The premise tilts toward the preposterous: Take a story about sexual
orientation, gender identity, race and cultural oppression; mix in
religious hypocrisy and faith in equal measures. Then set the whole
thing in the antebellum South. Disaster should loom. But in Robert
Sheeley’s Rainbow Plantation Blues, it doesn’t. Sheeley, a
graduate of Geneva High School who is “self-educated in history and
politics,” spins a compelling, sincere story of reconciling one’s inner
self with one’s outer environment.
Jonathan Thomas returns from a Northern education to his degenerate
dying father, seemingly fragile mother and a plantation whose success
was nourished by the blood and sweat of slaves. He carries within him
questions about the institution of slavery and his undeniable
attraction to men. Filled with self-loathing, Jonathan maintains a
brilliant, brittle façade of the young entitled plantation heir,
courting his mother’s choice of fiancée, attending a fashionable
church featuring a charismatic, fiery preacher and visiting relatives
in gracious Charleston. He also is swamped with desire for his
childhood friend and slave Kumi, intellectually fascinated by the
freethinking atheist Stephen Wentworth, wracked with guilt about his
impending marriage and prone to delicious bouts of
masturbation.
The novel follows the unraveling of not only Jonathan’s mask, but of
nearly every character. As truth reveals itself, it causes confusion
among family members, an intimate circle of friends and the larger
community. Says Jonathan to Stephen, “So often I feel overwhelmed, and
I know not where to begin. I constantly feel on the edge of madness.”
And Stephen’s response: “Begin with yourself. Understand
yourself.”
This self-actualized, 21st-century response may sound ridiculously
anachronistic. Much of the book blends 19th-century appearances with
contemporary thoughts and realizations. The book’s women push the tidy
envelope of Victorian behavior as they scream at brothers and husbands,
kiss unmarried men and follow their own sexual desires.
Despite these incongruities, the novel succeeds, deftly weaving
flashbacks and musings into the action of the narrative. The layered
plot, complex characters and absolute sincerity of Jonathan’s attempt
to understand himself and his place in the world fulfill expectations
and push the non-period language into the background. The story trumps
the telling.
According to an interview on Sheeley’s website, robertlsheeley.com, this is the point.
“Well, there are no love stories, at least none that I know of, between
LGBT people from pre-Civil War, 19th-century American literature, only
sodomy-lawbreaker and dress-code-violator sketches. So I had to invent
my own (our own) story. I chose the antebellum South and the
love between a black-male slave and a white-male master because it sets
up the seemingly most insurmountable situation of them all.”
Rainbow Plantation Blues is a self-published novel —
what was once smirkingly termed a vanity publication, implying that the
need to write one’s story was nothing more than an empty conceit. Not
any more. The growing strength of subsidy publishers like iUniverse and
Booksurge, coupled with the distribution potential of the Internet, has
changed what is available to buy and read. This bottom-up,
voice-of-the-people business model, in theory, allows more stories to
be told to a wider audience — or at least larger target
markets— unshackled by the chains of traditional publishing
houses.
So let freedom ring.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2009.