The Kitchen House

The Kitchen House

Celtic Bayou

We meet another young orphan this month in The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom.  When seven-year old Lavinia’s parents die during passage to America years before the Civil War, she becomes indentured to the owner of a Virginia tobacco plantation.  Though she is white, the plantation’s black slaves take her in, nurse her to health physically and emotionally, and in return, she finds a loving home with them – at least for a while.  She grows up as a slave, but when she’s a teenager, she’s forced to leave her adopted family and pursue an education in another city.  She finds that she can no longer straddle the two worlds of black slavery and white freedom, and  eventually marries the plantation owner’s son, a flawed character with a tragic history of his own. 

The story is told in the alternating viewpoints of Lavinia and Belle, a slave in the kitchen house and the plantation owner’s illegitimate daughter.  Through these two narrations, the many characters and their complicated relationships come to life.

The club members agreed that the story was a captivating and emotional one.  The story twist of a white indentured servant living with black slaves created a complex dynamic that kept some of us turning pages into the night.  For others, the story was good but maybe not the most riveting that we’ve read.  We agreed that after working out way throughRoots, we felt like we had some depth to our understanding of life in antebellum Virginia. 

In keeping with our southern theme and adding a dash of Irish fare, our restaurant was the Celtic Bayou, a pub in Redmond whose menu includes fare such as bangers and mash, jambalaya, and red beans and rice.  The casual atmosphere was perfect for a lengthy discussion, not all of it about the book, as usual.  Sunday night wasn’t very busy, so our server gave us plenty of time for discussion while we enjoyed blackened catfish and hush puppies, cilantro-lime shrimp salad and Guiness.  We also happened to catch snippets of the 2013 Academy Awards playing on the bar television.  Since we’ve read, in the last year, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, Roots, and the Kitchen House, we decided we wanted to continue our education on the pre-Civil War South and see (and maybe read) this one of this year’s winners:  12 Years a Slave.

But, before that, we look forward to next month’s book:  The Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda.

 written by member Robin White