Set on 21st century plantation, Attica Locke’s “The Cutting Season” examines legacy of slavery

The Cutting Season

Attica Locke

Dennis LeHane Books, $25.99, 400 pages

Ah, the deep South. Towering, fragrant magnolias. Stately white columns. Slave quarters neatly hidden from view. An idyllic slice of the pre-Civil War era that, according to the author, includes “belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count.” Sound familiar?

Texas-born Attica Locke sets her hefty, historical mystery, “The Cutting Season,” on the grounds of the fictional Belle Vie, a fully restored Louisiana plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River, complete with a mansion as grand as Margaret Mitchell’s Tara, and fields where slaves once performed back-breaking labor.

Far from having gone with the wind, Belle Vie is still a thriving industry in 2009, when the book opens. Its long-time owners have turned the estate over to weddings, corporate events and tourists, who flock to it by the busload, eager for a surreal but “authentic” taste of the South before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Including costumed “slaves” who give tours and also perform twice-daily in a play about Belle Vie’s history, delivering lines like this one: “Dem Yankee whites can’t make me leave dis here land. Dis here is mah home. Freedom weren’t meant nothin’ without Belle Vie.”

Overseeing the day-to-day operations and staff is Caren Gray, a single mother and law-school dropout who has returned, in a way, to her roots. Her mother was the plantation’s cook for nearly three decades, and Caren, who grew up playing with the children of the white owners, is descended from slaves.

Nowadays, Caren’s office is in the main house, a place she never set foot in as a child—even her mother “never made it past the foyer”—where she enjoys a scenic view of the “fields where her ancestors had cut sugarcane by hand.”

Into this half-real, half-reproduction world comes a grisly development: Out behind the slave quarters, Caren discovers the body of a murdered woman that police identify as a migrant worker employed by the agribusiness that leases the fields.

Two years of law school have taught Caren how a criminal investigation works—and this one leaves her convinced that the only suspect, one of her staff, is innocent. But it’s not until her young daughter is drawn into the investigation that Caren joins forces with a reporter and her ex-husband to track down the real killer. When the evidence she uncovers begins to reveal a far more complicated—and long hidden—basis for the murder, Caren finds herself the target of a killer who’ll do anything to keep the past buried.

Locke’s debut novel “Black Water Rising,” about corrupt politics in 1980s Houston, was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize and nominated for an Edgar Award. Dennis LeHane snapped up “The Cutting Season” as the first title in his new imprint, and it’s easy to see why: Like LeHane, Locke uses the mystery as a vehicle for a character-driven story about the search for self, accessible only through a painful confrontation with the past.

Caren’s ambivalence about just about every aspect of her life at Belle Vie adds to her complexity, and her law-school expertise makes her a credible amateur detective. But the real sparkle in these pages comes from Locke’s sly play on the ever-shifting roles of blacks and whites from antebellum times to the present, folding one form of slavery into another to create subtle and disturbing parallels between the “true story of the South,” and the more marketable, economically convenient one.

Consider these descriptions of the African-American Belle Vie Players, as they prepare for the day’s performance: “Cornelius McCrary … was wearing a faded, red-and-blue OBAMA 08 T-shirt over the tattered muslin pants that were his official FIELD SLAVE #2 costume.” “Dell and Shauna, MAMMY and YOUNG HOUSE SLAVE, respectively, were tying each other’s aprons in place.” In the depressed economy of 2009, they can’t afford to quit these jobs.

Note the new “slave labor”: Mexican cane cutters who’ve replaced local workers. Or the slight nausea that overwhelms Caren when, seated in the office that once housed the plantation’s overseer, she must heartlessly fire one of her staff. Or the shock she feels when the white owners neglect to inform her that they’re considering selling the plantation: “She could hardly imagine a world without Belle Vie.”

In other words, if you’re not doing a double-take on almost every page of this provocative, brainy whodunit, you must be blinking.

Locke based Belle Vie on a real-life plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, where, attending a wedding in 2004, “a whole cocktail of mixed emotions” hit her at once, including “rage and revulsion over what the antebellum scene represented.” For one night, she says, “I had been invited into the big house”—but was it a sign of progress or “a supreme act of disrespect” to celebrate on a site once devoted to slavery? “Or were we somehow past all that?”