Karen Jennings’s novel is set in 1838 in the week before the full emancipation of slaves in the Cape Colony, South Africa. “Come the first of December the chains will be broken for good,” proclaims a preacher on a crate by the sea. For four years, the enslaved had been reclassified as apprentices: “they were clearly too savage to be allowed freedom suddenly.”
Everyone is anxious about what emancipation portends. “What does he care if he works me to death?” frets one slave-apprentice concerning his master. The whites have their own apprehensions about the soon-to-be emancipated: “They don’t know how to behave, that’s the problem. They’ve never been free.”
First of December focuses on three people in the run-up to emancipation day. There’s James Kendrick and his wife, Caroline, who “had every reason not to love him”. The novel opens and closes with a runaway slave woman, her tortuous advance providing some of the most harrowing and hallucinatory passages in this atmospheric book. The landscape – “barbarous, foreign, strange” – could well be a fourth character, beclouding the unfolding events and mirroring the inner turmoil of the individuals.
Encountering a slave-apprentice who plans to change his name once free, the fugitive slave considers same, but wonders “whether it would matter when she had no one to tell it to”. She goes unnamed in the novel. Jennings keeps a tight focus on the force propelling the runaway, who must determine whether the spur is a lost love or freedom for its own sake, for herself.
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James is a prospector and founder of the First Colonial Bank. Cruel and sadistic, he thinks it is “terrible” that a row of negroes would not be sold, that “the opportunity had been lost”. He sees in emancipation endless opportunities for making money and overcoming his past failures. So he roams Cape Town obsessing about maps and “his plans, all the visions and hopes for the city that lived frantic inside him.”
First of December dispenses with James’s story perhaps one scene too early, but it is the novel’s moral acuity, and the author’s unerring devotion to the human urge to freedom symbolised by the slave woman in flight, that really lifts this quietly devastating novel.
