Stand the Storm: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Breena Clarke (Author)
Key Phrases: knitted work, lap work, fine tailoring, Stand the Storm, Daniel Joshua, Aaron Ridley (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Gail Buckley

I loved this book. I loved these people: The Coats family of Stand the Storm are quasi-free Negroes living in Georgetown just before, during and after the Civil War. Breena Clarke has written another stirring work of historical fiction that weaves the passionate, dramatic and uplifting story of the African American aspiration for true freedom into the great American tapestry.

Sewing Annie, whose husband had been sold away by her owner, Jonathan Ridley, knew that slaves with special skills were last to be sold. So she determined to teach her two children, Gabriel and Ellen, everything she knew about sewing, weaving, knitting, dyeing and the magical lore of quilts. "A woman whose every day was applied to the task of survival," Sewing Annie not only taught Gabriel about scissors and cloth; she taught him how to study whites without their knowing it, and how to disarm them. "Don't let them read your eyeballs," she says. "Keep them low and quiet."

At the age of 10, while still a slave, Gabriel is hired out to Georgetown tailor Abraham Pearl. Privately disapproving of slavery, Pearl treats Gabriel as an apprentice and assistant. Eight years later, Pearl decides to sell his shop to Ridley and move west -- leaving Gabriel a chest full of regulation military buttons. Keeping all profits for himself, Ridley puts Gabriel in charge of the business but makes his treacherous nephew the overseer. Annie handles the overseer by providing the perfect cup of hot black coffee for his daily hangovers: "Annie thus charmed him and became certain of him." The Coats family even earns his grudging respect: "Aye, they are limited by their race, but these are clever and cunning beasts."

The nephew is always proposing money scams to Ridley. Because they have been quasi-free, the Coatses fall for the biggest scam of all -- "to sell the slaves to themselves" -- letting them buy their own freedom while keeping them under white control. Still, for the first time in their lives, the Coatses belong to themselves: "The three were free to plan -- to look forward and to say how things could be."

As Washington prepares for conflict, Gabriel secretly answers an ad from the U.S. government for tailors. With Pearl's legacy of buttons, he wins a contract to make uniforms for the Army. It's a great opportunity for him, but most blacks in Washington are deeply worried about the rebels: "Would the secesh overrun the town," they wonder, "and sell all colored back into slavery?" Though he's on the threshold of business success, Gabriel enlists in the Union Army, having realized that "he was not fully free! He was only not as bound as others. For this he resolved to fight the war." The author follows Gabriel into battle, including the bloody siege of Petersburg where black troops drove back the Confederates at great cost.

A central theme of Stand the Storm is the Coatses' struggle to forge new identities and free themselves from the legacy of slavery. On the Ridley plantation, female slaves were "generally called by a variation of the name Ann." Annie's first gesture of freedom, while still a slave, was to name her daughter Ellen. In her first moment of joy at belonging to herself, she changed her name from Sewing Annie to Annie Coats. Later, she recommends that fresh start to her son's wife, too. When Carrie was a slave, she had been nearly beaten to death by her mistress because she was raped by the master. "Commence calling yourself Mary then," Annie tells her. "It will make a change." What happened to Carrie, the slave, has nothing to do with the self-liberated new person, Mary.

Stand the Storm reads like a great 19th-century page-turner, like Oliver Twist or the masterful Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is even the requisite cast of memorable secondary characters, among them Daniel Joshua, a runaway slave who teaches Gabriel how to survive in the woods and in Georgetown; Rev. William Higgins, a young white Catholic priest, friend to runaways, with secrets of his own; Jacob Millrace, a free Negro breeder of hunting dogs; Blue Girl, so called because her arms and hands are blue from indigo dyeing; and copper-haired Delia, who passes for white.

This is a novel about identity, about the power of talent and about freedom and constriction in life. Breena Clarke writes in a deceptively simple and subtle style, with an almost perfect sense of period and history. (There is only one minuscule imperfection: The word "quisling," named for a Norwegian Nazi, was not used until World War II.)

I loved Stand the Storm on its own, but Sewing Annie made me think of my own great-great-great-great-grandmother. Using her talents as a cook in Newnan, Ga., over a period of 20 years, Sinai Reynolds sold enough pies, cakes and homemade ginger beer to buy freedom for herself, her husband and her younger children and move to Chicago before the Civil War began. Clearly, there were many people like the Coats family -- determined to be free to carve their own piece of the American dream. We all know stories of the great black exceptions, but Breena Clarke writes about ordinary people who happen to be exceptional.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Like her first work of historical fiction, Stand the Storm weaves together the tale of an African American family struggling to cope in a white world. Although this novel takes place a few generations before River, Cross My Heart, it packs an equally powerful punch. Despite its horrors and violence, Stand the Storm is a surprisingly uplifting love story about men and women attempting to free themselves from bondage. Critics praised the emotional depth of Clarke’s characterizations and her compelling portrayal of life in a city that discriminates against its African American inhabitants. They diverged slightly on the quality of the writing, but the memorable cast of characters—primary and secondary—as well as the humane story more than made up for any flaws.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (July 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316007048
• ISBN-13: 978-0316007047
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #462,538 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars We'll Anchor By and By..., July 25, 2008

By	Phyllis Rhodes (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Breena Clarke's Stand the Storm centers on the story of "Sewing Annie" Coats and her son, Gabriel, expert tailors who manage to purchase their freedom at the cost of entering a less than lucrative business arrangement with their former owner. Nonetheless, hard work and thriftiness allow them to purchase Ellen (Annie's equally talented daughter) and her daughter, Delia. Prosperity reigns but the clan is happy for only a short while. The threat of re-enslavement looms at every corner as the reality of the times are made clear with the risk of being illegally captured by "pinchers" and sold South never to be seen again. There was also the ever-changing laws and complicated slave/freeman policies that deceitful slave owners misuse to extort and exploit freemen, not to mention the nerve-wrecking uncertainty of their status living in a district surrounded by slaveholding states as the country enters the Civil War.

The history lessons are supplemented with interludes of courtship and conflict featuring some colorful, charismatic and lovable, yet sympathetic characters who serve as love interests and arch nemeses for Annie and Gabriel. Luck and courage are also factors in their adventures propelling the "freedom train." Their industrious and ingenious survival skills are demonstrated during their humiliating encounters with whites and other undesirables. Unsurprisingly, for a story rooted in this era, the ugliness of racism and sexism are a given and Clarke does not skirt the realities of the degrading, violent sexual abuse that women and children of color endured at the hands of slavers, owners, or any white male in a position of authority. However, through Delia, the author broaches the sensitivities of colorism and the complications that it brings to the Coats's household.

Told largely from the freedmen's perspective in Washington's Georgetown district, this literary novel will appeal to Historical Fiction buffs in that it evokes the cadence and archaic vocabulary of the antebellum era and elicits the bittersweet nostalgia that comes with it. The author conjures poignant images to transport the reader back to the bustling rat-infested waterfronts, the narrow, muddy thoroughfares lined with trendy businesses and salacious bordellos, and the horrors of blood-soaked, body-littered battlefields. It is these circumstances that prompts a forlorn Annie (depressed when her beloved Gabriel joins the Union Army) to reminisce about her early years enslaved on the plantation and yearns to return to perceived safety, quiet, and comfort of it. The author continues down this conflicted path as she delves into the complicated familial interrelationships of the Coats clan, the ramifications and hardships of a (slave) mother's love, and its ultimate affects on the ties that bind. This title is well researched and recommended for literary, historical fiction fans or those interested in the challenges of African Americans in the antebellum period.

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
July 25, 2008

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What great storytelling, July 28, 2008

By	armchairinterviews.com (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

Sewing Annie Coats is a slave on the Ridley plantation. She's the best there is at her craft (taught by Knitting Annie) and she teaches her son, Gabriel, everything he needs to know about sewing so he can avoid working in the fields. As a young boy, Gabriel begins working for Abraham Pearl, a tailor. The man is kind to Gabriel and soon Gabriel learns the tailoring business and dreams of earning enough money to buy his freedom and the freedom of his mother.

Gabriel eventually earns his freedom and builds his life producing uniforms for soldiers and suits for men who want only the best. Annie works as a seamstress and does laundry. When Gabriel meets Mary, a runaway slave, they marry. The family also begins to help other slaves escape to freedom. But just when they think everything is working out for them, they discover that their children (born of free parents) might in fact, belong to their former master, Jonathan Ridley.

Clarke's story is compelling and fraught with brutal injustice, hope, redemption, joy and sadness. It's a harsh, yet beautiful story. There were brief moments when I felt the writing was a bit flat and left me wanting for some deeper emotion-but then Clarke rose to the occasion and delivered far more than I expected.

Armchair Interviews says: Stand the Storm is a must read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A powerful novel of redemption, July 21, 2008

By	Reader Views "www.readerviews.com" (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews

Reviewed by Tracy Kokemuller for Reader Views (7/08)

Like her wonderful book "River, Cross My Heart," an Oprah's Book Club selection, Breena Clarke's new novel, "Stand the Storm," is about the struggles of slavery. The story is set in Georgetown. The book's main character, Sewing Annie Coats, is a slave working for the Ridley plantation. Before her, Knitting Annie watched over her and taught her everything she knew about sewing. Her talent for sewing kept Annie from having to work in the fields. After falling in love, Annie had two children, Gabriel and Ellen. Annie taught them everything she knew about sewing and soon they were both adept at the task. At the age of ten, Gabriel was sold to a tailor, Abraham Pearl.

Soon Annie begins to work with Gabriel and they continue to sew in order to buy their freedom. Along the way, they meet a runaway slave named Mary and help her. Mary and Gabriel fall in love and they get married. They also begin to help other slaves escape to freedom. But, when they think they have bought their freedom, they discover that Jonathon Ridley has been cheating them and others. They continue to struggle through this oppressive time until freedom becomes a reality.

Breena Clarke's writing is like poetry. The images she creates through her expressive and detailed phrasings and word uses make the reader feel the characters' pain and joy. After buying his family's freedom, Gabriel returns to them, and instead of speaking, he begins to sing, and soon they all join him in expressing how they feel at that moment. It is moments like this that make this story so powerful. Breena makes you feel the family's faith and hope. What Mary went through when she was caught for running away will stay with me for some time. I think you will feel the same. Breena Clarke's new novel, "Stand the Storm," is a powerful and heartfelt novel that you should add to your reading list.