Keeper of the House - Paperback

by Rebecca T. Godwin (Author)

Keeper of the House is Rebecca T. Godwin's unforgettable novel narrated by the lively Minyon Manigault, a young black woman from a coastal South Carolina Gullah community.

In 1929, due to mysterious family circumstances, Minyon is given up by her grandmother to the employment of Ariadne Fleming, a white madam in the famously elegant brothel called Hazelhedge. At the age of fourteen, she becomes a pair of eyes and hands, watching and working almost invisibly in a world where men and women leave their inhibition, and their pasts, at the door. As Minyon grows up in the household with other black people who provide behind-the-scenes support of Hazelhedge, she cannot escape her haunting childhood memories. Even while bearing witness to the events unfolding around her, Minyon seeks to find her place in the world, and her pace within herself.

Author Biography

Rebecca T. Godwin has published two novels, Keeper of the House and Private Parts. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere; she has received MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and has been awarded the South Carolina Arts Commission's Prose Fellowship for 2023. For thirteen years she taught at Bennington College, during which time she was faculty editor for plain china, an online journal showcasing undergraduate writing from around the country. She has retired to her native South Carolina, where she's revising a collection of linked stories and two novels. More details may be found at rebeccatgodwin.com.