Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part three. Payback Time!

When Odysseus returned to his mansion on the island of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey, he found it besieged by the leading men of Ithaca, each of whom wanted Penelope to choose him as her husband. Penelope, besides being disgusted by them, still believed Odysseus would return. Then he did. Then what? Just what you would expect from a two-thousand year old story: Odysseus kills all of the men and reunites with Penelope.And this is what happens in Stan Rice’s novel Plantation Odyssey as well.

 

The local plantation owners (or former owners, as the Union army had displaced them) who lived around the plantation where Penelope (Penny) and Ulysses had been slaves insisted that Penny would choose one of them as her husband and therefore as the owner of the estate. They thought she would choose the one with the best barbecue. Then Ulysses returns disguised as her former servant Minerva (Minnie). It is so difficult for Ulysses to keep his disguise as Minnie a secret. Minnie just happens to know as much botany as the lost Ulysses did. S/he and Penny put poisonous mushrooms in the barbecue. While the men are sick from toadstool poison, Minnie (who has turned back into Ulysses) kills all of them, including the one decent white man, whom they offered a chance to live but he stayed with his social peers.

Rice’s motivation in this short novel is very clear. He is fantasizing about payback for oppression. Rice is not Black, but (as indicated by his science book Forgotten Landscapes, he is Cherokee, and his science book reflects a clear anger at what whites have done to Native Americans. He apparently identifies with Blacks as well in this novel.

Rice seems to encourage people of color to be resentful of whites. While some readers might think this is not helpful, in this time in which racial tensions are flaring, I agree with the author that the resentment of people of color against white suppression throughout history and even today is justified and has a place in modern literature. We need to hold the white race accountable for what we have done in the past. Donald Trump’s blasts against Juneteenth and Harriet Tubman show that conservatives would still like to suppress white America’s admission of slavery in our history.

I very much doubt that Rice’s novel, even though it celebrates violence against slave owners in the Civil War, will lead to any violence, or even protests, on the part of Blacks which would not have occurred anyway.

Plantation Odyssey, A Short Novel by Stan Rice, part two. Timeless Adventures

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy.

But Plantation Odyssey is closely modeled after Homer’s Odyssey. If you know nothing about Homer’s epic poem, you will be lost in reading this novel. Here is a parallel list of the events in the original and new Odyssey.

• As the Greek Odysseus went home, he first fell among the drug-addled Lotus Eaters. The slave Ulysses stayed with a dirty man who ate only cattails from a swamp.
• Both Odysseus and Ulysses encountered a Cyclops, a monster with one eye, who raised sheep and ate humans.
• Odysseus encountered the enchantingly beautiful Circe, beloved of birds and animals. Ulysses encountered Sissy and romped with her on her bed of moss. Rice combines Circe with the country song Wolverton Mountain.
• Odysseus visits hell, where he talks with dead heroes including Achilles. He has to offer them a bowl of blood before they will talk. Ulysses the slave visits hell, which is a gigantic fleshpot of endless struggle, where he meets his former owners who are now dead. After Ulysses offers them whiskey (which would you rather have, whiskey or blood?), they tell him how to find the path back to the plantation.
• Both Odysseus and Ulysses are trapped by a sex goddess named Calypso until they convince her they are serious about going home to their old wives.
• Odysseus is enchanted by the irresistible singing of the Sirens, then is shipwrecked, and rescued by women, including Nausicäa. Ulysses hears the beautiful singing of a chorus of Cherokees hidden in a swamp.
• Odysseus and Ulysses are both transformed into forms that can be recognized only by close observation: Odysseus into an old man and Ulysses into a Black woman.

In the next essay, what happens when Ulysses returns to the plantation!

Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part one

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy. So many depressing things can be and have been written about slavery. But Rice’s novel is very specific: slavery prevented slaves, as humans, from using their talents, even to the benefit of their owners. This is a theme that frequently shows up, as in Horse and March, in novels by Geraldine Brooks.

 

In exploring this theme, Rice is able to use a lot of humor. The delightful framework is about Frank Hicks, a white man, and Alberta Hicks (Bert; a black woman) who were lovers in rural Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, a time and place where interracial love was kept secret when it happened at all.

The main character in Plantation Odyssey is a slave, Ulysses, who was very smart, and trained himself to be a botanist (an image inspired, no doubt, by George Washington Carver, who lived later). Ulysses got a lot of help from the old white woman who owned the plantation, something that perhaps never actually happened. She wants Ulysses to use his botanical knowledge to increase yields on the plantation. Penelope is also a slave on the plantation, but she is seven-eighths white. Of course, she and Ulysses fall in love.

But the Heir Apparent (the old woman’s son) is not at all pleased that his mother has chosen Penelope, not his own white daughter, to inherit the plantation. But Penelope is also his daughter. But because she has a drop of black blood, she is ineligible to be an heiress in the Old South. The Heir Apparent plans to not only kill Penelope and Ulysses but even his own wayward brother, who has connections to the North. The Heir Apparent kidnapped Penelope as she fled with Ulysses. Ulysses escaped to the North to work with the very real, abolitionist Harvard botanist Asa Gray.

For a young Black botanist in the middle of the nineteenth century, there could hardly be anything better than working with Asa Gray. But, like Odysseus (Ulysses) in Homer’s Odyssey after winning the Trojan War, there was no place like home. He wanted to go back to his loving wife named, of course, Penelope. I would not recommend reading this novel if you have no idea what happens in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. Also, please don’t get it mixed up with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both Ulysseses want to go home even though both Penelopes were getting old and both Ulysseses had almost boundless sexual opportunities by not going home. What a story! No wonder it has persisted two thousand years! Epic stories have contributed to the social evolution of our species; humanity is inconceivable without them.

In the next essay, I will tell about how the slave Ulysses, just like the Greek hero Odysseus, encountered an enchanted path of danger and promise as they went home.

Greek Mythology: Pretty Depressing, Most of It

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, committed violent and senseless acts. The king of the gods, Zeus, went around raping women, and his jealous wife Hera went around afflicting the women. Apollo, the god of Truth, was a liar. In addition to this, he loved a human woman, Coronis, but she didn’t like him, so he had her killed. And it goes downhill from there.

The human heroes, as well as the demigods, were also far from being models of behavior. Hercules, for example, was a total jerk except when he was depressed. One time he went crazy and killed his family. Then he felt such intense remorse that he forced his famous Labors upon himself. The Greek king Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy. Even after reading about it, I could not understand why Medea killed her children.

Punishments, meted by the gods upon demigods or humans, seemed random. Some, like Tantalus, deserved the eternal torture that they received in Hades. (In his case, he was eternally hungry, and fruit hung right before his mouth but moved away whenever he reached for it, forever, and he was eternally thirsty, and water came right up to his mouth, but flowed away when he tried to drink it, forever.) I think Tantalus was one of the guys who killed his children. There were a lot of those. But Sisyphus was condemned to roll the stone uphill forever from a minor infraction. The Danaïds had to carry water, forever and forever and forever, in jars with holes in them, then refill them, for reasons that were not clear to me even when I read about them. And poor Oedipus. It was apparently the whim of the gods that condemned him to kill his father and marry his mother, and not realize he was doing it. The mother of Tithonis asked that he receive eternal life. The gods granted it. But she forgot to ask for him to remain young. So, he lived forever, just getting older and older and older. He must be a pile of flesh somewhere even today; if you step in a pile of goo, it might be him. Helen was immortal unless someone killed her.

The logical Greek view of the universe, as written by philosophers, came after a long history in which people thought of themselves as part of a universe that made no sense, and could never make sense. I can imagine living in a world of Aristotle, where effects follow causes, but I cannot imagine living in the world of Homer. The gods were just like humans, some good, some bad, most of them alternately and unpredictably both. The only difference is that they were powerful and immortal. How can you even get up in the morning if you believe the world is unpredictable?

The Romans were so unimaginative that they took the whole load of Greek mythology and adopted it as their own, just changing some names, like Zeus into Jupiter, Chronos into Saturn, Hephaestus into Vulcan, etc.

There were some bright spots. You will find them in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, there was one brief moment of humanity, in which Achilles returned the body of Hector to Hector’s grieving father, Priam the king of Troy. And the Odyssey is stirring because, despite the stupidity of fate, Odysseus (Ulysses) never gave up his quest to return home to Ithaca and to his wife Penelope, now two decades older. Some consider the Odyssey the first, and possibly the greatest, novel ever written.

Another bright spot is that the Greeks did not yet have our modern sense of racism. Andromeda, one of the beautiful princesses rescued from sea monsters, was Ethiopian.

Against the background of randomness, the priests of the gods (especially at the oracles) could pretty much make up whatever they wanted and claim that it was the will of their particular god. The priests of Zeus would listen to the susurrus of the wind in the oak leaves to discern the god’s will. However much I love the wind in the trees, I think these priests were just making shit up.

The only thing worse than Greek mythology was Norse mythology, which was just as grim, but the gods, rather than being immortal, had to eventually die in the Götterdämmerung.

So, dear students, if you have to study Greek mythology, be prepared for some grim and tiresome stuff, except for an occasional beam of light that will enter your mind the way Zeus entered through a tiny slit into the dome where the human woman Danae dwelt.