SOURCE: A review of Free Enterprise, in Belles Lettres, Vol. 9, No. 3, Spring, 1994, pp. 32-4.

In the following review, Shea admires Free Enterprise for its woman-centered perspective on American slavery and the abolition movement.

Fire seems to be Michelle Cliff's element. The very title of an early autobiographical essay asserts "If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire," and she closes her earlier novel No Telephone to Heaven with an apocalyptic blaze. Yet, not until now, in her most recent work, the novel Free Enterprise, has she fully explored fire's properties: destruction, blending, clarification, and perhaps even rebirth. In this powerful novel, which centers on the fictional character Annie Christmas and the historical figure Mary Ellen Pleasant, Jamaican-born Cliff explains that she is continuing the work begun in Toni Morrison's Beloved—"remembering and reconstructing the past." Cliff calls Beloved a "watershed" for her and...