Books from Memory -2: Foxes of the Harrow by Frank Yersby

Written by: Raghavendra B

May be my laziness. But felt that it would interesting to capture what I remember about some books, though saying shaped me would be too much may be, which have been real soul mates in childhood and have made a lasting impression on me. I shall alternate between Telugu and English books for the semblance of balance. There ends the pretense of balance in these recollections.  They are just that, recollections. Of my emotions. Towards my truest friends. Books. So, “prominence of I” the biggest sin of all, colours all of these. Grin and bear. 🙂

A tattered book, san the outer and inner hard covers, lying in my dad’s collections. That was Foxes of Harrow. To me. At first. The moment I picked it up, one of those innumerable sunny days, spent at home instead of school, “enjoying” illness, extended into late night till I had finished it. Wow, was my first reaction, if I remember rightly.

It did not preach. I was at an age when I could make that out. It did not scream murder about slavery, which I understood very much later. In the same genre of Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’, Harper Lee’s ‘To kill a Mocking Bird’ I feel, now. Yes, they are all in different contexts. But the same thread runs through. That chill of a thread, that you feel, when you watch blacks being chained to each other, (no need to waste good weights on them eh?) and let go of, overboard, when the slave ships are running out of supplies on their transatlantic  voyages etc. The visceral chill.  I thought these storytellers were dead. No, said Grisham recently in the Sycamore Row. Good for us humans.

BUT, what I remember most, I must confess are two things. I remember not the lovely and regal Odalie D’ Arcenuex. I remember the silent but stronger love of her sister, Aurore D’Arcenuex. Just like I love Savitiri’s character than Meenakshi’s in Swarnakamalam. Ya, ya, I know. A man loves an obedient filly, say the feminists. I know I know J But Aurore and obedient? Really? I don’t know. I feel, in some ways, she is more obstinate than Odalie. But anyway, love the characterisation of Aurore. And the tenderness of her relation with Stephen Fox. Oh, what must some one go through enduring one’s sweat heart romancing one’s own sister. And suffer as a consequence!!!

Odalie, now I feel, resembles our own Aishwarya Rai, to me. The best. But, almost the untouchable because of being the best. Which is in itself another kind of curse.

Oh ya, before I forget in further digression, the second thing that I remember from this, even now, is the lesson taught by a black servant, to her young white new plantation owner, maddeningly working like the slaves and with the slaves, in the cotton plantations. And that is “If you see a haze of veil covering the moon, it means that there is a storm brewing”. Some habits die hard. Even now I watch out for the veil worn by the moon whenever there is a prediction about oncoming rains. A silly thing really. The veil is nothing but a wisp of cloud covering the moon very thinly, this not obscuring it fully but still making it hazy. That’s it. But from the mouth of this old woman, it was wondrous then. As wondrous as the goat chase of Ben Gunn in the caves of Treasure Island, silently watched by the little Hawkins. More on this on another day.

And then there are the Foxes. The man fox Stephen and the cub Foxes Etiene and ….were there some other foxes as well? …Ummm J And then there was the Harrow, for the Foxes or of the Foxes?? The narration of the devilry of Stephen Fox building his own Harrow was the finest thing in this novel, I feel now.

The context of Civil unrest in New Orleans and the rest of the confederacy was more vividly described in Gone with the Wind than in this story. That period just provided a sublime context to the evolving romance and actually biography of the the two generations, ending aptly perhaps, if I remember rightly, with the Fox brood being decimated in the civil war as well as, as Internet just reminded me, of harrow being in dereliction at the end.

Hmm….I have recounted only the white characters. Well, though coming from the pen of a black Author, this was the characterization I remember as a child. So, that shall be it. If you can catch hold of it, go for it, if you like the genre. I loved it.

 

The Foxes of Harrow
Novel
Frank Yerby
Fiction

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