Overview by Dr. Peter J. Hawkes
The Simulated Plantation: A Connecticut Engineer in the Antebellum
By Ted Haynes Robleda. 260 pp. 2026.
(Overview by Dr. Peter J. Hawkes, Ph.D Columbia University Department of English and Comparative Literature, Professor Emeritus of English at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania.)
Ted Haynes’s latest novel falls into the genre of time travel, a category arguably begun with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a book Haynes calls to mind in his subtitle. Instead of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth century mechanical engineer, being transported to 6th century England, Cory Sergeant, a modern-day software engineer, is transposed via an AI-powered simulation to a slave plantation in the Deep South just before the Civil War. Cory brings with her the modern sensibilities of an educated black woman, who knows the history of her people and her gender. How does she interact with a family of slave holders and their slaves?
The AI simulation casts Cory in the form of a white male named Henry Martin. The avatar allows several continuing tensions. Cory’s inner identity as a black woman versus her outward identity as a white man; her twenty-first century beliefs as a Gen Zer as opposed to the views of the whites she meets; her awareness of Bend, Oregon, where she was raised, and Litchfield, Connecticut, where she works, in contrast to the cotton plantation in rural Talladega, Alabama.
The simulation begins with Cory walking towards the Fairhaven Plantation, where Arthur Fairlamb, the owner, awaits the arrival of a tutor he has hired by mail for his son. The quick-witted Cory seizes the chance to pass for Henry Martin and settles into family life, tutoring Mitchell, playing chess with the master, conversing with the engaged daughter Veronica, who needs coaching about men, and teaching songs to the youngest daughter Angelina. Meanwhile, he finds a sympathetic connection with the house slaves Apollo and his wife Polly and through them to the field slaves who spend long hours picking cotton.
Haynes’s novel can be read as an African American slave narrative since what Cory witnesses on the plantation recalls set pieces in autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. First observed whipping of a slave Pursuit of literacy Resistance to the overseer Threat of separation of the slave family The perilous escape Hiding in woods from pursuit The hypocritical Christian master As in the case of Douglass and Jacobs, the episodes emphasize the brutality of the slaveholders and the humanity of the enslaved.
Much of the novel is devoted to Cory’s reflections on what she’s seen. After each episode, whether in the house or in the fields, Cory’s ruminations become preoccupied with a series of binary oppositions:
White/Black Slaveholder/Slave Man/Woman Past/Present TradWife/#MeToo Modern Woman South/North Simulated/Real
Since the terms are irreconcilable, they end in a series of questions, the most important of which Cory asks herself: “What could I do to make life better for Black people on the plantation?”
Cory realizes if she does nothing, she becomes an accessory, complicit in slavery; but if she tries to improve the lot of the slaves, (for example, by secretly teaching them to read), she runs the risk of being discovered and even killed and of making things worse for the enslaved, who would be whipped and perhaps sold away.
Cory’s ethics are tested when Fairlamb asks for advice on buying Westaboga, an adjacent plantation, with eighty slaves. If Fairlamb doesn’t buy, slave families will be broken up and scattered across the state. If Fairlamb does buy, he and his family will be stuck with debt they cannot repay after the slaves are freed. Cory chooses “the welfare of the slaves over the welfare of the Fairlambs, even if it would be a betrayal of the family that had taken [her] in.”
Cory returns to the question of how she can alleviate the lives of the slaves? The answer seems to be little beyond her commitment to be respectful and courteous. When the simulation ends, Cory returns to present day Connecticut. She realizes slavery is horrid, wicked, and evil, and, in the words of her fiancé Rob, “the shadow of slavery is still with us.” The wiser Cory resolves “to pay attention, to ask myself if anyone was suffering because of the choices I made.”
Ted Haynes’s latest novel falls into the genre of time travel, a category arguably begun with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a book Haynes calls to mind in his subtitle. Instead of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth century mechanical engineer, being transported to 6th century England, Cory Sergeant, a modern-day software engineer, is transposed via an AI-powered simulation to a slave plantation in the Deep South just before the Civil War. Cory brings with her the modern sensibilities of an educated black woman, who knows the history of her people and her gender. How does she interact with a family of slave holders and their slaves?
The AI simulation casts Cory in the form of a white male named Henry Martin. The avatar allows several continuing tensions. Cory’s inner identity as a black woman versus her outward identity as a white man; her twenty-first century beliefs as a Gen Zer as opposed to the views of the whites she meets; her awareness of Bend, Oregon, where she was raised, and Litchfield, Connecticut, where she works, in contrast to the cotton plantation in rural Talladega, Alabama.
The simulation begins with Cory walking towards the Fairhaven Plantation, where Arthur Fairlamb, the owner, awaits the arrival of a tutor he has hired by mail for his son. The quick-witted Cory seizes the chance to pass for Henry Martin and settles into family life, tutoring Mitchell, playing chess with the master, conversing with the engaged daughter Veronica, who needs coaching about men, and teaching songs to the youngest daughter Angelina. Meanwhile, he finds a sympathetic connection with the house slaves Apollo and his wife Polly and through them to the field slaves who spend long hours picking cotton.
Haynes’s novel can be read as an African American slave narrative since what Cory witnesses on the plantation recalls set pieces in autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. First observed whipping of a slave Pursuit of literacy Resistance to the overseer Threat of separation of the slave family The perilous escape Hiding in woods from pursuit The hypocritical Christian master As in the case of Douglass and Jacobs, the episodes emphasize the brutality of the slaveholders and the humanity of the enslaved.
Much of the novel is devoted to Cory’s reflections on what she’s seen. After each episode, whether in the house or in the fields, Cory’s ruminations become preoccupied with a series of binary oppositions:
White/Black Slaveholder/Slave Man/Woman Past/Present TradWife/#MeToo Modern Woman South/North Simulated/Real
Since the terms are irreconcilable, they end in a series of questions, the most important of which Cory asks herself: “What could I do to make life better for Black people on the plantation?”
Cory realizes if she does nothing, she becomes an accessory, complicit in slavery; but if she tries to improve the lot of the slaves, (for example, by secretly teaching them to read), she runs the risk of being discovered and even killed and of making things worse for the enslaved, who would be whipped and perhaps sold away.
Cory’s ethics are tested when Fairlamb asks for advice on buying Westaboga, an adjacent plantation, with eighty slaves. If Fairlamb doesn’t buy, slave families will be broken up and scattered across the state. If Fairlamb does buy, he and his family will be stuck with debt they cannot repay after the slaves are freed. Cory chooses “the welfare of the slaves over the welfare of the Fairlambs, even if it would be a betrayal of the family that had taken [her] in.”
Cory returns to the question of how she can alleviate the lives of the slaves? The answer seems to be little beyond her commitment to be respectful and courteous. When the simulation ends, Cory returns to present day Connecticut. She realizes slavery is horrid, wicked, and evil, and, in the words of her fiancé Rob, “the shadow of slavery is still with us.” The wiser Cory resolves “to pay attention, to ask myself if anyone was suffering because of the choices I made.”