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Late one dark April night in 1775, a young doctor from Concord leaves the Lexington home of his fiancee and her family; he is unexpectedly drawn into an alarm being spread across the countryside of colonial Massachusetts (and becomes a key participant) warning of an impending invasion by the king's troops from Boston. As the rebellion unfolds, Dr. Samuel Prescott and his family, as well as Lydia Mulliken and her family, face the difficulties of war. Samuel's obligations take him from eastern Massachusetts to Ticonderoga in New York, and from Boston to the coastline of Maine. Meanwhile, Lydia is focused on helping her widowed mother care for and protect two sisters and a younger brother while three other brothers are off fighting with the Continental Army; two of them participate in the stand on Lexington Green and the Battle of Bunker Hill. Both families deal with tragedy and unwavering hope as they endure the struggle for the birth of a nation. Throughout the ordeal, Lydia and Samuel, kept apart by individual and family needs, balance their endless desire to be reunited with the continual sacrifice and hardships of the fight for liberty. The spirit, determination, and resilience of people like those reflected in this story, many who were real people, created a new nation through these pivotal moments and battles of the American Revolution.
The cool spring dusk fell drowsy and soft over Sandy Island, all but blotting out a log cabin that nestled under great moss-hung oaks close to the river’s edge. The small drab weather-stained house would scarcely have shown except for the fire that burned inside, sending a bright glow through its wide-open door and showers of sparks up its short stick-and-clay chimney. A gaunt, elderly black man strode hastily toward it along the path leading up from the river and went inside, but in a few minutes he came to stand in the doorway, his bulk well-nigh filling it as one broad shoulder leaned dejectedly against the lintel. When a moan came from inside, his brawny hands clenched and buckled in a foolish helpless way, and a frown knitted his forehead as he cast a glance at the old black woman who pattered back and forth from the hearth to the bed in the corner with a cupful of root-tea or a bit of hot grease in a spoon or a pinch of salt in the palm of her hand. Once in a while she called to him that everything was going well. To-morrow this same girl would laugh at all these groans and tears. Birthing a child is tough work. He must have patience. Long patience. Nobody can hurry a slow-coming child. The fire crackled and leaped higher, lighting the dirt-daubed cracks of the walls, shining under the bed where it played over the freshly sharpened point of a plow-share. A share ground and filed and put under a bed is the best thing in the world to cut birth-pains, but this one lagged with its work. Its clean edge glittered bright enough, yet as time dragged on the pains lingered and the expected child tarried with its coming. The moon must be to blame. This new moon was right for planting seed but wrong for birthing. Swift labor comes with a waning moon, not a growing one. The man heaved a deep sigh and looked out into the gathering twilight. The slender young moon was dropping fast. This birthing ought to get over. When the river’s tide turned, life could go out mighty quickly. Ebb tide is a dangerous time for sick people. Old Granny was too slow. Too easy-going. When this same girl was born sixteen years ago, or was it seventeen, Granny had a long race with Death and lost, yet here she was poking around with her roots and teas, trifling away the time. “Granny,” he stopped to clear the huskiness out of his throat, “better make haste. De tide’ll soon turn. Ebb tide ain’ to be trusted, you know.”
Black April, the foreman of Blue Brook Plantation, must confront his own mortality and the tragic consequence of human desire in this simple tale of black country life in coastal South Carolina.
In this searching study, Nghana Lewis offers a close reading of the works and private correspondences, essays, and lectures of five southern white women writers: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. At the core of this work is a sophisticated reexamination of the myth of southern white womanhood. Lewis overturns the conventional argument that white women were passive and pedestal-bound. Instead, she argues that these figures were complicit in the day-to-day dynamics of power and authorship and stood to gain much from these arrangements at the expense of others. At the same time that her examination of southern mythology explodes received wisdom, it is also a journey of self-discovery. As Lewis writes in her preface, “As a proud daughter of the South, I have always been acutely aware of the region’s rich cultural heritage, folks, and foodstuffs. How could I not be? I was born and reared in Lafayette, Louisiana, where an infant’s first words are not ‘da-da’ and ‘ma-ma’ but ‘crawfish boil’ and ‘fais-do-do.’ . . . I have also always been keenly familiar with its volatile history.” Where these conflicting images—and specifically the role of white southern women as catalysts, vindicators, abettors, and antagonists—meet forms the crux of this study. As such, this study of the South by a daughter of the South offers a distinctive perspective that illuminates the texts in novel and provocative ways.