The cover blurb from the Washington Post on my edition says, "Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted...This is glorious work.". That just about covers it.
Yes, a glorious work. Well written historical fiction can teach me more than years in a classroom, because it gives me people with personalities, names, faces, motives; it leads me step by step into dangerous but lovely landscapes, it shows me why certain things happened as they did, and in this book it explains so much about the western expansion and the tragedy of the American Indian. I get overwhelmed just thinking of how to describe this book and all it contains.
Very basically, it is the story of Britt Johnson, who comes to Texas as a free black man just after the Civil War. He has plans to become a freighter, hauling goods by wagon to outposts and forts. The Commanche raid his community, kill his oldest son, and take his wife and two younger children captive. He sets out to find them. It's also the story of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker sent to work with Indian Affairs, who discovers that all the love and Christian charity in the world is sometimes useless. The author also miraculously gets us to understand the native American mind-set, and in so doing shows us the heartbreak and tragedy of a brave people who couldn't fight white man's progress.
A warning to those who don't like violence; this book has a lot of it. Really though, how can you write about the West without it, if you want the whole story of what it took to survive in that time, and the courage needed to try? Paulette Jiles includes the violence, but then gives us the most beautiful prose to make up for it. I seem to be reading her books in backward order, as I started with News of the World, her latest book. I will surely add her two earlier books to my list now, and eagerly wait for whatever she does next.
Goodreads remark:
There's nothing that
"explains" the color of lightning, but there is a sentence from which
i gather the title is derived…it's (in my book) chapter 12…britt is on his way
to get his wife & kids and he's met tissoyo…tissoyo is describing a
"fight" that he had heard about when he was a child--he's recalling
the incident as he's telling britt: "i only heard about it. i was too
young to go. how i wish i had been there. when they all came home they were
streaming a kind of fire around them. they sang as they came into camp. fifty
men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms
and ranches of the enemy.… there was light all around them and all around their
war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of
lightning."
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