Just Jennifer

The Story of the Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith

Much has been written about the Mid-Atlantic and New England states during the time after the American Revolution and much has been written about the American South during the period, Reconstruction, after the Civil War, but less has been written about the American South during the years following the American Revolution.  In the small coastal North Carolina town Beaufort, ten-year-old Tabitha already has the sea and the responsibility of her family’s land in her blood. Her mother Helen died when Tabitha was born and she was raised, as was her mother before her, by her widowed father who stopped sailing after the death of his wife to raise his daughter and to run the plantation Asa had raised his daughter Helen to run.  John, Tabitha’s father, of whom Asa never approved, wants to do what is right by his daughter; when she is stricken by a fever, his heart tells him the sea will cure her and make her well again.  When it doesn’t, he returns to bury his daughter next to her mother and the story turns back in time to when Helen meets John before he leaves to fight in the war, returning to her after escaping from an enemy ship.  A third woman’s sorrows, those of Helen’s slave Moll, are echoed as she watches her only son Davy head west to the frontier with John, taking from her the second thing she loved.  With gorgeous prose and beautiful language, Smith, paints a portrait of a new America with all its hope and despair, using this family where the daughters were brought up to be strong and capable, but who were never given the chance, foreshadowing the greater horror and devastation that will befall the South almost one hundred years hence.