The full humanity of a man

Cassius, the carpenter/slave in a Virginia tobacco plantation, strides like a colossus though this novel set during the Civil War. With little opportunity to exercise freedom without, he nourishes a depth of thought inside himself. After the brutal loss of his young wife and son, he becomes a man apart, but the murder of the free black healer Emoline, who has saved his life and secretly taught him to read, breaks him from his reticence; in cautious but relentless determination, he will seek out the killer. So powerful is this character that other characters stand slightly in shadow from his light like one of the great Shakespearean protagonists. And there are many characters in his journey. Emancipation is just a few years away and the masters protect their human property with a wilder grip as they sense the end nearing.Yet the complex heart of this book is Cassius’s relationship with his master Hoke Howard. There is a terrible intensity in their first scene together: the white man has every power in the world over his carpenter slave who has built everything in his study yet the slave has a strange spiritual power over the master. Every word they speak, however casual, is triggered with the possibility of danger to Cassius yet by some strange psychology, though Hoke Howard mentally plays with his slave, he defers from harming him. “He owns me,” Cassius says late in the book. “He controls me,” and another man answers, “That is merely the law. This was deeper. He wanted your soul.” It is not until well into the story that the reader begins to understand the true horror of what Hoke has done to this slave which he can never admit or ever ask for forgiveness.

Though in shadow of this great Hamlet of a character, others are also carefully drawn: Howard’s bitter unloved wife who lives on laudanum and vengeance, the complicated dynamics of the house and field slaves, and many others. Nature and the sounds and smells of woods and plantation are vivid. Still, when we are alone with Cassius struggling through the rain on a journey or smoking a handmade cigar, deep in his mind as in a soliloquy, the book finds its greatest power. He is a true hero who stands up for what he believes is right, whatever may come.