i can’t wait to teach this in class! i read two others novels by cliff, abeng and no telephone to heaven, and at the time i found them both too challenging to be satisfying (i’ll try ‘em again, especially the latter). free enterprise is about the slave trade and abolitionism, and it focuses in particular on the life of mary ellen pleasant, a free born african american who lent lots of energy and money to the abolitionist cause. pleasant was a wealthy hotel owner in san francisco, and lived her life with a sense of entitlement that inspires. at least this is the way she’s portrayed in free enterprise. she is cool and tough and totally no nonsense. she’s also portrayed as butch, which is cool. (i already knew about MEP because my friend lynn hudson wrote a very good book on her).

when john brown was captured there was a note from MEP in his pocket.

one strong theme of this book is the amnesiac quality of history, in particular the fact that while john brown the-white-man ended up mythologized, mary ellen pleasant the-black-woman was all but forgotten. in enterprise, pleasant doesn’t hide her bitterness about this erasure, and neither does cliff, who peoples her book with other “forgotten” women, annie christmas, a jamaican gens inconnue, and alice and clover cooper, two white americans. there is much wordplay in enterprise, and i cannot begin to unfold the historical and popular resonances of these fictional characters without some research. but clover and annie are beautiful characters, very much alive and, also, very much hurt by the marginalization that is forced upon them.

this is not an easy novel. it is written in fragments and skips from one character to the next and back and forth in time. cliff writes in a lyrical and condensed way, and some of these chapters read like terse, somewhat experimental prose poems. but the storylines are ultimately not difficult to follow, and the fate of mary ellen, annie, alice, and clover is brought to the page with great poignancy and emotional impact.

i loved reading this. it’s a short book, but it stays with you. you want to read it slowly, sink into cliff’s expert, tightly controlled, effortless-looking writing, enjoy the beauty of her language and the passion of her feelings. it is a book with a number of intellectual challenges, too: what does capitalism hold in store for the free african american? what is the significance of history? what is the meaning of a life dedicated to a lost cause? what makes the ex-slave truly free? how can the wounds of the past be healed? are there injuries that are simply too deep ever to scar over? can women and men validate each other or are they put at irreconcilable odds by history and birth?

i highly recommend this neglected jewel.