23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
eloquent, passionate writing enriches compelling story, October 3, 2000
This review is from: Nowhere Else on Earth (Hardcover)
Set in the swampy, piney backwoods of North Carolina at the close of the Civil War in 1864, Josephine Humphreys' passionate, beautifully written novel evokes a time of struggle and helplessness in a proud insular community whose members trace their ancestry back to the Indians. Derisively dubbed Scuffletown by its "mack" neighbors (Scottish farmers mostly), known as "the settlement" to its inhabitants, the area subsists on turpentine manufacture, which has come to a halt with the war.
Narrator Rhoda Strong recalls those days of upheaval, tragedy and love from the vantagepoint of her middle years. She was 16, daughter of a stalwart Scuffletown woman and an outsider, a Scot, weaned from drinking by his wife and subject to bouts of depression.
As the story opens, Rhoda's mother, Cee, keeps the family inside their one-room, windowless ("because Cee said we're only inside at night and what good is a window then? Just one more thing to lock up.") cabin in the heat of summer to protect them, especially Rhoda's two brothers, from the Home Guard. The Home Guard is made up of "mack" neighbors, determined to spare their own boys by conscripting Scuffletown youth for forced labor at the Confederate forts and salt works.
It's a lawless time in the backcountry and the sadistic head of the Home Guard rules with impunity. After he kills two boys who escaped from the work gangs, Scuffletown's young men take to the woods, under the leadership of Henry Berry Lowrie, a charismatic, focused young man admired by the whole community, secretly loved by Rhoda.
But Cee is adamantly against the match, though she believes Henry "could turn out to be the best we've got. The best we've ever seen." This naturally confuses Rhoda, but her mother explains: "You want an ordinary man with a little flaw. A hurt, a weakness somewhere. Then you can be a helpmeet, and you'll have a bond. That's a man who'll give you some security, in return for what you give him. But what could you do for a man like Henry? What does he need that only you could provide? Nothing."
Cee also worries that Henry's leadership, a boon when times are good, could tear apart the community if he meets the violence they suffer with violence of his own. But since when does a girl ever take her mother's advice on a husband?
Scuffletown doesn't much care who wins the war. They take in deserting or wounded soldiers from both sides, hoping for peace to let them get back to farming, resurrect the turpentine business and maybe build a school.
But eventually Sherman's March brushes Scuffletown, incidentally disrupting the Home Guard's final murdering rampage. But the rampage's aftermath makes Henry a permanent outlaw with a price on his head, leaving Rhoda waiting.
"The first part of my life was over, and the second had not begun. I was drifting and waiting, and even though I had kept myself busy, inside the carcass of a chicken or rolling dough or running out a line of stitches so tiny I couldn't even see them, I felt deeply idle, stopped cold in the middle of my life." Her life resumes but its momentum is largely out of her hands, as her mother had warned.
This is a novel of human forces grown beyond human control - violence breeding violence, feeding on pride, duplicity and vengeance. Though events are tragic, told in Rhoda's voice, it's not tragedy. Humphreys' characters come alive in Rhoda's telling. Their eccentricities, strengths and best moments, even their foibles and weaknesses, call upon her deep affections. Each is an individual; together they form a vital force.
Humphreys' ("Dreams of Sleep," "Rich in Love") writing is rich, earthy and eloquent, permeated with the rhythms of the Deep South. She delivers a clear, compelling story and Rhoda Strong is a winning, vibrant heroine. A wise and romantic novel.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One Woman's History, January 24, 2003
Review by Jillian Abbott
Nowhere Else On Earth by Josephine Humphreys is an historical novel with equal emphasis on history and fiction.
In terms of history, the book stays close to known facts. But Humphreys doesn't stop there. In inventing a first person memoir, she creates a subjective, indeed, feminine, history. "Mine is only a single and limited testimony, one woman's version. . ."
There is mischief in her narrator, the curious Rhoda Strong. She is game even to examine and question the true nature of history, racial prejudice and scapegoating, all described in such a way as to render today's incidences of ethnic violence comprehensible: ". . . it wasn't an English that sliced him . . . [it was] his own neighbor! . . . We were neighbor against neighbor."
In fictional terms the characters and events are portrayed with grace, subtly, and depth. Gaps in the story are filled by citing period newspapers. Yet there is an irony here as when, after drawing considerably from the press, Rhoda points out the divergence between the life she actually leads and the one portrayed by the media.
But in creating this personal history, Humphreys is again playing with us. What is the line between the personal and the political?
In the Prologue, supposedly written on November 3, 1890, the feisty and wise Rhoda sets out her intentions and hopes for her narrative and outlines her view on the nature of history, stating that nobody will ever be able to render the story of Scuffletown complete and objective, "just as a soldier can never describe a whole battle - only his piece of it . . ."
In choosing the words, "us and our times" to refer to her story, Humphreys is telling us this is a political work, as much about the society that denied the Scuffletown Indians justice, as it is about one particular Indian woman.
Rhoda is a Lowrie by blood and marriage, and "the Lowries are Indians. The whole place is Indian. And that's the answer to who we are."
But is it? Dr. McCabe, a member of the Scottish Confederate overclass, isn't so sure. He studies Rhoda and her people, measures their heads, and invasively probes their origins. By the second half of the book McCabe is sure there is more to the Lowries than anyone suspects.
As the true origin of the Scuffletown Indians dawns on McCabe, the Civil War is almost over. It is a desperate lawless time. To the Scottish Confederates, the source of their defeat, and all that has gone wrong in their lives, is clear. Their demise is not the result of Union soldiers or their own bad ideas; rather, it is the Lowries and Scuffletown who are responsible.
Again Humphreys uses subjective truth to make her point. McTeer, the brutal Deputy Sheriff and a leader of lynch mobs, spells out why the Lowries are guilty, and even how they differ from respectable white folks: "The noble morals is bred out. Your makeup is what they call bestial . . ."
Using simple prose Humphreys evokes the times in hauntingly powerful images. As the Civil War drags towards its end, and as the defensive gang formed by Rhoda's husband, Henry, nearly matches the Confederate whites in brutality, Scuffletown can't even manage to fill its belly. The inhabitants have neither food nor money, which hardly matters because the stores have no food to sell. Desperation pervades: "There was gunfire every night, everywhere, and just about every farmer's watch dog was shot. Some were eaten."
Yet despite the harsh times, Rhoda is a woman with a great capacity for love, and it is her love for Scuffletown and its people that motivates her. After all, for Rhoda, there is, Nowhere Else On Earth.
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