The Longest Memory

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Longest Memory threatens to shatter the spare control of d'Aguiar's language. He exercises great poetic strength in thirteen short chapters, stretching his words taut over the darkness of his story and coaxing out the memory of pain. An old and loyal slave has tried to convince his only son of the wisdom of accepting life as a slave; the son runs away, and the father, in an attempt to save his life, tells the plantation owner which way he has gone, in exchange for a promise of leniency. The son is dragged back in chains and, in front of his father and the rest of the slaves, is beaten slowly to death. The old man describes the deadening of his senses as he watches his son die, and then leaves the story to a cast of other characters, each of whom opens another vista onto this boy's death. In a scene of almost Shakespearean rambunctiousness, the plantation owner struggles for his humanity as he is teased by a room full of fellow slave-owners for having propounded leniency and then ...

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the north where he will write verses for a living, verses for all occasions. Memory and love and language all come together to lift these two far beyond their dehumanizing world, if only for the briefest of moments in this generations-long story.

And the main tensions in this story are between the generations rather than between black and white. In the meditation on memory that opens and closes the book, the old slave says, "The master is daylight, the slave is night. A complete day needs both light and dark. The day cannot be broken in two to leave each half to itself. Nor can the master hope to rule the day and the night along with it forever. Slavery is the long day of the master ...

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