The Queen of Palmyra by Minrose Gwin

Finished on 14Feb.

My friend said that this book was being compared to The Help. So all the way through I tried to find points of comparison. It is set in approximately the same time frame and more or less the same location: Mississippi in the sixties. Both are carried on in the context of the racial tensions of the period. Aside from that - not much in common. As I recall (you know my talent for forgetting almost everything about a book once I close the cover), The Help is set in Jackson and is about (to oversimplify) the relationships between the young women of the Junior League and the black women without whom their lives would cease to function. Women of privilege who were reared by black women and have turned their own children over to black women who raise them and neglect their own.

This story is set in a small Mississippi factory town and is about a young girl and the people who let her down - her mother who married beneath her, her father who is a vicious predator, her grandmother who in punishing her daughter for her mesalliance permits her granddaughter to be exposed to unspeakable situations. What stability there is in young Florence's life comes from Zenie, her grandmother's maid and her family, although they are limited in what security they can provide because of the dangerous racial tensions of the time and place.

Zenie's full name is Zenobia, after the once Queen of Palmyra and she regales young Florence with tales of the deeds of Queenie. Florence inserts herself into these stories - as well as the stories of Uncle Wiggly - the favorites of her grandfather.

Florence's mother abandons her - once by running their old car into a train and then by simply walking away while on leave from the mental institute where she is incarcerated after her suicide attempt. She saved herself from her brutal and abusive husband, but left Florence in his hands. The father molests her and takes her to clan meetings where she is passed around the entire group. The grandmother retreats into a bottle.

Florence's disfunctional life is set against the racial violence of the period, but it is primarily the story of one young girl. Her sudden recall as an adult of a brutal crime which she witnessed seems almost inevitable rather than climactic in the general setting of her life.