfort’s quick study and Esther’s knowledge of roots and herbs save them. Disguise, poison, betrayal, all elements of high suspense, and though it all you root for Esther, you root for Pompey the mute slave, you root for Comfort, you root for her baby, pulled along by Maxson and Young’s well paced, graceful prose.
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