Belle

Belle is the mixed-race daughter of the Virginia plantation master and an enslaved woman in Kathleen Grissom's historical novel The Kitchen House — a young woman who occupies the most precarious possible position in a slave society: too white to be safely enslaved, too Black to be safe in white society, educated and cared for by her father in ways that create expectations she has no legitimate means of fulfilling. Grissom follows Belle across the novel's span as she navigates a world that has made no provision for her existence.

Belle's relationship with Lavinia, the Irish indentured servant girl raised in the kitchen house, is one of the novel's most carefully rendered bonds — two people whose circumstances have placed them outside the rigid categories of plantation society, whose friendship is both genuine and complicated by the racial dynamics that neither of them fully controls. Belle's wisdom and her ability to read situations that others miss give her a kind of informal authority in the domestic spaces of the plantation.

Grissom writes Belle with the historical specificity that the character requires — the particular legal and social position of mixed-race people in early nineteenth-century Virginia, and the specific dangers and possibilities it created, are rendered with research depth and genuine compassion.

Begin with The Kitchen House (2010).