SOURCE: "Taking Liberties with History," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XI, Nos. 10-11, July, 1994, pp. 32-3.

In the review below, McDowell considers the thematic relation between resistance and memory in Free Enterprise, focusing on multiple connotations of the novel's title.

"Who has ever heard of Annie Christmas, Mary Shadd Carey, Mary Ellen Pleasant?" asks the narrator of Free Enterprise, Michelle Cliff's third novel. All nineteenth-century comrades in the struggle for Black liberation, theirs, except perhaps for Carey's, are among the countless names "disappeared" from "official" accounts of resistance to slavery's domination.

Free Enterprise takes its inspiration from one such act of resistance: John Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry in October 1859. History has cast Brown as the lone and fearless warrior, the hero of folk songs and monuments, who first risked family, fortune and social standing, then martyred himself for the abolitionist cause. But in Cliff's novel...