Nowhere Else on Earth (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: cat hole, Henry Lowrie, North Carolina, Brant Harris (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although not a single cannon is fired in Josephine Humphreys's quietly ambitious Nowhere Else on Earth, the lives of the inhabitants of Scuffletown, a poor Indian settlement on the Lumbee River in North Carolina, are in every way affected by the Civil War. The demand for turpentine, their principal industry, has dwindled to nothing. When they are not fending off or involuntarily "supplying" Union soldiers and marauding gangs, they are hiding their sons from the macks, their hostile Confederate neighbors (pink-faced Scottish farmers with names like McTeer and McLean), who are rounding up Scuffletown boys for forced labor in forts and salt works, from which few have returned.

Sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong has seen both her brothers disappear into the woods to join this gang, headed by the handsome, charismatic Henry Berry Lowrie, the hope of Scuffletown--who keeps the young men alive through a series of crimes that inevitably escalate to match the cruelties of the macks. To her mother's distress, and to her own, Rhoda finds herself falling in love with Henry Lowrie, so obviously a marked man. When he notices her, and returns her love, she too becomes marked, dubbed the Queen of Scuffletown by her enemies and drawn into a larger history of suffering and revenge.

Writing from the vantage point of middle age, Rhoda resurrects the past, "hot as coals," in an obsessive act of remembrance, having studied and pondered her story for over 20 years.

One dog tooth is gone, and my monthly flow has dwindled to a spatter. I'm not as full as I used to be, my wrists are skinny, my knuckles are knobs. I'm starting to wear thin. This is the price of the years of thinking, the casting and recording of events and the frantic pen scratching past midnight, the hoarding of paper, the loneliness, the pages accumulating while I myself shrink down.

Rhoda's richly detailed and beautifully sustained fourth novel will recall, in the best ways, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (also set in North Carolina, the most "Union" of the Confederate states), although Humphreys has given her heroine a fresh, strong voice, and in turn given a voice to Scuffletown. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

While Humphreys has been justly praised as a writer with her fingers on the pulse of Southern culture, she surpasses even her previous novels (Dreams of Sleep; The Fireman's Fair; etc.) in this spellbinding story of a largely forgotten remnant of Indians caught between opposing sides during the Civil War. Scuffletown, on the banks of North Carolina's Lumbee River, is home to the mixed-blood descendants of the original Indians in the area, desperately poor but hardworking families who eke out a living in the arduous turpentining trade. Other nearby residents are "the macks"AScots planters who hold the money and power, and own black slaves. During the last months of the Civil War, the lawless Home Guard, led by sadistic Brant Harris, conscripts boys from Scuffletown into forced labor building Confederate fortifications. Teenage narrator Rhoda Strong, daughter of a Scots father and a Lumbee Indian mother, relates the circumstances that lead her brothers to join renegade Henry Berry Lowrie, charismatic scion of Scuffletown's most respected family, in hiding out and defying Harris and his henchmen. In a narrative layered with indelibly memorable scenes, Humphreys depicts the moral ambiguities that beset Scuffletown's residents and the ironies of their precarious position; the sympathies of many are with the Yankees, yet they endure the depredations of Union troops as well as of marauding Confederates. The major irony, however, lies in Henry Lowrie's fate. Pursued by the profiteering hoodlums he has thwarted, Henry eventually becomes a thief in order to survive, and in time, an outlaw hunted for murder. He is arrested in the midst of his wedding to Rhoda, whose coming-of-age is the frame on which the novel rests. Humphreys constructs her intricately wrought plot with understated eloquence, and she breathes life into the landscape of this piney, swampy rural area. Each of a large cast of splendidly realized characters is informed by her understanding of the subtleties of human relationships when race is a factor. Most impressively, she illuminates a largely unknown facet of the Civil War, finding universal resonances in the suffering and quiet heroism of a beleaguered remnant of marginalized Americans. In its historically accurate delineations of the violence, greed and betrayal engendered by internecine conflict, and of corresponding bravery, sacrifice and heartbreak, this novel makes a powerful statement. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (October 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141002069
• ISBN-13: 978-0141002064
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #111,215 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars eloquent, passionate writing enriches compelling story, October 3, 2000

By	Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Joy To Read, December 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Nowhere Else on Earth (Hardcover)

I know that anybody who liked Cold Mountain will love Nowhere Else On Earth. The details here are even more finely written and complex. The wrenching plot builds on the history of a fascinating, underexplored corner of the East Coast--a mostly Lumbee Indian community in North Carolina--and a perspective on the Civil War I had never even pondered before. Surprising and very eye-opening. I just love Josephine Humphrey's knack for beautiful speech, especially the way it reflects the colors and metaphors of Southern talk. At the same time the characters she creates (esp. Rhoda Strong) are so astute about human nature, and so wise, I'm always wishing I could meet them. THose of you who enjoyed Dreams of Sleep and Fireman's Fair will go crazy over this one. I think the historical novel really shows off her strengths as a writer.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One Woman's History, January 24, 2003

By	Jillian Abbott (Bayside, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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.