Women lead the way in Marlon James’ historical novel The Book of Night Women. Set in eighteenth century Jamaica, the book follows Lilith, the youngest and newest addition to the group of rebellion-plotting enslaved women who meet under the cover of darkness, as she strives to reach beyond the boundaries of the brutish life on the sugar plantation of Montpelier, where slaves are named after Greek gods and personalities. Like most entities designed to extract labour for profit, the plantation operates under a hierarchy: Plantation owner; overseer; slave drivers, and slaves, a category composed of house slaves, field slaves and Johnny-jumpers or black slave drivers. And while no group escapes the clutches of human depravity, life is especially grim for black women who endure untold violence from white men and women as well as black men. 

When Lilith accidentally scalds a dinner guest with a hot bowl of soup, one of the three Johnny-jumpers assigned to take her already brutalised body to the whipping post attempts to grab her crotch. In another scene, Homer, the head of the night women and Lilith’s mentor, narrates how men from a Maroon community—former slaves who gained their freedom via successful rebellions—viciously assaulted her before returning her to Montpelier, the plantation she escaped.          

“You think you get whipping?” she says to Lilith. “Me get the worst whipping in Montpelier. The worst of the worst. Beat me with whip, tree branch and then brand me with iron across me back for every day me did gone. That be the mistress idea. She take great interest.”

The novel opens in the aftermath of Saint-Domingue’s successful slave revolution that won the island nation, now known as Haiti, its independence after 12 arduous years of fighting France, Britain and Spain. With winds of freedom blowing over neighbouring islands whose slave population outnumber the white ruling class, or in Jamaica’s case 33 to one as James reminds readers every so often, fears of another rebellion hang like a threat in the air and not without reason given the island nation’s long history of slave uprisings, the famous one being Tacky’s War of 1760. That history, combined with the staggering ratio between slaves and enslavers, drives the latter to perpetrate extreme forms of repression.    

“White man know that there never be a safe day in the colony. So they whip we. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred lash and whatever number come after that… They chop off a foot if you run away, a hand if they think you thief and a balls if they showing you a lesson… They take a mama new young’un and kill it in front of the mama.”

It’s in this gruesome context the night women meet to coordinate a rebellion with neighbouring plantations. As leader of the group, Homer has no qualms disposing of anyone who threatens her plans for freedom, and in an obvious nod to her namesake, she often speaks in riddles whose ambiguity confounds and annoys Lilith. For her part, the opinionated teen aggravates the older woman with reservations about the impending revolt, reservations that deepen further when she realises Homer’s interest in her is mostly utilitarian and Robert Quinn, the plantation’s overseer, begins a hopeless romance with her.

“But Quinn be the only living soul who look at her as just that, a woman,” reasons Lilith following an argument between her and Homer. “Not the niggers, not even Homer, who look ‘pon her like she be the angel that kilt all them pickney in Bible chapter Exodus.”

The choice to use what some consider non-Standard English lends an authenticity and proximity to the speech and thought patterns of the book’s central characters, while challenging the idea that “informal” forms of the language, although lush with comical and grammatical expressions, can’t effectively paint verbal images on a par with so-called Standard English.

Describing an opium den, James writes, “So much stink fight for space in the inn that a nose would think there be no smell at all,” and of the evening, “Night time come heavy, like a woman ready for baby dropping.”

James does a spectacular job of creating nuanced, three-dimensional characters, none of whom come out smelling entirely of roses or decay. Lilith helps the plantation owner’s girlfriend conceal her midnight escapades as penance for unintentionally avenging the woman’s unfettered cruelty towards her, while the callous former overseer inexplicably extends grace to his biracial daughters. Homer uses deceit and brutality to further her cause, yet brews herbal tea for the overseer to extinguish his nightmares. Lilith and Quinn attempt to find love in a grotesque place, where the social hierarchy of discrimination occasionally seeps into Quinn’s close friendship with the British plantation owner, highlighting Britain’s condescension towards the Irish.

“Used to have your kind in chains before we switched to niggers,” the former overseer says to Quinn within earshot of the plantation owner, who quickly admonishes his friend’s retort.

This rich depiction of characters with real feelings and real motivations weaves a believable tapestry of a world that escapes the typical vapid, cartoonish tropes of Hollywood slave narratives, where the oppressed are incapable of perpetrating cruelty and oppressors are bereft of all emotions but hate. The novel also shines in its sublime commentary on sexism and the double standards that allow white men to whore their way through town without rousing society’s condemnation, leaving white women to visit their rage against their partner’s infidelities and forced sexual intercourse with black women on their enslaved counterpart. Most central to the story’s heft is the treatment of female characters as not only victims and spectators of violence but also perpetrators, granting them a full range of human experiences that disrupts the one-note narrative of sainthood or stone-cold villainy so often ascribed to women in arts and life.

The Book of Night Women is an unflinching account of the politics of race, gender and violence, the brutalities of unhinged capitalism, and the humans forced to keep its machinery running even under the strain of inhumane conditions. Those faint of heart should proceed with caution.

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