In the 1900s, authors like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour rode the peak of the ‘Western’ genre with their enormous output. These books typically featured tough, sharp-shooting, quick-on-the-draw white men with beautiful horses who rode the wild country of the American West fighting cattle-rustlers and land-grabbers . These self-reliant gun-slingers rarely had a wife or family, and were described with words like ‘laconic’. The books have certainly contributed to the American frontier myth.
In All God’s Children , Aaron Gwyn attempts to expand this simplistic view, exploring the paradoxes and often brutal reality of the time and place. The novel is told in two voices, both unusual characters to be featured in this genre, but the author has also made sure that every other character is also unpredictable.
Duncan Lammons is from Kentucky, fleeing a religious father who attempts to beat out his son’s attraction to other men. And yet, in one of the early examples of non-stereotyping, this anti-gay father also is a slavery abolitionist, “thundering on about the evils of Southern slavers”. Duncan has never seen “men manacled and chained”, but discovers in New Orleans that it makes him “sick at the stomach”. Duncan heads for Texas, accompanied by his friend Noah.
Texas was a free frontier, promising folks like me the chance to start fresh. It’s a peculiar sort of man who needs a fresh start by the age of twenty, but I was always peculiar.
Cecelia, who has no last name, is a slave in Virginia, fifteen years old in 1827. She is the pet of her mistress Anne, but her attempts to escape slavery lead to the auction block, and she is sold downriver from Virginia to Mississippi to Louisiana in the years from 1829 to 1837.
In years to come, she’d think of this as a time of falling. She was falling from the tobacco soil of Virginia to the cotton lands of the south. [..]
The chapter where Cecelia is reduced to a field hand picking cotton in Louisiana is harrowing in its detail, but it is this detail that makes the experience visceral to the reader.
Noon she was in the middle of the field, picking with her one good hand, wiping blood on her dress. Her fingers were so sticky with it she couldn’t get the cotton to fall into the sack, had to scrape it from the fingers with the blade of her right hand.
Alternating chapters follow Duncan and Cecelia, but as seen above, Duncan’s chapters are told in the first person while Cecelia’s are in the third person. This is an interesting choice, as the author is clearly making no claims to speak for Cecelia, but it makes her story a little more remote and distant, and there is less personality evident in her story than in Duncan’s.
In Texas, Duncan meets Sam Fisk.
a square-jawed man in a buckskin jacket with leather leggings gartered up to his knees. He had sapphire-blue eyes that shone in the firelight, long hair the color of wheat, and for a hat, a cap of wild pantherskin.
My throat felt tight as a snare. All of a sudden, I had trouble swallowing.
Duncan and Sam end up in the army fighting for Texan independence from Mexico, and here’s where the author’s historical research comes to the fore. He succeeds in making these battles interesting even to a reader without a deep interest in war history. The famous persons of the time make a brief appearance:
[..] Colonel Bowie, already quite famous for that knife fight over in Vandalia and all the blades that bore his name […]
I was informed that this was the great Sam Houston, former governor of Tennessee and soon-to-be general of the Texian army. [..] He had a good deep voice, strong as reverent whisky, and his words put steel in your backbone.
Sam Fisk is almost the Western stereotype: he stays up nights on guard, he shoots fast “his hands moving so fast they blurred”, he has infinite courage, he is the essential survivalist. But Sam is also illiterate, has never seen a map, and does not know where Kentucky is : again, one of the paradoxes of the time and place illustrated in this novel.
Sam has a chivalrous heart, too, and when he sees Cecelia being sold in Louisiana, he buys her. Over time, they move to Texas, slowly develop a relationship, have a child and settle down. More paradoxes: Cecelia can read, and knows much more of the world than Sam.
In the second half of the novel, less open-minded Texans use the fact that he is living with a black woman to take away his land ( a puzzling plot: is not the history of slavery full of white men with black women?), and the hard-won little idyll of Sam and Cecelia is threatened. A long side-thread tells the story of Juan, a Spaniard who is kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sold to a Turkish pasha before ending up in America. It’s an interesting story, but the point of it only becomes clearer much later in the novel.
While the author does not downplay any of the horrors accompanying slavery (see the cotton-picking above), he has chosen not dwell on sexual abuse. Instead, he focuses on the strength and determination of this woman, and gives her agency. Likewise, many people die in this novel, but it does not linger admiringly over the shooting ability of the killers.
Exceptionally well done is the language and dialogue, especially that of Duncan, which is so period-specific that it is almost a character of its own.
I figured he was just jobbing me.
They might could lock us up as vagrants.
Anything worth shooting would be frightened off by his wabbling.
Once Duncan and Cecelia form an uneasy alliance rooted in their mutual love of Sam, the novel flags a little. Cecelia is given short shrift thereafter, her book knowledge of no use in their lives, and Duncan’s half-considered thoughts about the political situation before the Civil War are not terribly interesting.
Still, it’s a pleasure to read a genre-busting ‘Western’ novel, so far from the mythical loner gunfighter sagas.
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