“It would take months to unpack this foreign land…”
Balm, the second novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, interweaves the stories of Sadie, Madge, and Hemp, travelers who have made their solitary way to Chicago from their homes—and the lives they are trying to escape—in the post-Civil War South.
Sadie, not entirely disappointed to have been widowed as a bride, discovers in her departed husband’s home both the restless spirit of a Union soldier killed at Shiloh and her own ability to communicate with the dead. Madge, a freewoman and healer neglected as a child, discovers in Sadie a restless woman in need of a cure that goes beyond herbs. Hemp, a freed slave searching for the wife who had been taken from him years before, in chains, discovers in Madge the possibility of solace. But before any of them can fully unpack themselves in this foreign land, they must unravel—and reconcile—the past.
Perkins-Valdez, whose award-winning debut novel, Wench, explored the lives of four slave women who are their masters’ mistresses, understands the power of understatement. Able to juxtapose dominion and hatred with submission and defeat in a single gesture—the master's wife placing a cracker on the tongue of his mistress, who is chained to the porch—Perkins-Valdez writes with the kind of subtlety and precision that bring the reader fully and inescapably into the story and make that reader ache for characters who long ago lost the ability to ache for themselves.
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