I don’t feel like bloggin’ you today. 

We had a special and very enjoyable Thanksgiving with our family this year, up in Ojai.  I was sorry not to be able to spend time with my parents, but my wife’s parents threw an amazing and delicious feast.  We did no shopping whatsoever on ‘Black Friday’, which I understand means that stores and companies go into the black on that day, financially.  If I’m wrong, I imagine someone reading this blog will correct me. 

Happy Holidays, everyone.  When are YOU putting up your Yule lights? 

I hope you all enjoy your Thanksgiving today.  I wish you all a happy time with your families, those of you who will be with families, and hope you will sustain emotional peace.  All those ‘things’ seem to come up during the holidays, no matter how we try to pretend we can sidestep them.  But come up they do, so at that moment, try to find a smile. 

Nominated on Reading Matters as one of the most enjoyable reads of the year, by IceDream of Reading In Appalachia, our very own Sweetsmoke.  

Again, IceDream, I thank you with all my heart.  You are generous, and you have, ahem, excellent taste.  

David Fuller captures new view of slavery in Sweetsmoke

Mary Philip

November 14, 2008 11:00pm

Sweetsmoke, David Fuller, Abacus, $32.99

DAVID Fuller is a new voice in literature and there is an appealing freshness to his story about Cassius Howard, a slave in Virginia in the dying days of the slave-trade in the South. There is something perennial about a story like Sweetsmoke.

Despite the fact the events (in this book fictional) happened 150 years ago, the effects on the United States of America are ongoing.

Sweetsmoke is the tobacco plantation into which Cassius was born, and despite the cruelties which occur on a regular basis, including the removal of his son and the lashing to death of his wife, Ellen and Hoke Howard are considered more civilised than many other slave-owners.

Cassius has a complicated relationship with Hoke which grows more complicated when they hear of the murder of Emoline Justice, a freed slave who is significant to both men. Cassius embarks on a fraught journey to discover and pursue her killer, but events threaten to overtake him as he finds himself in the midst of the killing fields of the Confederate and Federal armies.

This book claims to offer an imaginative departure from other slave narratives – and it does.

Cassius was secretly taught to read by Emoline and when he started to browse Homer’s The Iliad, a whole world beyond the plantation came into his view. But knowledge was dangerous at Sweetsmoke and Cassius was never far from betrayal. He was an introspective man whose difference provoked his white masters but paradoxically he never attempted to run away.

In this impressive novel Fuller breaks new ground, I believe, in the way he captures the agonising dilemmas that must have tormented all those men and women who yearned for something beyond the yoke of slavery.

Russ Parsons has an article about the Judy Rodgers salted turkey again this year.  We tried it and it was pretty darned amazing.  Check it out in the food section of the Los Angeles Times.  You have just enough days to get started, as it takes three days to sit after you salt it. 

Check out ScriptGirl’s Thanksgiving Special: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnCTb1TlJNk

At the 4 1/2 minute mark, something very cool happens. 

You can find me at  www.readerscircle.org.  It says that I am happy to contact your book group and answer questions.  I’ve done it before and I enjoy it.  Don’t hesitate to contact me.  But best to do it through the CONTACT page.   

See Minneapolis StarTrib Review below. 

Blue ribbon for a white author

Cassius, an American slave in Civil War days, sets out to solve the murder of a friend.

By EMILY CARTERSpecial to the Star Tribune

Last update: November 14, 2008 - 3:39 PM

David Fuller’s admirable new book should be commended, and probably purchased, on its gutsiness alone.

This is a book that straddles two genres: the murder mystery and the slave narrative. The first is a safe category, but it’s a risk for a white writer to attempt the second and for the publisher to publish it. The writer risks distraction from the tale, the publisher risks sales on several fronts and they both risk critical backlash from writers and critics of color.

As a murder mystery, set in the Civil War, “Sweetsmoke” is more than enough of a success. The plot, revolving around the murder of a free black woman named Emoline Justice, does the two things it has to in order to satisfy: It holds attention and it holds water.

The protagonist, a crypto-literate slave named Cassius, is a near perfect hero — wounded, realistic, resilient and intelligent. The murdered woman taught him how to read and made his existence something that could be endured; in the watchful and disillusioned way common to heroes, he had loved Justice.

Fuller has created for his main character an equally compelling antagonist, the disturbed and disturbing slave owner, Hoke Howard, a well-made villain, his repugnance all the more potent for being multidimensional. Fuller’s research pays off; the experience of slavery is drawn with detail: A description of the tiny but tenacious hookworms that a young boy has to pull off the underside of tobacco leaves segues seamlessly into the observation that the news of even the most distant white person’s death is big news, delivered through field chants — and that someone close to you might be taken away. Sold. From hookworms to large choruses, from the irritating to the devastating.

Fuller’s brush work is elegant and subtle; he paints a rich and believable world. The question is whether it’s enough. Are his considerable novelist’s skill sufficient to keep the reader’s eyes and thought from jumping from the white face on the inside jacket author’s photo to the black hands on the cover picture? Enough to forget the controversy when William Styron wrote a first-person novel about Nat Turner? To wonder if it’s permissible at all to make an aesthetic experience out of a horror that affected neither you nor anyone to whom you are bound by blood?

That question will be answered differently by different individuals. If you can answer “yes,” however, you will find “Sweetsmoke” worth the price of admission, because it does what a good murder mystery should do: It entertains while provoking just enough thought to make it worth turning off the TV.

Emily Carter is the author of “Glory Goes and Gets Some.” She lives in Minneapolis.