Washington County, East Texas, is the setting for a tale of various young people growing up in the lead-up to the Civil War. AT WHAT COST, SILENCE? features Adrien Villere and his sister Bernadette, alternating between wishing for unsupervised time and hoping for their father Paien Villere’s attention. He runs a spreading tobacco plantation, a big industry at the time, and neighbours grow cotton, one man expressing a wish to raise horses instead of crops. All this work gets done by others, of course.
Isaac is a house slave, better dressed than field slaves. He provides a brother figure for Adrien – for a time. In this household, the talk is of servants, not slaves. Some have even been given freedom. But they can’t go anywhere or better their lives, so there is not much difference from day to day. During the tale, however, we see the vicious treatment meted out to a recaptured runaway slave. Life was hard.
While Bernadette craves education and maybe even a vote, Adrien will get both for the asking. Bullied in the local school, Adrien has to learn to defend himself. He starts to hero-worship the older neighbouring boy, Jacob Hart. Then at boarding school, he realises that he’s looking at men instead of women. This has to be kept silent.
Karen Lynne Klink has researched the background in period and location. The difference it made to plantation managers if they had a good summer or a hard winter. How new slaves were bought and for what reasons. I found double standards and double dealing throughout her epic fiction. Black people are called servants and respected, except when they are absolutely not. Women are schooled and extravagantly raised, except when they want to do something any boy would do. Boys are encouraged to develop manly friendships and pursuits, except when these might lead to close relationships. Men were right to invest their fortunes, except when calamity occurred. Control freakery would generate wealth, except when it led to war.
The Texian Trilogy which begins with AT WHAT COST, SILENCE? is a more modern approach to the Gone With The Wind story – one which acknowledges that along with the raging hormones of youth, some young people were covertly gay. The war looks to be the central part of the trilogy, which demonstrates the changes of this turbulent period through the characters. Anyone looking for historical fiction will be interested.
Adrien Villere suspects he is not like other boys. For years, he desperately locks away his feelings and fears—but eventually, tragedy and loss drive him to seeking solace from his mentor, a young neighbor Jacob Hart. Jacob’s betrayal of Adrien’s trust, however, results in secret abuse, setting off a chain of actions from which neither Adrien’s wise sister, Bernadette, nor his closest friend, Isaac, can turn him.
At What Cost, Silence presents two contrasting plantation families in a society where strict rules of belief and behavior are clear, and public opinion can shape an entire life. Centerstage are the Villeres, a family less brutal than the Harts, but no less divisive. Often-absent Papa Paien Villere guards several secrets he has kept from everyone—including one which could destroy his entire family. Years after Jacob’s betrayal, Adrien falls hopelessly in love with his former mentor’s erotically precocious and beautiful young sister Lily—whose father has affianced her to a wealthy older man.
What will happen if Lily’s violent brother learns of Adrien and Lily’s clandestine affair? Will Adrien aid in freeing Isaac—an enslaved Black man—as promised? Will Bernadette find the unconventional life she seeks? Or will their entire world end as states secede and war creeps ever closer?
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