price of a child

Joseph Coppola
“The Price of a Child”
Dear Lorene Cary,
As I began reading “The Price of a Child”, I did not know what to expect. The title of the book certainly makes you think a little bit, and there can be so many different interpretations of this title that I could not settle on one until I read the book and found out for myself. Before I started reading, I had expectations of yet another boring slave novel which would just tell how the main character planned and executed their attempts at freedom, but once again that title kept me on my heels. Why would any normal runaway slave leave behind one of her children? It just didn’t make sense to me until I got through the first chapter.
Unlike most slave narratives where the slave has to escape to freedom, “The Price of a Child” gave a different outlook on escaping when Ginnie and two of her three children just walk right away from their master without any struggle at all. But the fact that Bennie was left behind put many different thoughts into my head as to what might happen to him. Also, most books about slaves stress the actual escaping as the main focus of the book, but in this novel, the main character gets her freedom within the first few chapters and then focuses on developing a new life as a free woman in the northern states. The traditional name change and hiding is typical for all slave narratives, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when Ginnie changed her name to Mercer and lived in a shed for a while. But all in all, I think the plot of the story was much different and much more effective than most other books of this sort.
The most confusing part about this novel is that the title of the book is so heavily based on Bennie, that I would have expected him to play much more of a major role in the book. He really is only mention mostly in the beginning while the setting is still in the southern plantations, and is not heard from again until the very end of the book. If I had to change one element about this book, this would probably be the only thing I would want to alter. I think that if throughout the novel the reader is looking for an explanation to what the “price” of the child is, then the child should have a very major role in the book and not just mentioned in the beginning and then briefly again at the end.
In conclusion, I think that this novel is different from most and takes some unusual twists and turns that divert it from the other slave narratives that I have previously read. With a few changes and different decisions by the main character, I think that this novel could be taken to a whole new level and remembered as one of the best of its kind.
Sincerely,
Joseph Coppola