Sunday Salon: Receive Me Falling by Erica Robuck

Nevis Island.
February 1831

The slave woman fell over the cliff's edge toward the black swirl of water that churned over the boulders reaching from the sea.

Title: Receive Me Falling
Author: Erica Robuck
ISBN: 9780982229804
Publisher: Elysian Field Press/2009
Page: 266

Meghan Owen is engaged to be married. When her parents die in an accident on the night of her engage party, she calls of her wedding. Going through her father's papers, she finds, she has inherited land in Nevis. She leaves her job to travel there. When she reaches the old plantation House, Eden, she finds letter and papers and an ominous presence of dark secrets. She has to get into the bottom of it and also find out how she is involved in all this.

She learns about the Dall family who had leaved there in the 19th century. Just at that moment the British abolitionists had arrived to free the slaves. The daughter of the plantation owner Catherine Dall, is tormented between her sense of fairness and her family. She loves and cares for the slaves in her plantation. However, she can't escape her destiny. When Catherine discovers some unpleasant truth about her slave, leah, she gets maddeningly angry and tragic strikes in the form of Leah's death. Was it suicide, or was it murder?

Meg too finds that the land that she owns is tainted with the stigma of slavery and stolen money. It falls on Meg to find the secrets and let the ghosts rest forever. She has to balance her present with the historic events that took place so much before her time.

With alternate chapters, the present and past somehow merge and Meg has the big task of bringing justice to the ghosts of the past. With simplistic writing about the complex issue of slavery, Robuck has written a good readable nobel. The secondary characters too are very well etched out. Yes, there is so much sadness. No slave stoy can ever be happy. And every slave story needs to be told. Maybe that way we might be able to learn something from the past.

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