CHAINS OF GOLD

Robb offers an impassioned novel of the California Gold Rush that grapples with its racist history.

It’s 1849, and Charles Perkins, a recent graduate of Princeton University, returns to his family’s Mississippi plantation with bold dreams of self-made wealth: “he has other plans for securing his fortune now that gold has been discovered in California.” He plans to travel westward and “strike it rich”; Charles’ slave-owning parents, despite their reluctance, eventually give him their blessing and agree to let him take the enslaved Carter with him to “keep him safe.” After a harrowing, weekslong journey from New Orleans to Panama on a ship harboring burglars—then through the Panamanian jungle on wooden canoes and muleback, amid such threats as alligators, snakes, raging rivers, and typhoid fever—Charles and Carter finally make it to California. But the politics in the future Golden State are more complicated than Charles imagined; indeed, California is a fulcrum on which the fate of slavery in the Union may rest. In the midst of his ongoing crisis of morality, Charles stakes a claim near Coloma before he receives a letter from home that makes him question his entire journey. Robb’s well-researched, fictional tale of the California Gold Rush, and the role of both free and enslaved Black people in it, will appeal to history buffs, readers interested in social justice, and anyone who’s struggled to reconcile what their family thinks of them with who they really are. It offers a rousing tale, complete with a historical notes section and bibliography, but it’s sometimes easy to lose track of characters’ names, and on which side of the abolitionist movement they are, due to the sheer size of the cast and its members’ peripheral subplots. Still, it’s an ambitious attempt to give Black gold miners their due.

An engaging novel of hidden history.