This Here Is Love

Set in the Virginia Colony from the 1690s to roughly 1710, the novel follows several intertwined families, Black and white, whose fates are shaped by the emerging institution of chattel slavery.

The story opens with Cassie, an enslaved African woman at Willow Oaks Plantation, who was stolen from her West African village as a child. All of Cassie's other children have been sold; her daughter Bless is the only one left. When the mistress claims Bless as a personal servant for her daughter Rebecca, breaking the master's promise that Cassie could keep her last child, Bless recognizes her mother's powerlessness and voluntarily takes the mistress's hand. Cassie's grief curdles into bitterness, and over the years that follow, she withdraws her tenderness from the daughter she still loves.

In a parallel storyline set in 1691, the Dane family boards The Venture bound for Virginia. Rowan Dane, his pregnant wife Lydia, and their eight-year-old son Jack are destitute Scots-Irish peasants, descendants of English and Scottish settlers displaced to Northern Ireland. They sign an indenture contract promising years of labor in exchange for passage. Conditions in the cargo hold are brutal. Lydia dies in childbirth during a storm, and Jack takes full care of his newborn sister until Rowan sells the baby to a wealthy merchant whose own infant has died. Jack's trust in his father is permanently shattered.

On Virginia's Eastern Shore, Andrew Cabarrus, a free Black planter, struggles to buy his enslaved wife Phoebe and their five children from their owner, Othman Scarborough. Scarborough demands Andrew's most valuable farmland as payment. Andrew refuses, knowing the land is his children's only future. Under the colonial law of partus sequitur ventrem, a child's legal status follows the mother's, meaning all of Andrew's children are enslaved because Phoebe is. Andrew secretly takes his eldest son David to the family farm at night, telling him, "You the son of a free man. You belong to yourself" (21). When Andrew continues to refuse Scarborough's terms, the planter class conspires to jail him on fabricated charges. His crop is destroyed. Phoebe and the children are seized, auctioned, and scattered across the colony as Andrew is outbid for every family member.

At Willow Oaks, Bless grows up under escalating abuse. She endures the groping of the master's son Dalton and the false kindness of Jason, Rebecca's fiancé, who rapes her in a cellar. Banished to the fields, Bless meets Jeremiah, a young enslaved man who teaches her to survive and to trust. Jeremiah carries knowledge of a maroon community, a settlement of fugitives living free in the Great Dismal Swamp. Each scar on his body from previous escape attempts maps a landmark on the route to freedom. He and Bless fall in love, and she asks him to carve the map into her thigh so she can follow if they are separated. When the overseer Rove assaults Bless, she kills him with a hoe. Jeremiah takes the blame and flees to the swamp. Bless is whipped and sold. Cassie, knowing her daughter is gone forever, hangs herself above the master's dining table on Christmas.

Jack's parallel journey traces a moral descent. After Rowan dies, the farm's owner Thomas Crewe adopts Jack and trains him as a slaveholder, teaching him to inspect enslaved people at market and then forcing twelve-year-old Jack to whip Adam, a newly purchased enslaved boy. On Crewe's farm, Jack forms a bond with Shango, an indentured Kalabari African who teaches the family survival skills. When Shango discovers that no indenture contract exists and that he has been enslaved for life, he fights back. Jack throws scalding cornmeal mush on Shango to bring him down. By adulthood, Jack takes the Crewe name, inherits the farm, and transforms it into a way station servicing the domestic slave trade. He purchases David Cabarrus and proposes a breeding scheme: David will be the "rootstock" for a line of enslaved people raised from birth to accept servitude. David, exhausted by years of being sold, agrees.

Crewe buys Bless from a coffle, a chained group of enslaved people marched for sale, as a mate for David. They are forcibly married. David discovers Bless is already pregnant, likely by Jason or Rove, and keeps the secret. Bless deliberately steps into the path of a charging ox, causing a stillbirth. The midwife, Patience Basnight, secretly provides her with contraceptive herbs. Over time, David and Bless develop genuine affection, though Bless continues drinking the tea after each coupling, preventing the pregnancy Crewe demands.

Andrew rebuilds his life on the frontier with a store and eventually reunites with Phoebe. He sends Bill, his factor (purchasing agent), to find and buy David. Bill poses as a horse buyer at the smithy. That night, David meets Andrew at the baby's grave, and father and son reunite. David refuses to leave because of his commitment to Bless, but Bless reveals her deception with the tea, telling him, "You are not a man to do awful things, David" (281). She will never be sorry she prevented a child from being born into slavery. Bill completes the purchase, and David rides away to rejoin his family.

After David's departure, Bless initiates sex with Crewe as an act of self-destruction. She gives birth to Lydia, a blue-eyed girl whose eyes recall those of Crewe's dead mother and bartered sister. Bless bonds fiercely with the infant, resolving not to withdraw from her daughter as Cassie withdrew from her.

Years pass. John Jeffrey, a slave trader who partners with Crewe, delivers Jonah, Nora, and their children to the farm as new breeding stock. Jeffrey promises Nora freedom in exchange for eight live births, a promise he is under no obligation to keep. Lydia grows up alongside Kelsey, Jonah's eldest son. When Kelsey tells Lydia she is a slave, she confronts Crewe directly. He answers honestly: Yes, she is a slave, and yes, he is a bad man. Lydia refuses to take his hand and walks out on her own.

Jeffrey dies of syphilis. His son Ethan, a boy Crewe once comforted who has since hardened into a ruthless trader, wants to buy Lydia and sell her to a "fancy girl" establishment in Charleston, a house where light-skinned enslaved women are groomed for sexual exploitation. Crewe refuses, but Ethan produces his father's ledger of compounded debts, revealing that Crewe owes an enormous sum. Ethan frames the choice: "Give up slavery or give up the slave" (359).

Crewe agonizes through the night. Before dawn, he loads money, supplies, and manumission papers (legal documents granting freedom) onto his horse and knocks on Bless's cabin door. Bless reads his face and understands. She thrusts Lydia into Crewe's arms and shoves them toward the door. Kneeling on the cabin floor, clutching the corn-husk doll she made for Lydia, Bless thinks, "This here is love" (363). Crewe takes Lydia and Kelsey to a backcountry settlement in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where people of mixed backgrounds live without slavery, and raises them as brother and sister.

Ethan sells the remaining enslaved people on the farm. Bless, chained in a coffle, marches south. Days into the trek, a burning in her thigh draws her attention to the scars Jeremiah carved years ago. She recognizes the landmarks: hard-packed clay underfoot, jessamine vines tangled in the pines. Her sorrow shifts, and Bless turns toward the Great Dismal Swamp: "Still, Bless was freedom bound" (367).