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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid, responsible, eloquent, quietly epic historical fiction, April 12, 2009
This review is from: The Color of Lightning: A Novel (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The stories of a number of characters on the Texas frontier during the period immediately following the Civil War: a recently-freed African American teamster and his wife and children; a Quaker Indian agent; a white woman captured by the Kiowa tribe but eventually rescued; several Native American characters appear as well. What I loved about this novel was the quality of reflection about the characters, the careful differentiation of their inner thoughts (and the fact that the characters are drawn very differently), the way in which the author puts her characters in the path of conflict, and the portrayal of the irresolvable nature of cultural negotiation along the border between U.S. settlement and the retreating Native American nations. Tremendously well-written, with a very concrete feel to the prose, the book is a joy to read. Also, the author very clearly relied for background material on the most uptodate scholarship in the field, so while there are occasional slips, for the most part historical narrative about cowboys and Indians is avoided.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
TO READ THIS IS BOTH PRIVILEGE AND PLEASURE, April 13, 2009
This review is from: The Color of Lightning: A Novel (Hardcover)
To read the work of Paulette Jiles is both a privilege and a pleasure. Reviewing her debut novel, Enemy Women, I described her prose as artful, her story painful in its authenticity yet poetically rendered, and the book as one that would not be forgotten. I would echo those sentiments regarding The Color Of Lightning. An acclaimed poet and memorist, her literary voice haunts as she explores the plight of humanity in its progress.
Once again she turns to pages from our history to bring us an imagined story, yet one based on prodigious research, documentation, and oral history. Set in post-Civil War North Texas it is the morning of October 13, 1864 when Britt Johnson, a freed-man, is preparing his team of horses to go to Weatherford for supplies. He leaves behind his wife, Mary, and their two youngest children. Stopping along the way he leaves his eldest son, Jim, at the Fitzgerald home for a visit.
While Britt is away "...a combined force of seven hundred Comanche and Kiowa poured down into what the white people knew as Young County. Mary and the children are captured by the Kiowa, while Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaughter are seized by the Comanches. They were, it seemed at the time, more fortunate than Susan Durgan whose "scalp and its tangled brown hair bounced on the pommel of a man named Eaten Alive." Thus, Britt's odyssey begins, a search for his family across unfriendly, unfamiliar terrain often in enemy territory.
In a parallel story Samuel Hammond, a Philadelphia Quaker, is delegated by the Society of Friends to go West as the Indian agent, to befriend and teach the Comanche and Kiowa, to give them goods, calico, muslin, rations of beef, farming implements, as if these "would bring order and obedience." And then they would be happy to live on a reservation.
It is also his task to rescue those taken captive and return them to their families, little knowing that some seized as children have no wish to return, in fact fear what they do not remember or understand. Later, a young girl called Good Medicine is brought to him. When he reassures her that now she will not go hungry, he realizes it is not starvation she fears but "She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing.....She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun."
There is a great deal of beauty in Jiles's book and large portions of truth. Questions that today remain unanswered.
Highly recommended.
- Gail Cooke
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shining a light on an obscure footnote of history, March 18, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"The Color of Lightning" is a novelized account of the lives of real people and actual events in the Texas of the 1860s and the surrounding Indian Territory. Very literately written, it tells of Britt and Mary Johnson, a black couple who settle in Texas as freed slaves, and their children; Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a ranch widow of indomitable spirit; and Samuel Hammond, a Quaker hired to manage the Indian agency which ministers to the Comanche and Kiowa, who don't want white ways pressed on them. Samuel is one of the few fictionalized people in the book; most characters here actually existed.
In the hours when the men are away on a freighting job, the Johnson and Fitzgerald homesteads are descended upon by Comanche and Kiowa together. The women are brutalized, the children are either snatched up or killed, and the survivors are kidnapped away. Upon his return from freighting, Britt sets about going after them, doing so in a measured, thought-out manner, nothing brash or unconsidered. His coolness is what helps him survive many touchy situations.
Very well written and researched, the author, Paulette Jiles, presents a vivid story of a wild time in the history of that locale. She shows clearly the obtuseness of those running the agencies, with their pigheaded insistence on their own way, the white way, not trying to understand a people who have managed quite well, thank you, without learning outside ways, for centuries. There is a bit of pigheadedness on that side as well, in that the tribes stolidly refused to see that what was coming, as sad as it was, was inevitable.
Interestingly, I read an account of this incident the very day I started this book, in a Western publication, and was surprised to discover the authenticity of the story. The incident itself sparked a movie called "The Searchers" a few decades ago, with a Hollywoodized cast; the truth got a little lost in the shuffle. This book comes much closer to the truth, and is recommended highly, especially for readers interested in the Texas of that era and the lost glory days of the Comanche and Kiowa Nations.
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