Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant

Michelle Cliff urges us to turn our eyes and ears away from "John Brown's Body," that famous Union marching song of the Civil War ("John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave..."), and calls on us to attend to the bodies and voices of the women working with John Brown in the militant US abolitionist movement. When John Brown was hung after the failed raid on Harpers Ferry, a note from Mary Ellen Pleasant was in his pocket. She was on the road carrying money and munitions, and she made it North when she heard the news of the early start and the quick failure. In Free Enterprise, Michelle Cliff gives us a full picture of Mary Ellen Pleasant's life through the prism of her unacknowledged involvement with the Bleeding Kansas plot. Cliff, through Pleasant's attendance at key events of the day, engages us with the differences among abolitionists, their histories rooted in different sites: Mary Ellen Pleasant is a black woman born in North America, Annie is a black woman born in Jamaica who comes to North America, Alice Hooper is a wealthy white woman from the north, and her cousin (and possible lover), Clover Adams, shares her background. Following Mary Ellen's course, we map the tensions and possibilities created by interactions between these women. This book will have you looking up these names and others (like Leo Frank, Zong, ...) to re-read your history. Let Cliff educate you! Michelle Cliff is an amazing novelist and poet, and her partner is the famous feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich. MonkeyWrench now has this book in the 2004 City Lights edition, created by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, proprietor of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and supporter of the beat poets. So the book itself takes part in a literary-revolutionary history. Come and read it!