Book Review: The Waiting Time

Title: The Waiting Time

Author: Eugenia Price

Date: 1997

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-312-96506-0

Length: 345 pages including afterword

Quote: “I know you’re a slave owner now, Abigail, but—your loving mother is an abolitionist.”

Eugenia Price wrote uplifting nonfiction for Christians, and big fat novels about the Old South in the tradition of Gone with the Wind or Jubilee. Readers expected her to mix history into fiction more smoothly than in Jubilee, and provide more and deeper conversations about politics and philosophy, less passion and less detailed descriptions of everyone’s clothes than in Gone with the Wind. Her historical novels were based on the known facts about real people, but of course, the people being long dead and most of their private affairs having remained private, she embroidered lavishly around the bare bones of history. Several characters in each novel appear under their real names.

The Waiting Time lives up to expectations. Finished a few weeks before Price’s death from cancer (just before her eightieth birthday), it describes the adventures of Abby Banes, a Boston girl who thought life on a rice plantation would be romantic. Once married to a much older man whom she loves more as a father-figure than as a partner, Abby finds herself so starved for conversation that (as many real women did) she finds herself talking to and bonding with slaves. During a consolation visit with her mother following her husband’s death, Abby becomes an abolitionist. She’d like to set all the slaves free. She’d also like to fall in love and get married again...but she finds it necessary to wait before doing either of these things.

Is Abby’s chaste, low-key romance with Thad the overseer realistic, or toned down to suit the sensitivities of a Christian writer who was born in 1916? I think Abby’s mourning, recovery, and second chance at love are remarkably true to life, considering that they were written by a bachelor. 

In the afterword we learn that the reason why this story breaks off where it does was that Price had planned at least one sequel, which would have carried Thad and Abby forward into the Civil War years. We don’t know what would have happened to them in the war, but from the fact that Price had made these fictional characters close friends of a real historical family whose house was not burned during the war “evidently because they were Unionists,” and had specified that both Thad and Abby were Northern-born, we may guess that the young couple would have been given some role in protecting their friends.

Though not an apology for slavery (of either the modern or the classical kind), this novel does document some of the historical reasons why some rational Southerners kept slaves in the 1850s. It was not that slavery was profitable (farmers felt financially stuck with slavery), but that hysteria about slave uprisings had spawned ludicrous laws intended to keep the slaves in their places. To free a slave was no longer, if it had ever been, a matter of signing papers and telling a former slave, “You are free.” Slaves had to be given a reasonable amount of money to allow them to start their own lives, and were not necessarily allowed to live in the state or town where they had been enslaved. Slave owners who were well known, rich, and regarded as public examples often had to make it an ongoing project to emancipate one or two slaves each year. Less scrupulous slave owners, especially in less settled areas, are known to have left opportunities for slaves to “escape” and wished them luck.

Although only a few of the slaves in The Waiting Time are given speaking parts, the novel also discusses the historical reality that slaves remained individuals with different situations and outlooks on life. We can guess that, in sequels, the enslaved couple Obadiah and Rosa Moon would have been loyal friends to Thad and Abby but needed little help to start their lives as freedmen. We are vaguely told that some of the other slaves wouldn’t have had the skills they needed to enjoy their freedom; we can guess that sequels might have characterized some of them and shown how they adjusted after emancipation.

Had I been Price’s editor, I would have tried to encourage her to drop the oldfashioned practice of trying to spell the variations in people’s accents. It’s a small fault, but it’s the kind of thing that can spoil a novel for English majors. Price spells out the pronunciations of words that deviate from the educated Anglo-American standard in Georgia. The standard accent in Georgia, however, deviated considerably from the standard accent in Boston. If Abby had been writing the story, she would have noticed the way her affluent White neighbors said things like “po-laht suthun woe-man” as much as she noticed the way Rosa Moon said “ob dat.” Since Price transcribes what Abby hears Fred Bentley saying in standard English, her spelling out “ob dat” sounds prejudiced. Price succeeds in the difficult task of showing us how a character who is obviously sympathetic to Price would handle an emotional situation Price never experienced, then fails at the comparably easy task of showing us how that character would hear her neighbors’ speech. That’s why most writers don’t try to “write dialect” any more.

This novel is recommended to those who enjoy long thoughtful novels with genuinely grown-up, as distinct from “adult,” content. If you’re old enough to know exactly what Thad and Abby would have done if they had gone into the house together, and to appreciate that they don’t go into the house together but stay outside talking about politics, economics, and rice farming, then you’ll love The Waiting Time. If you are the parent of a child who’s interested in Silhouette Desire romances, this is the sort of novel you can recommend to her (or him) as being really grown-up.