Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part three. Payback Time!

When Odysseus returned to his mansion on the island of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey, he found it besieged by the leading men of Ithaca, each of whom wanted Penelope to choose him as her husband. Penelope, besides being disgusted by them, still believed Odysseus would return. Then he did. Then what? Just what you would expect from a two-thousand year old story: Odysseus kills all of the men and reunites with Penelope. And this is what happens in Stan Rice’s novel Plantation Odyssey as well.

 

The local plantation owners (or former owners, as the Union army had displaced them) who lived around the plantation where Penelope (Penny) and Ulysses had been slaves insisted that Penny would choose one of them as her husband and therefore as the owner of the estate. They thought she would choose the one with the best barbecue. Then Ulysses returns disguised as her former servant Minerva (Minnie).  It is so difficult for Ulysses to keep his disguise as Minnie a secret. Minnie just happens to know as much botany as the lost Ulysses did. S/he and Penny put poisonous mushrooms in the barbecue. While the men are sick from toadstool poison, Minnie (who has turned back into Ulysses) kills all of them, including the one decent white man, whom they offered a chance to live but he stayed with his social peers.

Rice’s motivation in this short novel is very clear. He is fantasizing about payback for oppression. Rice is not Black, but (as indicated by his science book Forgotten Landscapes, he is Cherokee, and his science book reflects a clear anger at what whites have done to Native Americans. He apparently identifies with Blacks as well in this novel.

Rice seems to encourage people of color to be resentful of whites. While some readers might think this is not helpful, in this time in which racial tensions are flaring, I agree with the author that the resentment of people of color against white suppression throughout history and even today is justified and has a place in modern literature. We need to hold the white race accountable for what we have done in the past. Donald Trump’s blasts against Juneteenth and Harriet Tubman show that conservatives would still like to suppress white America’s admission of slavery in our history.

I very much doubt that Rice’s novel, even though it celebrates violence against slave owners in the Civil War, will lead to any violence, or even protests, on the part of Blacks which would not have occurred anyway.