The Benefits of Eating White Folks

By Leslie T. Grover
Jaded Ibis Press, 2022, 157 pages

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Through a powerful combination of prose, poetry, and visual art, The Benefits of Eating White Folks explores an enslaved woman’s determination to survive and persist amid a series of traumas that threaten to break her. And it connects her trials to issues of racial injustice that continue to afflict our country. The result is an unforgettable book, one that holds an unforgiving mirror up to American racism, past and present, showing its ineradicable toll.

The prose portions of the book are set in the antebellum South, and the main character of this narrative is Perpetua, an enslaved woman who is being beaten by one of her enslavers, identified as the Missus. The Missus is the wife of a man known as the Doctor, and his repeated rapes of Perpetua have caused her conceive several children, only one of whom–Meenie–has survived. At the time of the beating, Perpetua is pregnant by the Doctor once again, and this is the reason for the Missus’s fury. She has accused Perpetua of seducing her husband, refusing to believe Perpetua’s truth: that he raped her. (Apparently, the Missus did not realize, or want to believe, that her husband was the cause of Perpetua’s earlier pregnancies.)

Perpetua’s history with the Missus makes the beating all the more disturbing, and heartbreaking. Once, they were close companions–of course, not by Perpetua’s choice. “We are just like sisters,” the Missus had said to Perpetua in their childhood. And Perpetua recalls that before her beating by the Missus:

The story of the women’s friendship and of the Missus’s brutal betrayal of Perpetua says so much about how power was wielded and exploited by enslavers and within a (white) male-dominated society–with consequences that have carried forward to this day. The Missus would rather believe that a woman she’d once regarded as a sister is a seductress than see her husband as a rapist. And her status as an enslaver gives her the power to violently express her rage and her need for vengeance, without any personal repurcussions. For her part, Perpetua’s status as an enslaved woman leaves her helpless to escape the beating, much less fight back against it.

For similar reasons, an enslaved groomsman and friend of Perpetua, Jack, is helpless to come to her aid, as much as he seems to want to. In fact, when the Missus asks Jack to hand her another branch with which to beat Perpetua (the one she’d been using had broken from the force of her blows), he must comply or face the consequences. In this and other ways, the book makes it painfully clear how trauma radiates outward from its source, taking a ruthless toll on every susceptible individual in its path.

Another trauma that has taken a lasting toll was the beating of Perpetua’s father at the hand of the Missus’s father. After her father’s death from the beating, Perpetua’s mother took a bit of a bloodied rag that had been in his possession and gave it to Perpetua. “Keep this with you all the time,” Perpetua’s mother told her. “It will protect you”–as if it is a bit of her father. But this bit of rag gets lost when the Doctor rapes Perpetua, who by now has also been separated from her mother. Although Perpetua has lost the comfort and protection of her parents, she is determined to look out for her own daughter, Meenie. And then, mysteriously, Meenie disappears. “She did not run,” Perpetua observes. “She was not sold. She was not loaned out. … Nobody would even help look for her even though she was the Doctor’s child.”

At the time of Meenie’s disappearance, another mystery is unfolding: a deadly, unfamiliar ailment called the Sickness is running rampant among whites in the area, and it causes special concern when it begins to kill off white children. The Doctor is under pressure to treat the illness, and he comes under suspicion when one of his sons holds onto life while infected with the Sickness, albeit tenuously. Other white citizens begin to wonder whether the Doctor is treating him with something that’s not being made available to them.

Although the Sickness spares the enslaved, enslaved children begin to disappear. In some cases, they’re found dead, their bodies mutilated: a terrifying prospect for Perpetua, given Meenie’s disappearance. Nevertheless, Perpetua remains certain that Meenie is still alive, and she is determined to find her.

The reason that some Black children are found dead eventually becomes clear, and without revealing the details, I’ll say that it’s rooted in the power and needs of the Doctor, and of enslavers in general. And it makes this book a horror story, in more ways than one. Still, Perpetua holds onto hope that she and Meenie will be reunited, even though God seems to have turned His back on her.

Perpetua’s story is interwoven with powerful poems that pick up on elements of her trials and, in many cases, link them to issues of racial injustice that persist to this day. In that way, the poems have an amplifying effect. One poem, “Divine Ears,” seems to speak for Perpetua and for many other women who have followed her. In part, it reads:                

Other poems show the power of love amid pain and adversity. The poem “Daddy,” which appears after the story of the beating death of Perpetua’s father, tells of one father’s love for his daughter, the poem’s narrator. Here’s an excerpt:              

Later in the poem and in time, the father says to the daughter, “I am proud of you.”

Accompanying the poems are striking illustrations by Lisa Teasley, which help to underscore and intensify the poems’ emotions and messages.

The poems, visuals, and especially the story of Perpetua offer readers ample opportunities to reflect on racism’s roots in slavery, and on its persistence. As a white woman, I see this book as an invitation to take a good long look into the narrative’s unforgiving mirror and to fully see, and meaningfully confront, the horrors of racism that remain.