The Kitchen House

Orphaned on the passage from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives at a Virginia tobacco plantation as an indentured servant and is placed in the kitchen house, where the enslaved family who works there raises her as one of their own. She grows up loving Belle, Mama Mae, Papa George, and the others, blind at first to the wall that her white skin builds between them. Belle, meanwhile, is the plantation master's unacknowledged daughter, kept close and kept down by the same man. As Lavinia is pulled toward the world of the main house and eventually into the owning family itself, the loyalties of her childhood collide with the brutal logic of the plantation. Grissom alternates Lavinia's and Belle's voices across the years, building toward a reckoning neither the household nor its secrets can hold back.