BLACK GOLD

African-Americans battle and lust after one another as they struggle to gain control of an oil field in Texas in the 1920's: a well-researched if clichÇ-gushing first hardcover. Leela Brannon, orphaned as an infant and raised by her voodoo- spouting grandmother and seamstress aunt in Mexia, Texas, gets her shot at the American dream when she marries prosperous landowner T.J. Wilder and becomes mistress of Rioluces—Wilder's 160-acre melon farm outside of Mexia. Hard-working T.J., however, is also coldhearted, and Leela soon finds herself almost succumbing to his half-brother—flashy gambler Carey Logan. When T.J. discovers the two in his hayloft, semi-clothed, he banishes Carey from Rioluces. But seven years later, after T.J. dies of tuberculosis, Carey returns to claim Leela and gain control of Rioluces, by now the target of crooked, oil-crazed white speculators. Meanwhile, Leela has joined forces with Victor Beaufort, an ambitious wildcatter who advances her the money to save Rioluces from foreclosure in return for the right to drill for oil on her land. Just as Victor and Leela are on the verge of gaining everything they want—wedding bands on their fingers and control over the black gold of Rioluces- -Carey steps in with an evil scheme that almost destroys them and leaves Rioluces in flames. Near the close, Victor's financial base has been ruined, and Leela is on trial for the murder of Carey (whom she's discovered, in a southern gothic twist, is really her half-brother). Innocent Leela is eventually acquitted, of course- -and she and Victor reunite on the grounds of Rioluces. Despite interesting historical documentation of a neglected chapter of African-American history: a saga marred by oily, overheated prose that renders the characters as insubstantial as layers of methane gas.