I am getting used to Lowry's narrative voice. I do not dislike it; it is instructive. It's like she is explaining how she went about researching in the process of her writing the biography. To me, this is an anthropological style. It is also what we might call self-reflexive. She is being critical about her own manner of writing and research.
An example of this would be when she talks about language. She writes for instance that "own" is a painful word to use. You'll recall in class that I mentioned an NPR interview with Isabel Allende on her 2009 novel Island Beneath the Sea, where a caller takes her to task for using the word "slave," the politically correct term these days being "enslaved." I was disappointed with how quickly Allende agreed with the caller, which made me think that she wasn't as confident as she might have been with writing about slavery. One may take Lowry's self-critical voice in this same way. She does a lot of explaining of her choices. In choosing to use a word like own, she says that she is using the language of the time because it was the legal condition. However, she also says that a present perspective can be maintained, meaning one can both read the language of the times and also reject that language as not belonging to this time. In essence, Lowry is both telling Tubman's story and creating a separate and connected conversation about how she is going about creating the story. In this sense, the book is taking place in the historical present and real present simultaneously.
I find myself being less patient when she complains more than once that her writing must rely on court documents written by old white men. Here, I see Lowry herself falling into political correctness. I would rather she use the same reasoning as she does with the language. The documents she relies upon are the documents of the time, and while she might look at them as limiting, they are not. Tubman lived during a time when institutions were dominated by white men, so this is not a fact that she should feel the need to adjust in any way. I would be more interested however in Lowry finding ways that the voices of the oppressed speak even in situations of domination. I am confident, having read this book once before, that she later does just that. Would that her researcher voice was more confident. At one point, she writes, "All slaves old or young were the same." Huh? This is true, in my opinion, in only the most superficial sense. To be in the social role of slave connected one to others in that same oppressed state, yet every enslaved person was different, human, and of varying character and talent. So, what does Lowry mean exactly, and how can she feel this way when she is writing about an enslaved woman who so very clearly was different than most, one who did not accept her objective social condition? Lowry finds a way out of her own conflictedness when she writes, "The data comes scattered and for the most part will not stand on its own but must be applied, interpreted, and merged across the years." Yes, that is her task as a writer of history attempting to educate a contemporary audience.
Likewise, however, she admits that she has only scraps of information to work with, and she says that it is difficult therefore to provide a chronological or linear story. This is yet another feature of the book that, for me anyway, needs little explanation and no apology.
Lowry continues, using her story-teller and researcher voice to inform her reader about slavery, so she takes on I suppose also a teacher's voice. She explains slavery to us. For example, she explains why it is that the woman whom the world knows as Harriet Tubman was born on a plantation that was not that of her owner. Edward Broadas was not, when she was born, old enough to yet be recognized as master, according to Lowry. So, her mother and father lived on the property of her father's owners. Lowry also explains the law, rights, inheritance, the land, and injustice. One question her readers might ask is whether this voice is more instructive than it is intrusive.
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