The writing style of this novel seems to be typical of the new writers coming out of Writers’ Workshops these days; generic. While the stories and settings are different, the overall style and tone of these new “serious” novels are the same. It’s as if they are all part of an upscale chain of restaurants. The formula seems to be: write prose that are better than average (but nothing too difficult, esoteric, lyrical or original), and write about a serious subject (war, slavery, Jim Crow laws) and you will get critical acclaim and sell a lot of books. After reading just a few pages in one of these books I know I am reading a book by an author that was part of a “workshop or writers group.”

Set in 1913 in rural Tennessee, this story is about two couples one white and one African-American. The African American couple, the Welles’, sharecrop on the farm owned by the white couple, the McNaughtons. Trouble brews when the John Welles abandons his wife and 4 children with nary a word and Alex McNaughton falls in love with Annalaura Welles, John’s wife.

While the story held my interest and attention, I did not find the characters all that believable. Alex McNaughton actually believes that his wife will have no problem bringing his black mistress and children into their house to live with them--Really? He is a Southern born and bred man who knows the order of things in the South at the time; not even he could be that obtuse or love-stricken to think this was going to fly. Most of the secondary characters are stereotypical white Southerners. Eula, John’s wife seems to be the most believable character, but she is really not a pivotal character. And I think the hardest thing to swallow is we are led to believe Annalaura is a smart woman, but with the last paragraph of the book I think we have to re-think that notion too.

Between the generic writing style and the less than believable characters I think this book is about 2 ½ stars. I also did not come away from reading this book feeling I had read something original or had any new insights.
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A tale of the Old South. Having lived with grandparents who were young in these years, I know the sentiments are true to the times. Females were as restricted and controlled by societal norms as told in the novel. ( )

The separation of blacks and white in the early 1900's are depicted through the lives of a married sharecropper family and the white farmer family they work for. Annalaura, the sharecropper's wife, is left without money or food for her children and faces being evicted from her ramshackle room (a loft at the top of the barn above the cows and pigs), since her husband is not around to harvest the tobacco from the fields. When the farmer, McNaughton, comes to see what progress has been made with in the fields, he finds Annalaura and her children working with no idea of when the husband, John, will return. McNaughton takes a shine to Annalaura and makes a deal to allow her to stay and to provide her with food and clothes for her children at a price.

Annalaura's life turns upside down while trying to balance her husband, the farmer, her four children, plus another one on the way. Annalaura's decisions change everyone’s' lives and shows that no one was truly benefiting from the drastic class level differences during this time period. ( )

Annalaura and John Welles are sharecroppers for Alex McNaughton in 1913 Montgomery County, Tennessee. John has abandoned Annalaura and the four children to seek money in Nashville; for John, the idea of getting out from under the white man’s oppressive ownership of his labor outweighs all other concerns. Annalaura and the children live in a corner of a drafty, broken-down barn; she can barely feed the kids, and fears she cannot bring in the tobacco crop by herself. Alex, worried about his profits, rides out one hot summer day to check on the fields. Alex is 43, and married to a plain woman, Eula Mae, in a passionless marriage. When Alex sees twenty-nine year old Laura with her skirts hitched up in the heat, he feels desire. It is considered acceptable in this time and place for white men to take up with black women if their men aren't around: “blackberry juice kept a man young. Every white man in Montgomery County knew that.”

The white women adjust; as Eula Mae’s sister-in-law tells her:

"If you complain that yo’ husband is cheatin’ on you with a nigger, then you’re telling everybody in all of Montgomery County that a colored woman is the same as you. That she’s as good as you. That she’s even better, because she’s got yo’ man. … White men ain’t supposed to love black women over us. My Lord, if we acted like that was true, there wouldn’t be no sense to this world.”

The black women must adjust as well; Annalaura's Aunt Becky spits out:

"If a Tennessee white man comes ridin’ along and spots an apple orchard and decides he wants him an apple, ain’t nothin’ that apple can do to make him pick a different one. .. A colored woman in Tennessee is just like that apple. Ain’t never been a brown-skinned woman who had any say over what a Tennessee white man can do with her body.”

Both white and black women are advised by their friends and relatives to suck it up. If a man is your husband,

"It’s up to you to lay in his bed, lumpy as it may be, let him do what he’s got to do, and act as happy as if you’d gotten your gold, heaven crown right now.”

When Alex comes back to see Annalaura, and unbuckles his pants, her attempts to protest (albeit in a subservient manner so as not to get beaten) don’t make any difference. But something else unexpected does. Alex falls in love with Annalaura.

The drama and tension that ensue when Eula Mae and John Welles get wind of what’s going on take over the remainder of the book. You won’t want to put it down until you discover how it all gets resolved.

Discussion: The status of Black Americans in 1913 that set the stage for the behavior of the characters in this book was actually worse in many areas of the country (particularly in the Deep South) than was the case in this book’s setting.

Race relations in the South had reached a new low in the first decade of the new century. Black men in the South were arrested on any pretense and imprisoned in work camps. In Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Slavery by Another Name, the author reports that:

"The horror of the mortality rates and living conditions was underscored by the triviality of the alleged offenses for which hundreds of men were being held.”

The arrest and conviction of these men for such crimes as cursing and vagrancy and even “cause not given” became a lucrative source of compensation for the law enforcement community, which started operating a trading network for the sale and distribution of blacks to be used as slave laborers. (The author notes that while the Civil War may have destroyed the South as a military threat, there was no opportunity for the white population to learn new attitudes about labor; they could not conceive of doing the worst jobs - such as dirty, dangerous mine work - themselves, nor could they conceive of blacks living amongst them as equals. Thus, they came up with creative solutions to restore the old order.)

By the end of the Union occupation of the South in 1877, Blackmon reports, "every formerly Confederate state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black prisoners into commercial hands. ... In return for what they paid each state, the companies received absolute control of the prisoners." He indicates that prisoners were "routinely starved and brutalized:

"The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed."

Black women were vulnerable in a different way; there was absolutely no recourse for them against sexual exploitation by white men. Sharecropper families were especially at risk because they could be accused of owing money to the landlord (legitimately or not) and then threatened with a prison camp if some sort of quid pro quo were not worked out: rape was considered an issue of entitlement.

So many blacks left for the North between 1910 and 1930, the movement was known as "The Great Migration."

The black characters in this book must be seen as actors in a system that left them few options for self-respect.

Evaluation: This book is one of four selected in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, the international contest co-sponsored by Amazon.com, CreateSpace and Penguin Group (USA) that seeks to discover the next popular novel. And what a wonderful effort from a first time author! Apparently the story is “loosely based” on the author’s family history. I thought the author took a chapter or two to work into her stride and feel comfortable, and after that, it was smooth sailing for both author and reader. I really liked this book, and look forward to more from this author – hopefully, a sequel! ( )

Page From a Tennessee Journal revolves around four people. Eula Mae has been married to Alex McNaughton for over twenty years. They have no children, a hole that she feels keenly. She loves her husband, but he hardly pays her any attention. She takes pride in anticipating all his needs and wants. But Eula Mae sometimes wishes that she could be more intimate with her husband; she just doesn't know how to apprise him of that fact without him thinking her too forward or, worse, a hussy.

Annalaura is a sharecropper on Alexander McNaughton's farm. Her husband, John, left some months ago without a word and now she is desperately trying to feed and clothe her four children on her own, with no money. She doesn't think John will ever return, and she is terrified that McNaughton will turn her out of her home if she doesn't bring in a good tobacco harvest. Sure enough, Alex McNaughton comes to check on her plot's progress, only to find it not performing up to par. He finds Annalaura attractive, though. Very much so. And so he brings her food to feed her children in exchange for spending the night with her. And then he keeps bringing gifts. And keeps spending the night.

Meanwhile, John Welles is in Nashville making as much money as he possibly can so that he can get his family its own farm. This is taking longer than he expects, though, and he is gone for well over a year. When he returns and sees the state of his family, everything begins to unravel. John and Alex must come to terms with their own feelings about their wives and their families, and Annalaura and Eula Mae must decide how to respond to a world that may very well turn on them.

I found both Annalaura and Eula Mae very easy to sympathize with. They were both victims of situations beyond their control, but they never pitied themselves. Each was so strong and dignified and so heartbreakingly realistic about things. In contrast to the women in this story, the men were very hard to sympathize with. I liked both of them, kind of. But I was mostly very ambivalent towards them both. John is charming and seems to believe he is doing what's best for his family (even if what's best for them is starvation for a year while he's off in Nashville). I only began to feel sympathy for the male characters towards the end of the book. Up until then, they both acted so selfishly (and even to the end, Alex seemed pretty delusional) that it was impossible for me to feel any empathy towards them. They never once wondered about how their actions would affect other people, least of all their wives, or what might happen in the future and how it might be dealt with. Alex, especially, was so unaware of the fact that Eula Mae might have feelings while being so concerned about everything having to do with Annalaura that I wanted to hit him. Multiple times. I wanted to hit John, too, but not as hard. The way that the men justify their behavior is painful to my feminist sensibilities.

I liked that Howard wrote this story within the constraints of societal norms without making her characters stereotypical. There wasn't the caricature white villain, or the victimized black woman. Everyone was fleshed out and believable. ( )