MANUELA BLAYNE…A LIFE APART

Cheatham relates the story of a troubled teenager in this fourth installment of a historical-fiction series.

It’s 1910, and 11-year-old Trudy Cameron is enjoying her life. Since her mother, Zoe, married Sam Benton, she now has two extra siblings, including younger stepsister Bailey. The two White girls spend their days doing fun activities, which include catching frogs and building houses for them out of sand. Trudy is intrigued by their Black neighbors, the Blaynes, including Nettie, a woman who has troubling seizures that cause her to wander off. The girls are fascinated by Nettie’s 13-year-old granddaughter, Manuela, when she becomes part of the Blayne household even though Trudy’s brother, Will Cameron, mysteriously warns them to stay away from her. The girls befriend Manuela, nonetheless, and attempt to catch her up on what they’re studying in school. Manuela strongly dislikes Old Man Aaron, the Whitecotton farmer who employs her family as pickers, but Trudy doesn’t understand why; after all, he’s always nice to Trudy and her siblings. Then Manuela is mysteriously attacked and injured; later, the girls see her in town, crouched in an alley with her hair cut short. What exactly is she going through? The brutal truth,when Trudy learns it, will change her perspective on her world. Cheatham’s prose, as narrated by Trudy, is textured and finely tuned to the time period and setting: “When Sunday came, all of us Camerons and Bentons, dressed in our second-best Sunday clothes, loaded into the Model T and motored down the dirt highway toward Hot Coffee. Papa Sam turned onto a bumpy road, no wider than a cow’s trail, to Antioch Church.” The inherent tension between Trudy’s cheery worldview and Manuela’s family’s troubled lives makes for a compelling read. However, many readers will likely guess the secret at the heart of the tale. Also, the fact that Manuela’s story is filtered through Trudy’s perspective feels antiquated and slightly exploitative, as the Black girl’s unvoiced suffering is presented, in part, as a learning experience for the White protagonist. Still, the book does succeed in demonstrating the girls’ starkly different life experiences.

An imperfect but sometimes-stirring tragedy.