Book Summary
The narrator of this searing novel is the granddaughter of a slave. Her grandfather, Jonathan Carrick, was a white man. He was sold just after the Civil War to a struggling Kansas tobacco farmer - a common enough practice in those days when black slaves were no longer legal and the children of destitute soldiers were being marketed. You could pick up a white kid cheap, and Jonathan, only four years old, went for fifteen dollars.^
Woven together from his coded diaries and from memories of the embittered family, the harrowing story that emerges is that of a child denied his past, "bound out" to a brutish man (whose justification is "You get you an animal, you got to break him"), trussed and staked to the floor of the sod hut to keep him from running away, worked endlessly at planting, harvesting, picking off tobacco worms by hand, wrapping tobacco plugs (while the other children go to school), and - the ultimate humiliation - bullied by the soft, resentful son of the family, George Stoke. Through it all the anger burns, yet the fire forges an uncanny strength in the child. He bides his time. And then the railroad roars through the prairie, stopping at Sweetbrier, Kansas, and provides escape - freedom in the rough boomtown of Denver and a ferociously dangerous career as brakeman, astride the cars on the TransContinental Mogul heading into the Rockies.^
In the railroad yards, College, a gabby fellow runaway of sorts, befriends the helpless young man; in a bar in Cheyenne a fire-and-brimstone preacher fights for his soul; in a windswept farmhouse in Maine he finally gets the education that had been withheld. Jonathan survives - survives his "idyll with God," his education, his uneasy marriage. But the rage keeps breaking through, and always it is George Stoke, now a fat "cobra of a politician," known as the "fearless liberal" senator from Kansas, who is the target. The strategies of war - fueled by hatred - are what keep Jonathan Carrick in fighting trim. But as Joan Brady makes devastatingly clear in this brilliant and disturbing novel, the cost of slavery to flee human spirit is overwhelming, and her account of one man as victim leaves, in the mind of the reader, an enduring scar.
