Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Patricia Eakins's novel The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste manages to be both an hallucinogenic fable of a slave's escape and a moral treatise on the horrors of bondage. Narrated by the orphaned slave, Pierre, who more often than not refers to himself in the third person — almost as though he is psychologically dissociated — this tale tells the story of Pierre's flight (by sealing himself in a barrel and setting himself loose in the ocean) in hopes of reaching his final destination of France and freedom. An autodidact who teaches himself to write in the dust, Pierre dreams of writing what he calls his "shadow histoire"... which will tell the authentic story of his people and their anguish.

In African culture for centuries there has been a tradition known as "shortening the night" in which villagers sit around a fire and take turns telling stories in an attempt to find comfort and pass the night more quickly. Eakins structures her novel around this concept, delighting us with near-visionary images of tortoises with candles on their backs wandering through a garden and a spider in a barrel offering consolation to Pierre on his sojourn. Moreover, Eakins utilizes African creation myths (how whites were born from Africans), as well as other fables to deepen her themes.

What is most striking about Pierre Baptiste is the way in which Eakins expresses the suppressed rage of her speaker and, by extension, his fellow slaves. Some of the stories Pierre imparts (how his wife Vérité, when raped by her master Dufay, kills the child and serves up the baby as dessert for him) are almost sadistic in their graphic demands on the reader. And yet despite their brutality, these scenes are necessary to the emotional texture. The heart of Eakins's story can be summed up when Pierre explains that he murdered Pamphile (Dufay's son) "because he was white, and looked past my heart" — one of the rare instances when the narrator is cognizant of his internal turmoil.

In the end, Pierre's tale is offered to us as an act of redemption that will only be complete when we partake of it like a sacrament. The final tableau of this novel--an extraordinary vision of Perre's rescue of his fellow slaves in a "ship of sugar threads...manned by hundreds of spiders" in which "all the sufferers" will be brought home to paradise — presents us with a unique and unforgettable image of grace.

... Patricia Eakins, author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories (San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 1988), has pulled up from the rich, metamorphosing sea of her imagination a book [Pierre Baptiste] meticulously figured with human, part-human, and supernatural characters. She has tuned her prose to Pierre's time and he bobbles along on it, weaving the lacy sea-froth around him into portraits of all the landscapes that have bodied him.

Pierre undergoes a series of captivities in his three passages toward becoming both mother and father to his new-species progeny. That his mouth is their womb, his tongue their food, is logical outcome for him because the language trapped in his mind has not nourished his life except as wishful dreams, has, except in excised fashion, not passed his lips. It has entered him through his ears and eyes and has had no exit until, on his desert island, it finally becomes an act of his hand.

Which is one of the houses he wished for it, as countermand to what his master, an amateur naturalist, had built in his histories and sent to the great Buffon in France. Opposite his master's work, which isolated and condemned to death his specimens so each, without the intrusion of habitat or breath, could be more accurately studied and sketched, Pierre's histories are filled with animated subjects who, whether flesh or spirit or god, intersect and collide and often cause rupture in the fabric of the lives, the relationships, the landscapes inhabiting Pierre's words.

As suggested perhaps by its unconventional title, this is an unusual novel. Eakins has crafted a wildly imaginative tale. She weds fascinating creativity with a writing style evocative of centuries-old styling. The first half of the novel details the life of the protagonist Pierre Baptiste as a sage slave on the plantation of his owner. For the remainder of the novel the author spins a collection of imaginative short stories held together within the loose framework depicting Pierre's travels, as he escapes in a barrel from his plantation, undergoes a traumatic sea journey, and eventually lands on an island bereft of other human presence.

It is in this second half that the book's sole pitfall occurs. The philosophical tales recounted by the progatonist are quite fanciful and entertaining. Eakins skillfully crafts a patchwork quilt weaving together bits and pieces of African spiritual lore. Yet the parables seem somehow disconnected from the progression of the novel's story line. Because of the earlier motivations of Pierre, the reader is left somewhat wanting, as the character's mission is never realized.

And perhaps, as the story goes, that's life. For life is never a tidy summary of needs fulfilled and goals accomplished. On the whole, however, as the tale draws to a close, the reader is suffused with the pleasant sensation of having been privy to a story of remarkable originality and imagination.

Patricia Eakins is a breathtakingly audacious writer dedicated to unveiling the marvelous, one whose formidable gifts of invention and lyric phrasing are more than commensurate with her boldness. In her first book, The Hungry Girls and Other Stories (1988), she dared to create new worlds and new species in language calm, precise, and genuinely poetic: the voice of the inspired fabulist. Upon its publication, she was aptly compared with Calvino and Borges.

Now, in her first novel (winner of the New York University Press Prize for Fiction), The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste: Father and Mother, First and Last (NYU Press), she brings her narrative magic to bear on the subject of slavery in the French Caribbean in the 18th century.

Like William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner, she writes in the first person about the experience of slavery. Styron, a white Southerner, was criticized -- even vilified -- for his presumptuousness in insisting on the universality of human suffering. His critics were wrong, but his novel is nowhere near the achievement of The Marvelous Adventures. In it, Eakins, a white woman writing at the end of the 20th century, enters into the mind of an African man of letters, a slave in the 18th century. She breathes life into Pierre Baptiste through the power of her literary and moral imagination, creating a character as fully realized and memorable as any in literature. Fiction is not only about stories; it is about language. Eakins's language is eloquent and vivid. Yet Styron's Nat Turner has faded in memory, perhaps because he is rendered "realistically," in anachronistically modern prose.

Like John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor, Eakins writes in the high style of the 18th century. It is thus credible that Pierre Baptiste might well correspond with his hero, the writer Buffon, a member of the French nobility and the greatest naturalist of his time.

In an overture to the narrative, Pierre Baptiste tells us he is writing his story as an escaped slave living free on a desert island: "I DID COAST IN atop the amorous, delusome waves, a-bobble in a rum keg, a chattel-servant escaped of a sugar-cane planter of Saint-Michel, of the French Anduves. My plan were to float into a shipping lane to be taken aboard some packet as errant specimen cargo, viz., the salted-down carcasses of birds for Buffon's cabinet. I would be transported to France to the eminent natural historian, for I had marked the keg 'M. de Buffon, Intendant, Jardin du Roi, Paris.' Once arrived, I would be esteemed a savant, to stroll among the flowers & fountains of the garden and to study the stuffed & mounted animals and the mineral curiosities of the cabinet, and to enjoy the duties and perquisites of philosophy, for according to law I would be free on touching the soil of France. And a free man can rise to his worth."

A free man in his own mind, Pierre Baptiste rises to his own worth as we see him first as a young assistant to his master, an amateur naturalist; then as an autodidact; then as husband to a disfigured cook with magical powers whom he marries because she is infertile, and will produce no more slaves. When he runs afoul of his master's second wife, he casts off in a rum keg, and ends up on his desert isle, kept company by spiders, fish, and his "children," who are among Eakins's most delightful inventions.

Pierre Baptiste's narrative draws a devastating picture of the horrors of slavery, but no adversity causes him to lose his humanity. He refuses to be defined by his bondage, and his "marvelous adventures" are a constant surprise. One grows fonder of him with each page.

It is difficult to describe a work of such originality. Its strangeness is haunting. Its beauty is undeniable. It is a triumph.

Think back to when you first learned to read -- if your memories are similar to mine, then you'll recall a preponderance of well-dressed white children who were fixated on trees and balls, and rhymed all their sentences like infant tappers. If, however, you'd learned to read not via picture books, but through Plato, Newton, Diderot, and Descartes, you would undoubtedly speak as the self-educated narrator of Patricia Eakins's first novel does--with a kind of stilted grace and clumsy vocabulary, allowing you to charm your way through unbelievable situations like being in bondage to a naturalist, going to sea in a barrel, and giving birth to education-hungry fish.

Pierre Baptiste, the fictional autodidact in question, structures his autobiography in a classical 18th-century method, addressing himself in the third person at random and giving each chapter its own headline, such as "The Trouble I Took to Wife" and "Voyage of an Apprentice Savant." Admitting himself a genius from the very first, Pierre lays out his adventures like an explorer unfurling a map, with each new region more interesting than the last.

When the novel begins, 10-year-old Pierre is a slave on a sugar plantation owned by an amateur naturalist, Dufay. Needing the equivalent of a hard-working lab assistant, Dufay enlists Pierre to help him classify the fauna and flora of the Caribbean island on which they reside. The genius slave proves both entertaining and whip-smart, and Dufay sets him on a course of study, allowing him to learn to read and write. Pierre's main textbooks are the cornerstones of philosophy, as well as epics and satires, forever cementing his odd turns of speech and writing into place. Even a petty action of revenge against his owner sounds like a writ in Pierre's hands:

To avenge my degradation, I must confess, I defiled the chastity of many a volume, the pages of which had not been cut, but I did ravage with pains, for I prided myself on civility. Dear Reader, you may allow I was taking seigneurial rights in defiling these books, stealing perquisites from the master. I confess it was so.

Through commentary about freedom and justice, the work explores the ugliness of racial inequality and other conditions that have survived beyond Pierre's 18th-century world. Later, when Pierre is loosed from his bondage, Eakins strives to draw parallels about the chasm between humans and animals, and how much this gulf tells us about racist culture and paths to redemption.

The events of Pierre's life, from marrying a hideously ugly cook to various adventures on an uninhabited island, are strikingly original, occasionally requiring complete suspension of disbelief. The strength of Eakins's work, however, is not in the plotting but in the language. Pierre's love of words, and Eakins's obvious love of classic literature and philosophy, shine with particular brilliance. Reading the fanciful phrasing of earnest Pierre's philosophy and deciphering his sometimes overly complex sentences is like learning to read all over again, but with a guide far more interesting than dull little Dick and Jane.

Winner of the 1998 New York University Press Prize for Fiction, this is the story of an escaped slave's life and his people's ways in the sugar isles during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Born in Guinée, but captured as a babe with his mother, Pierre is taken from his mother and shipped to a Caribbean sugar-cane plantation, where he becomes the personal servant of master Dufay while still a young boy. After a few years, in order to save the salary of an accountant, Dufay has Pierre educated in letters and numbers. Studying further on his own, Pierre's eyes are opened to beliefs other than what he has observed around him -- including how truly lustful and greedy Dufay and his son are, though kinder than most masters.

From this point, Pierre uses his knowledge in subtle ways: angered that slaves are ordered to marry in order to breed more slaves, he circumvents punishment by marrying Pélérine Vérité, the barren voodoo witch; and with hope of eventually having freedom granted to himself, he acts kindly towards the young Madame of the house. When Madame wishes more attentions than Pierre will provide, however, his only salvation from sure torture and death is escaping in a barrel on the sea. After countless days and nights adrift, Pierre is washed up on an island where he meets a strange creature from the sea -- with whom he has four children. Pierre's tale continues with the raising of his children and in the sudden, shipwrecked arrival of the Dufay's son, Pamphile, along with surprising news from the plantation.

Interspersed in this story are all of the vignettes that bring the people of the plantation to life: the Master's eccentricities; Madame's attempts at running the household; the fall from grace of the slavedriver called Squint; the cruelty of Pélérine's first owner; Pamphile's observations in France and his subsequent behavior. Also adding to the atmosphere of the story are the slaves' ever-present religion and the various legends that guide Pierre's many decisions.

From the very first pages, this wondrously different world of Pierre Baptiste emerges out of the colorful, conversational mouth of Pierre himself. Readers will laugh at the tomfoolery, cry in horror at the brutality of torturous punishments, and then thank Uncle God they were never born a slave.

Eakins' skill at spinning a tale and her love of language are obvious in this story of an eighteenth-century black slave who repeatedly defies convention and ultimately creates his own universe. Torn from his mother as an infant, Pierre is selected at age 10 to be his master's porter, thus gaining access to a library and becoming a self-educated man on the sugar plantation. He even successfully resists his master's attempt to breed him by selecting for his wife a woman known to be barren, as the result of horrific treatment at the hands of her previous owner. But when he deflects his mistress' advances, she threatens tortures worse than death, and he escapes from his island home by taking to sea in a barrel, thus embarking on fantastic adventures. The story is told in the style and language of the time and is studded with tales seemingly grounded in legend and myth. Eakins succeeds in her desire "to create stories that read as if they come from the body of lost history."

The trials of a genius trapped in bondage supplies the framework for Eakins's first novel (after the short story collecteion The Hungry Girls), which purports to be the adventure-filled autobiography of an 18th-century black youth born into slavery on a sugar plantation. The plantation master, an amateur naturalist named Dufay, recalls 10-year-old Pierre from labor in the cane fields to help him classify flora and fauna on the Caribbean island. Impressed by young Pierre's acumen, and by his good humor -- he nicknames him Goody -- Dufay allows the boy to learn to read and write. Pierre often sneaks into the master's library to pore over volumes of Plato, Descartes, Newton, and Diderot. After encountering a noted philosopher's condescending description of "Negroes," Pierre sets out to create the definitive encyclopedia of African culture: "in so doing, I would open for inspection THE GENIUS OF MY PEOPLE, proving we who had been stolen from Guinee THE EQUALS IN EVERY RESPECT OF OUR MASTERS and DESERVING OF LIBERTY." Later, when Pierre (now married to the hideously ugly but loving plantation cook) refuses to sleep with Madam Dufay, she accuses him of rape; Pierre sets out to sea in a barrel addressed to France. After an arduous experience, he is washed ashore on an uninhabited island. Here the novel's brilliance begins to tarnish. Pierre's commentaries on his Caribbean life are often scathing, humorous, and brutally heartbreaking, but alone on his island, Pierre waxes tediously philosophical, and his adventures become weird, indeed; he is impregnated by a mermaidlike creature, carries the results to term in his mouth, and gives birth to four "philosofish," whom he proceeds to educate. Such over-the-top, magic-realist bizarreness detracts from, and almost capsizes, what is for the most part startlingly creative, memorable work.

First-novelist Eakins (The Hungry Girls & Other Stories) received the NYU Press Prize for this account of an 18th-century slave who becomes an autodidact, a philosopher, a castaway, and a mother and father both.

Try, if you might, to imagine Robinson Crusoe's Friday with Tristram Shandy's education -- and without Robinson Crusoe -- and you'll get some notion of what to expect in Eakins's rather audacious tale. It's narrated by one Pierre Baptiste de Buffon, an African slave who has spent most of his life in the Caribbean islands during the years leading up to the French Revolution. Pierre was purchased by an erudite and forward-thinking landowner who -- in defiance of both law and custom -- taught him how to read and write and eventually made him the manager of one of his estates. About as privileged as a slave could be, Pierre studied philosophy, sciences, and literature, and was able to converse with his master's peers as an intellectual (if not a social) equal. He learned from them that a Revolution proclaiming the equality of all was convulsing France and threatening to spread across Europe. Determined to see at first hand what was happening, Pierre ran away and tried to float across the Atlantic in a rum cask -- only to run aground on an uninhabited island. Here the story turns into a veritable bestiary of the weird and unexpected. The impractical Pierre is hard-pressed to survive in the wild until he catches a wounded mermaid and nurses her back to health. She repays his charity by coming ashore each day and vomiting fish into his mouth. Eventually, Pierre discovers himself pregnant, and in due course he delivers four new "creatures" into the world. Presiding over his odd family, Pierre tames his island wilderness and tries to complete his "CYCLOPEDISH HISTOIRE OF GUINEE AND BEYOND" (i.e., the story of his life), which will probably go on for quite some time -- if it's ever finished at all.

Bizarre, marvelous, and horrifying at once: a refreshing escape from the mundane.

On the publication of "The A, the B, the C of My Education"
in Fiction/86, Gargoyle Magazine/Paycock Press

My favorite of the twenty-six selections is Patricia Eakins's "The A, the B, the C of My Education," an excerpt from what appears to be a historical novel … highly wrought rhetoric.

What a writer Eakins is! In no time at all she coaxes me into Pierre's world which she describes in the most elegant and witty prose. (The poetry of it will not be lost on her readers either.) They will enter not only the heart of Baptiste but inhale, too, that cruel and decadent history of slave labor in the French-Caribbean …

For comments about Patricia Eakins's other work, see What the Critics Are Saying