β Scribed by Skip Horack
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Louisiana-born Horack's novel (after The Southern Cross collection) offers a stylish, fast-paced, historical narrative based on an 1816 slave insurrection. Spanish slave traders enter the Congo and purchase a captured Pygmy named Kau, transporting him to Pensacola, Fla., where he's sold to an innkeeper. Five years later, Kau kills the innkeeper's son and flees into the wilds of southern Florida. Along his wilderness trek, Kau regrets the murder, yearns for his family in Africa, and encounters a "Negro fort" on the Apalachicola River built by General Garçon. The remote fort's ostentatious "genius" commander befriends the diminutive Kau, who is allowed to take an escaped slave as his mate. The American victory in the War of 1812 makes Garçon, an ally of the British, a target of the imminent American invasion. While sympathetic to the slaves' desire to be free, Kau realizes the slim chance for success against the Americans; he's more inclined to follow his heart and "live quietly" in Florida than stand with Garçon. This diminutive man serves as a watchful protagonist in Horack's crisp, vivid tale.
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Five years after capture and enslavement in the American South, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, manages to escape. He flees into the wilder territories of unsettled Florida, an area still very much in dispute between Native Americans and white Americans, between runaway slaves and slave catchers, between black recruits to the British army to fight the War of 1812 and the white American military. Kau finds himself caught between cultures and clashes on an odyssey through the Florida swamplands, haunted by memories of his own tribe and family, struggling to reconcile the alliances and animosities among the warring black, red, and white tribes he encounters. He meets Native Americans fighting with and against encroaching white men, a family of freed blacks eking a life for themselves, and a mesmerizing former slave who commands a fort while leading a doomed mission. What Kau wants is to find a space in the wilderness that will return him to himself. Horack is masterful in rendering a story of a man whose singularity offers fresh perspective on a turbulent period in American history in an exceptionally evocative novel. --Vanessa Bush
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