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The year is 1862, and the Civil War rages through the South. On a Virginia tobacco plantation, another kind of battle soon begins. There, Cassius Howard, a skilled carpenter and slave, risks everything-punishment, sale to a cotton plantation, even his life-to learn the truth concerning the murder of Emoline, a freed black woman, a woman who secretly taught him to read and once saved his life. It is clear that no one cares about her death in the midst of a brutal and hellish war. No one but Cassius, who braves horrific dangers to escape the plantation and avenge her loss.
As Cassius seeks answers about Emoline's murder, he finds an unexpected friend and ally in Quashee, a new woman brought over from another plantation; and a formidable adversary in Hoke Howard, the master he has always obeyed.
With subtlety and beauty, Sweetsmoke captures the daily indignities and harrowing losses suffered by slaves, the turmoil of a country waging countless wars within its own borders, and the lives of those people fighting for identity, for salvation, and for freedom.
David Fuller has been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. He spent eight years researching Sweetsmoke, his first novel, and along the way discovered that he had ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War. Fuller lives in Los Angeles with his wife and twin sons.
Mystery novels, ever in need of fresh points of view, are given to strange genre hybrids like Fuller's debut novel: part investigative procedural, part narrative of American slave life. Cassius, a secretly literate slave on a Civil War-era Virginia tobacco plantation, is determined to track down whoever killed his mentor and surrogate mother, Emoline Justice, a free black woman. Making liberal use of his limited freedoms, Cassius takes to the road, playing the obvious disadvantages of life under the yoke to his favor. Along the way, he encounters slave traders, Underground Railroad conspirators, Confederate soldiers, Northern spies and a wide assortment of African-Americans, slave and free. Fuller, a screenwriter, has palpable sympathy for his African-American characters, and Cassius's encounters with other characters-like the haunted slave owner Hoke Howard-are the book's strongest parts. Unfortunately, Fuller's solid plot doesn't carry the novel through to its end, and, despite sourcing the work of historians Eugene Genovese and John Hope Franklin, the novel gives off a distinct whiff of unreality. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
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Joseph Mesfin
reviewed Sweetsmoke on January 19, 2015
Sweetsmoke
I live in the south. Every day, I see relics of days that to some symbolize the glory of the south, to others, a time of great shame for humankind. I was not born into southern culture (indeed, my own family fled from persecution elsewhere to settle in the United States in the days before World War I), but I still feel the scars that the enslavement of African Americans left on our world. When a friend from another country had trouble enjoying a visit to Charleston, saying he could feel the pain of slavery as he walked the streets of the city, it was a knife to my heart. It is not the way we live now, at least not in this part of the world, and while we are not perfect, I wonder how long those who inhabit this land will bear the responsibility of scars of the past.
Many people have a romanticized vision of slavery, due in part to its depiction in novels and movies. But even the kindest rendition in print or screen cannot deny that at its core, slavery involves ownership of one person over another. Sweetsmoke presents the reader with a huge array of relationships between between people of the south in that time of our history. The brutality is unflinching, the loyalties complex, the relationships tangled. It is a glimpse into the darkness of our past, exploring diverse aspects of the human psyche. It's a retelling of that wound in our national history called the Civil War. It's a character study of a man of passions and principles, despite his enslavement. It's a reminder that our greatest downfall is man's inhumanity to man, and our greatest strength is our ability to open our hearts to other people, and strive for what is right. I thought the author's technique of using quotation marks around the speech of free people, black or white, and none around the speech of the enslaved was a powerful tool to keep the reader reminded of the degradation of the human spirit when we succumb to the evils of saying we own another individual.
This is a book that is complex, and I may reread, because there are certainly nuances I missed. There were some moments in it that opened my eyes, not so much about the institution of slavery, but more regarding how the world was in that time-- figuring out how to pass a message, cross a river, make a rendezvous. I even found myself looking up some of the herbs and medicinal plants mentioned, as that's an interest of mine.
Many thanks to my friend Maggie, who recommended this book to me. I will pass it on thoughtfully.
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