Tancy

by Belinda Hurmence

Tancy, a favored house slave on the Gaither plantation, loves to read even though she knows it's forbidden. Whenever her mistress naps, the girl goes through letters and papers on the library table, reading whatever she can get her hands on. One day she discovers a baffling entry in one of Mr. Gaither's old Day Books. "6/16/48 Lulu lying in. 6/17/48 Lulu delivered of Tancy. Both well." Where is Lulu now? Tancy wonders. What became of her mother, once Tancy was born?

With Emancipation, and the end of the Civil War, Tancy is free to leave the plantation and search for her mother. Bravely she forges into the unknown world of freedom, for the first time earning wages for her work, spending her own money, and fending for herself. Eventually her new life takes Tancy to Shantytown, a village where former slaves live in ramshackle huts they've constructed themselves. There Tancy meets Sin, a bitter, eccentric old woman who shatters Tancy's dreams of a warm reunion with her real mother.

Genres: Fiction

203 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1984

Reviews

[slauderdale]

I borrowed this book through ComCat and it has no reviews on Goodread at the moment, so I feel like I have to review it before I can return it. What follows actually starts off more like a joint review of two books by Belinda Hurmence, "Tancy" (1984) and A Girl Called Boy (1982), although I think that “Tancy” is much the better of the two. It's just hard for me to talk about “Tancy” without also talking about “A Girl Called Boy.” I read that book first and had some problems with it; I went into "Tancy" afterward with added pessimism because of its mention in a 1991 interview, "The Search for Multicultural Children’s Books: An interview with Kathleen Horning of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center conducted by Clare Seguin":

KH: There’s a white author named Belinda Hurmence who has written three novels for children that deal with African-American experience. The first, Tough Tiffany, is about a contemporary child; it’s probably the least offensive. The other two deal with history. A Girl Called Boy is about a contemporary, middle-class black child who finds some little stone or something that magically transports her back in history to the pre-Civil War era. She finds herself on a plantation and becomes a house servant, which seems to be fine with her. It’s this whole Southern white mythology that there are the ‘good’ blacks and the ‘bad’ blacks and house servants really liked their positions.

RS: So the slave experience is depicted as a pleasant experience?

KT: Basically. It isn’t too pleasant in the first part when she’s on the plantation with the field hands, but when she makes it into the big house, becomes a very favored servant,and she and the mistress get along real well, it’s really not so bad.

It’s very interesting if you look closely at the descriptions of the field hands. They’re frequently described with terminology that compares them to animals. For example, when one of the field hands smiles at the main character, his smile is described as ‘almost human’.

The third and most offensive novel is called Tancy. It’s set in the time right at the end of the Civil War. It’s about a black teenage girl who has been a house servant all her life and the impact of freedom on her life. She goes out in search of her mother, who she’s been separated from for many years. She finds her mother, decides she has nothing in common with her and goes back to the plantation to the mistress, who she feels is really her mother. In one incredible scene, the redneck son of the master attempts to rape Tansy. The mistress comes in on the scene and says to him, “How could you — your own sister!”. The thoughts going through Tansy’s head after this are the woman’s words, she’s putting it together that the master is her father and that her mother was also raped. She thinks “no wonder I love the master — he’s my daddy.”

I think there are some mischaracterizations by Horning in this exchange, probably just because she was going off her remembered impressions of the books rather than a recent read, so I will get to those.

To start with, I am much more bothered by Boy in "A Boy Called Boy" than I am by Tancy as a character. Boy is so completely disconnected from the slavery-era black characters that it felt there was another fantastical element overlaying the time travel element: a brain transplant! Although Boy is meant to read as spoiled, she reads like a spoiled white girl – a really ignorant one with a severe deficit of imagination and empathy – rather than a spoiled black girl. Her disjuncture is just too profound and too prolonged. Hurmence also tries to do something that I don't think works. She seems, based on what I have heard about her nonfiction collections/selections from former slave interviews by the Federal Writers' Project, to be interested in the sometimes ambivalent feelings that formerly enslaved people would describe about slavery or their enslavers, and in her nonfiction writing she conjectures that this could have been for a number of reasons: elderly black people, long suffering under Jim Crow, being interviewed by mainly white interviewers during the added suffering of the Great Depression, reflecting on a time from their distant past, often their childhoods. But trying to explore ambivalent feelings about slavery in a time traveling 11-year-old doesn't work: those conditions don't apply.

I disagree with Horning’s statement that "[Boy] and the mistress get along real well, it’s really not so bad" in this book: I think it mischaracterizes what Hurmence is trying to convey, which is a kind of weird brainwashing/Stockholm syndrome in a vulnerable child who definitely isn't experiencing the worst aspects of the slave experience, but still recognizes how thoroughly dehumanizing it is. Mrs. Yancey is the "nice" slave mistress who is also "secure in the belief that her slaves were incapable of thought and feeling," and whose affection for Boy is for a "little lapdog" (Mrs. Yancey’s words!)

Shorter take: Hurmence is trying to get at something more complicated than Horning is willing to credit her for, but she isn't doing a good job of it and is further encumbered by an unsympathetic main character and an unhelpful time travel conceit.

"Tancy" is a much more brutal read than "A Girl Called Boy.” It's a book for older readers about an older character, who is actually from the time period in question and has been principally raised by her white enslavers. Early in the book she is sexually attacked by the white son of the household and learns that he is her half-brother, meaning that her dead "master" was also her father. What Horning boils down with such incredulity ("What woman reading this book could think that right after someone was raped they would be thinking about how much they loved the man who raped their mother?") is the upshot of personal processing over a span of several pages, in a character who is deeply hungry for love and family connection, looking for it in the same people that have robbed her of it: the dead man who was sometimes nice to her and gave her trinkets but sexually exploited and then sold her mother after Tancy was born, his wife who pets her but also castigates and manipulates her, her half-brother who was her childhood playmate and taught her to read growing up but later tries to rape her, not once but TWICE. Tancy trying to find family in these people shows the deforming effects of slavery, epitomized in the kind of crazy worldview displayed by enslaving whites would seriously claim they treated their "servants" like family, manifested in a character who tries to make herself believe it because she has been robbed of anything better.

That’s family? That's fucked up.

As much as Tansy might feel fondness or make excuses for "Miss Puddin," AKA Mrs. Gaither, Hurmence doesn't: she shows her in the narrative as incredibly racist, exploitative and emotionally manipulative. And Tansy knows this. She's young, naive, traumatized, and she will try to make more excuses for these people than they deserve, but she's not a fool and she matures a great deal over the course of the book. She comes to understand her own mixed feelings and why she feels them, and she also develops the emotional maturity not to be played by them. When Horning says that Tancy "finds her mother, decides she has nothing in common with her and goes back to the plantation to the mistress, who she feels is really her mother", she makes it sound like that’s the end of the story. It’s not.

“Lulu. My mother,” [Tancy] reminded her as gently as she could. “You promised to help me find her.”

“I know I did. And I will. But law, girl, what’s the rush? I’ll ask around. Not telling what’s become of her, it’s been so long.”

“She’s in Shantytown,” said Tancy.

Mrs. Gaither tried not to look flustered. “You don’t say! You clever girl, you’ve gone out and found your mammy for yourself!”

“She’s got a house and some land there that Mr. Rankin gave her.”

“Rankin. Would that be Hub Rankin do you suppose? Probably not; Hub Rankin is so stingy, he’d cut a pea in two.”

“Miss Puddin,” said Tancy sadly, “did you know where my mother was all along?”

The woman gave her one brief defiant look.

After Tancy catches her out, they talk further about her mother’s circumstances.

“She rents out her land, and makes her living that way,“ said Tancy, and she couldn’t resist adding, “She says she’ll stake me to a little business of my own in the town.”

“Oho. So she can boss you around! You wouldn’t want that, would you? When you’ve got a good living guaranteed you here at Gaither’s? I can promise you from sad experience, a girl never grows up as long as she lets her mother boss her. Believe you me, that’s what will happen when you move in with Lucinda."

“I wouldn’t move in with her. I just want to live closer to where she is.”

“Forever more. Why?”

“Because,” said Tancy, “she is my mother.”

Mrs. Gaither’s face crumpled. She pulled off her steel-rimmed spectacles, turned them over in her hands, put them on again. “I was more of a mother to you than ever she was,” she said brokenly.

It was true. She was. The mother-tie twanged between them like a strummed chord.

But this motherhood is a cuckoo brand of motherhood, by a former enslaver who deprived Tancy of her birth mother and tried to keep her from ever finding her, by a post-war white widow who uses the N-word constantly and is carefully building up her new collection of black people looking for place and employment in post-war North Carolina.

“I’m so alone.” Mrs. Gaither wept into her apron. “I thought when Billy died, I’d been punished enough. Now you say you want to leave me too!” Those were real tears, and instinctively Tancy moved to comfort her. Then she caught Miss Puddin watching her shrewdly from behind the apron, and she burst out laughing.

“Don’t cry, Miss Puddin,” she said. “Let’s enjoy our visit while I’m here.”

The woman continued to weep.

“Listen to you!” Tancy scolded. “You’d think I was leaving you forever. I’ll be coming back for other visits – maybe next spring. We’ll shell a few peas and go look at the baby chickens and the new little pigs, and you’ll tell me all the neighborhood gossip.” She took the loose pins from the woman’s hair and deftly secured the ashy strands. “I’ll brush your hair for you, and we’ll talk, and it’ll be just like old times.”

“It won’t,” the mistress mourned. “You’ll turn townified and different and forget all about Gaither’s Mill.”

Ah, but Tansy was already a different person; didn’t Miss Puddin see that? “I’ll never forget Gaither’s Mill,” she said lightly; but her words contained more warning than promise.

Mrs. Gaither blew her nose in her apron, unheeding. “I will claim you, Tancy,” she declared. By the time they said good-bye at the gate the following week, the woman had regained her old confidence. “I’ll have you back here yet,” she threatened.

Boy, I sure hope not, because given the historical reality Hurmence is playing off, there were certainly those people who wound up “staying on” with their former enslavers after the War, which is what Stud and his family end up doing: they actually leave but then go back.

Run, Tancy. Run far away.

Anyway, it’s not a perfect book, and there are plenty of elements in there to sour a prospective reader (language elements, various throwaway lines, and those not-impossible-but-still-weird character dynamics between Tancy and the Gaithers), but it was interesting and I didn’t hate it. Weird cover, though. It's like whoever designed the jacket didn't know when the book was set or something.

...OH HEY. Let me throw in this author's note from Hurmence, because it highlights an incredibly poignant and affecting story element involving one of the characters, Jemmy.

The idea for Tancy began among the pages of slave narratives, a voluminous folk history collected by the Library of Congress for a W.P.A. project of the 1930s. In that remarkable collection, a reader of the novel may discover the model for the character Jemmy, in a former slave's account of a harrowing separation:

"... his mammy was sold away from him when he was a little boy. He looked down the long lane after her just as long as he could see her, and cried after her. He went down to the big road and set down by his mammy's barefooted tracks in the sand and set there until it got dark, and then he come on back to the quarters."

The slave girl, Tancy, has no such counterpart within the narratives. She is meant to embody the innumerable ex-slaves who set out to find their families after the Civil War. Her yearning and searching parallel what many young people experience even today, looking for some ideal, or "mother," on the way to discovering themselves.