The Last Runaway

Corn, as an American crop, illustrates both Honor’s happiness and her dissatisfaction with her life in America. She intermittently sees corn as an overwhelming flavor in American cuisine, lamenting how its sweetness infiltrates all dishes and experiencing delight at its various possibilities for consumption. Honor’s experience of corn parallels her experience of Jack’s courtship and, later, his husbandly affection. Her first flirtation with Jack arises when he gives her ears of the first corn of summer, which Honor finds delightful and delicious; she similarly enjoys Jack’s attention on her as she eats the treat that he has provided. After they are married, Jack similarly delights in presenting Honor with popcorn for the first time. He makes her the snack several nights in a row, despite his mother’s disapproval. Honor, again, finds Jack’s attention (particularly when it risks his mother’s ire) to be as pleasing as the food itself.

In the novel’s climax, corn also emerges as an emblem of safety; Honor and Virginie hide from Donovan and Jack in a cornfield. Here, it is the Americanness of the hiding women that comes into play. When Honor starts to enter the cornfield, she worries only about the rustling of the stalks as something that can draw attention. Virginie, however, cautions that they must not break stalks, either, as this will leave a path indicating their whereabouts. This knowledge presents Virginie as both more accomplished at hiding (a necessary skill for a woman who has, more than once, escaped enslavement) and as more knowledgeable about America. This latter presentation offers a political argument in a novel in which various characters espouse “colonization” as a solution to the “slavery problem”: Virginie (and, by extension, all other Black people, enslaved or not) are Americans.