55 pages • 1 hour read
Eleanor ShearerRiver Sing Me Home
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Authorial Context: Shearer’s Novel as Modern Resistance
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses abuse of enslaved people.
Eleanor Shearer’s inspiration for River Sing Me Home originates from a historical exhibit. The Windrush Foundation’s Making Freedom exhibit, which marked the 175th anniversary of full Emancipation in the Caribbean, had a huge impact on her as a teenager. Through the exhibit, Shearer connected with the stories of enslaved people seizing liberation, particularly the tales of formerly enslaved women searching for their missing children post-Emancipation. It is through learning about these women’s actions, Shearer writes, that she found “the seeds” for River Sing Me Home (Shearer, Eleanor. “For Me and My White-Passing Family Members, Our Heritage Has a Complicated Legacy.” Good Housekeeping, 2023).
The broader direction for her novel came to her while conducting fieldwork in Saint Lucia and Barbados. When speaking to people on the islands about slavery’s impact on the areas’ culture(s), she noticed a gap between how the UK and Caribbean discussed slavery (Polk, Shelbi. “River Sing Me Home and the Lengths a Mother Will Go for Her Children.” Shondaland, 2023).
Shearer espouses the power of writing for those whose heritages are impacted by colonial racialization. She says that that writing provided an additional way for her to get “closer to her roots” (“The Lengths a Mother Will Go for Her Children”). As the granddaughter of Windrush Generation immigrants—Caribbean immigrants who immigrated to the UK between the late 1940s and early 1970s to alleviate the union’s post–World War II labor woes—the act of writing the novel is a contemporary form of resistance to the legacy of the British Empire.
This legacy can be found in how the boundaries of whiteness and Blackness are construed. As a writer who identifies as “mixed race” despite passing as white, Shearer sees this identity as both a celebration of her Caribbean heritage as well as a rebuttal to Blackness as suffering. Moreover, by embracing a “mixed race” identity, Shearer mirrors the complexity of the Caribbean population now and as it was in previous generations.
This reflection can be found in Rachel whom Shearer describes as a composition of all the Black women she knew in her life (“The Lengths a Mother Will Go for Her Children”). By connecting with her protagonist in this way, Shearer transfers the novel’s central theme, The Connection Between All Things, off the page. Rachel’s tale of loss and reconnection epitomizes The Power of Memory within the African diaspora.
Socio-Historical Context: The Ambiguities of Caribbean Emancipation
August 1, 1834, marked the end of slavery in the British Empire, with the exception of territories possessed by the East India Company, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Saint Helena. The day arrived a little more than a year after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 passed. Though celebrated today as Emancipation Day in Anglophone (English-speaking) Caribbean countries, August 1, 1834, was the day that many enslaved people in the British-colonized Caribbean entered into a period of social, psychological, and physical uncertainty. To compensate for planters’ loss of income once slavery ended, British Parliament introduced the apprenticeship system, which officially ended in 1838. The apprenticeship system worked as a mediator between slavery and full emancipation. It “[prevented] any social disturbance at the time of abolition, and may have helped in maintaining the same level of production” (Latimer, James. “The Apprenticeship System in the British West Indies.” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1964), 52).
Colonial authorities created laws that were designed to protect apprentices from cruelty from their former enslavers as well as guarantee labor for planters; however, these laws did not alleviate the concerns of either apprentices or planters. Apprentices saw apprenticeship as yet another method of dehumanization. Planters, on the other hand, were put off by the system because of fears that apprenticeships would impact the production of economically important crops like sugar.
Apprentices worked 45 hours a week without pay for the same individual who had enslaved them. Any work done beyond this time stipulation was supposed to be compensated; however, apprentices were not allowed to ask for better pay. The system also considered the differences in skill between enslaved people, factoring in the type of labor that they did as well as their age. Fieldhands, who were enslaved people who worked in agriculture, would be made to apprentice for six years, whereas those who worked in the house were made to work for four. Children under six years old at the time of the Act’s enforcement were automatically freed. On paper, planters could not use whippings as physical punishment; however, they did create laws within their respective localities that privileged their status as former enslavers. Such laws included “vagrancy laws” which criminalized the ability for apprentices to move from place to place, in order to control them. Vagrancy acts helped authorities to “control work supply, supervise the population, prevent the use of ‘non-conformist culture’ such as Obeah […] [and] to force freed people to work in colonies relying mostly on an agricultural economy” (Pluskota, Marion. “Freedom of Movement, Access to the Urban Centres, and Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean.” International Review of Social History, vol. 65 (2020), 94). Due to these and other social and legal stipulations imposed by the apprenticeship system, apprentices saw the change as slavery by another name.
In River Sing Me Home, Shearer uses the socio-historical context of the apprenticeship system to explore freedom, identity, and memory.
