Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
by Kate McCafferty

Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
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Book Summary Information

Author: Kate McCafferty
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-28
ISBN: 014200183X
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Book Reviews of Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

Book Review: splendid historical fiction
Summary: 5 Stars

I ask three things of historical fiction: an authentic, memorable voice, a vivid sense of place, and a story so well told that I want to learn more about the historical events on which it is based. Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl delivers admirably on all three counts. Cot Quashey's voice and her description of Barbados is so well written that it seemed as if I were sweating in that stifling room with her and Peter Coote, the character who records her spellbinding narrative. And before the day is over, I hope to own a copy of To Hell and Barbados by Sean O'Callaghan, a nonfiction work about Irish slavery in Barbados.

The pace of Testimony reminds me of Cold Mountain, in which the reader walks every step with a soldier painfully making his way back home. Like Inman, Cot Quashey takes the reader on a journey through time and misery at a pace that perfectly matches the geographic setting of her tale. When Coote grows impatient with the ramblings of a dying woman--indeed, is annoyed by the putrefication of her rotting flesh--readers are reminded that stories of slavery are always discomfiting. We wish they had never happened; we long for them to end. But Cot has her way. Coote, and the reader, must hear every beautifully-phrased, horrific word.

I particularly like the deposition device that the author employs. She stretches it to suit her purpose--this is fiction, after all--but it's historically accurate and calls to mind Thomas Gray's actual interview of the enslaved Nat Turner while he was waiting in his cell to be hanged. I also liked the cultural commonalities that the Irish Cot and her African husband discover between them. Quashey is distressed because his enslavement means that "ancestors could no longer guide" him and his people. Cot remembers that she said "many holy charms and tales; but the heart has gone away from them. My saints can no longer find me." Kate McCafferty bravely and imaginatively addresses a subject often ignored by historians who focus solely on the tragedy of Irish-Black relations: as much united these oppressed peoples as separated them.

In "A Conversation with Kate McCafferty" at the end of the book, the author notes, "There's been a recent trend against histories in the genre of a novel. I think it's a kind of postmodern stance . . . " I agree. Shame on postmodern academics who sniff at McCafferty's book while using it in a classroom setting. They would be better off sticking to the dry, lifeless prose written by their colleagues. A writer of historical fiction does not spend years researching and crafting a story so that teachers incapable of writing such a work can then turn it into instructional material. At its best, literature can motivate, inspire, entertain, and change the heart of a reader. Its potential should never be destroyed by using it as a textbook or comparing it to one.

Summary of Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

Kidnapped from Galway, Ireland, as a young girl, shipped to Barbados, and forced to work the land alongside African slaves, Cot Daley's life has been shaped by injustice. In this stunning debut novel, Kate McCafferty re-creates, through Cot's story, the history of the more than fifty thousand Irish who were sold as indentured servants to Caribbean plantation owners during the seventeenth century. As Cot tells her story-the brutal journey to Barbados, the harrowing years of fieldwork on the sugarcane plantations, her marriage to an African slave and rebel leader, and the fate of her children?her testimony reveals an exceptional woman's astonishing life.

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