Discoveries

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The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride

A Rediscovered African American Novel

Julia C. Collins, edited by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun

Oxford University Press: 140 pp., $11.95 paper

“THE Curse of Caste” is the first published novel by an African American woman. It appeared in 31 installments in the Christian Recorder, a weekly of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1865. The book had no ending; its author, Julia C. Collins, a Williamsport, Pa., schoolteacher, died of consumption later that year. Collins also contributed essays to the Christian Recorder, which are included here. “Intelligent Women” describes a future “golden era” of creativity and equality for blacks; “Mental Improvement” exhorts them to read and enter the public forum. Fiction allowed Collins to imagine a future in which black women had control over their lives. Her novel is about a slave, Lina, whose white lover, Richard, arranges her purchase from his father. They marry, and when Richard’s father finds out, he shoots his son. Richard survives but leaves the country, telling his father that Lina is dead. Lina gives birth to their daughter and dies, and the daughter, Claire, is raised by a black nurse. Not knowing her parentage, Claire takes a job as governess in her grandfather’s house. Chapter 7 of “The Curse of Caste” appeared the week President Lincoln was assassinated. By the time the 30th chapter came out, 23 states had outlawed slavery. The introduction by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun provides a context for the novel and a carefully researched description (though few facts about Collins remain) of the author, her life and family.

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Alligator

A Novel

Lisa Moore

Black Cat: 306 pp., $13 paper

LISA MOORE’s first novel, “Alligator,” was originally published in 2005 in Canada, where it was a bestseller. Moore transcends language and goes straight for the nervous system, often juxtaposing shocking images: a terrorist beheading and a nuclear mushroom, or a wrecking ball smashing into a tenement decorated for the holidays.

Her characters wander in and out of our field of view, against an urban backdrop in Newfoundland -- food courts, Wal-Marts, tiny apartments called bed-sits. Some are hapless, some have agendas, some are bourgeois (they cook with fennel, wear big silver jewelry, ride titanium bicycles, live amid a lot of pine and other light woods). Others are between scams, work in bars or wear Christmas sweaters with blinking lights. “Here was her prescription,” Moore writes of one character. “[B]ehave as if you are unaffected and never stop behaving that way.” Colleen, a girl who is arrested early in the book for her environmental activism, is the hub of the wheel, the character you want (no, need) to survive. The odds are not in her favor.

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The Horizontal World

Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere

Debra Marquart

Counterpoint: 270 pp., $24

“THIS was no little house on the prairie,” writes Debra Marquart in this remarkable memoir of her childhood home in Napoleon, N.D., (pop. 1,107), a former icehouse transformed by her great-grandfather, a Russian emigre who amassed 5,760 acres and died the Logan County wheat king. “Be careful of farmboys,” Marquart’s girlfriends warned one another. “They know how to plant seeds.” “We were farmgirls running tall through pastures. We had long shiny hair and peach-fresh skin.... We learned to speed shift, double clutch. Our feet never knew the brake.” Marquart escapes (“North Dakota looked best only when glanced at briefly while adjusting the rearview mirror”), but not really. She’s drawn back to “the horizontal life” by her father’s funeral. In a dream, she sees the landscape of her childhood: “I understood in one flash ... that this was my oeuvre, my entire body of work revealing itself to me ... and that I would spend the rest of my life working this field, arranging these letters into words, sentences, paragraphs.”