A sprawling, often engaging story of a family in bondage set against the backdrop of the Civil War.
In this debut historical novel, Calloway fictionalizes the story of his enslaved Black great-grandfather.
George Calloway was born into slavery in 1829 in Cleveland, Tennessee. From the age of 12, he was expected to work as hard as a grown man, and he did. Indeed, he worked so hard that when the White overseer died, George was made the manager of the farm at the age of 18: “He was proud of the fact that the farm produced more per acre with him as boss than under old Bryant. He was proud of the straight rows, taut fences….George could run a farm as well as any man.” Now, on the eve of the Civil War, George is married with a child, and they live in a small cabin on the land that his enslaver owns. Marsa Thom, as George calls him, is the biological father of George and his siblings, although this relationship isn’t acknowledged openly. Still, the horrors of slavery affect George’s family deeply: His freedman father-in-law, after a run-in with a White man, is whipped within an inch of his life, and his enslaved younger brother Henry is sent off to work at a plantation in New Orleans in exchange for cash. George and his family do what they can to support people who decide to run for freedom, including his younger brother Louis, a frequent (and frequently recaptured) escapee. Change may be coming soon, however, with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and a rumored potential invasion of the South by abolitionists. George isn’t sure what war might bring—an end to slavery is almost too outlandish for him to imagine—but one thing’s for sure: Tennessee is about to get a lot more violent.
Calloway’s elegant prose effectively captures the tension and textures of the period, as when George comes upon some neighbors celebrating the surrender of Fort Sumter: “George walked out into the front office and stopped short when he saw the jug of moonshine spilling on the out-of-town newspapers that had just come in that morning. Acock was so drunk that his hand listed badly to one side spilling the clear liquid, smearing the message of Confederate Sovereignty printed on the front pages.” Although the author presents the novel as something of a family history project, he shows himself to be such a talented writer of historical fiction that the biographical element of the work barely registers. George and his family are complexly rendered characters, and it’s only the occasional photographs and footnotes that remind the reader of the underlying reality of the story. This relationship to true history complicates some of the less-realistic aspects of the plot, such as the oddly honorable depiction of enslaver Marsa Thom, whose sympathetic rendering will likely be off-putting to some readers. It’s a lengthy novel at more than 400 pages, but Calloway largely earns the length with his nuanced depictions of life in Bradley County.
A sprawling, often engaging story of a family in bondage set against the backdrop of the Civil War.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9865014-0-6
Page Count: 419
Publisher: Point Fermin Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
This historical fever dream of a novel follows the flight of a servant girl through the Colonial American wilderness, red in tooth and claw.
As in her last novel, Matrix (2021), Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine of language and rhythm. “She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time." Those onrushing sentences will follow the girl, “sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age,” through the wilderness surrounding the desperate colony, driven by famine and plague into barbarism, through the territory of “the powhatan and pamunkey” to what she hopes will be “the settlements of frenchmen, canada,” a place she once saw pointed out on a map. The focus is on the terrors of survival, the exigencies of starvation, the challenges of locomotion, the miseries of a body wounded, infected, and pushed beyond its limit. What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world. Whether she is eating baby birds and stealing the fluff from the mother’s nest to line her boots, having a little tea party with her meager trove of possessions, temporarily living inside a tree trunk that comes with a pantry full of grubs (spiders prove less tasty), or finally coming to rest in a way neither she nor we can foresee, immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization that readers may find deeply satisfying.
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593418390
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Intelligent and thoughtful but not quite at this groundbreaking writer’s usual level of excellence.
An obscure English novelist and a missing-heir trial are the real historical springboards for Smith’s latest fiction.
Eliza Touchet is cousin and housekeeper to William Ainsworth, whose novel Jack Sheppard once outsold Oliver Twist but who, by 1868, has been far eclipsed by his erstwhile friend Dickens. Widower William is about to marry his maid Sarah Wells, who has borne him a child. Characteristically, he leaves the arrangements to Eliza, who manages everything about his life except the novels he keeps cranking out, which his shrewd cousin knows are dreadful. The new Mrs. Ainsworth is obsessed with the man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a family fortune who was reported drowned in a shipwreck. The Claimant, as he is called, is likely a butcher from Wapping, but Sarah is one of many working-class Britons who passionately defend him as a man of the people being done wrong by the toffs. Eliza gets drawn into the trial by her fascination with Andrew Bogle, formerly enslaved by the Tichbornes in Jamaica, who recognizes the Claimant as Sir Roger. A Roman Catholic in Protestant Britain and William’s former lover who's been supplanted by a younger woman, Eliza feels a connection to Bogle as a fellow outsider. (Some pointed scenes, however, make it clear that this sense of kinship is one-sided and that well-intentioned Eliza can be as patronizing as any other white Briton.) Smith alternates the progress of the trial with Eliza’s memories of the past, which include tart assessments of William’s circle of literary pals, who eventually make clear their disdain for his work, and intriguing allusions to her affair with William’s first wife and to her S&M sex with William. (Eliza wielded the whips.) It’s skillfully done, but the minutely detailed trial scenes provide more information than most readers will want, and a lengthy middle section recounting Bogle’s African ancestry and enslaved life, though gripping, further blurs the narrative’s focus. Historical fiction doesn’t seem to bring out Smith’s strongest gifts; this rather pallid narrative lacks the zest of her previous novels’ depictions of contemporary life.
Intelligent and thoughtful but not quite at this groundbreaking writer’s usual level of excellence.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780525558965
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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