Canaan: A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"A bred-in-the-bones storyteller." —Geraldine Brooks
Canaan fills a vast canvas. Its points of reference are Richmond in the throes of Reconstruction; the trading floors of Wall Street; a Virginia plantation; and the Great Plains, where the splendidly arrogant George Custer—Yellowhair—rides to his fate against Sitting Bull’s warriors.
This is the story of America over twenty years of its most turbulent history. The characters are black, white, and red, ex-Union and ex-Confederate; and the principal narrator is a Santee woman She Goes Before who marries an ex-slave. Through her eyes we witness the hanging of her father by whites in the mass execution of 1863, Red Cloud’s banquet with President Grant, and that final confrontation on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This well-wrought sequel to McCaig's Civil War novel Jacob's Ladder (2003) covers the fractious years between Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn. To illustrate that complex, ugly era, the narrative follows the changing fortunes of a variety of personages a Virginia plantation owner's family and former slaves, a Yankee carpetbagger and a railroad magnate among others. The character who best captures the contradictions that McCaig is after is Edward Ratcliff, top sergeant for the 38th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, who journeys from slave to free man to member of the South Carolina Santee Indian Tribe. Before the war, Ratcliff was known as a "hincty nigger," but his white army commander treats him with respect. After travels north and west, as a scout, a trail cook, cattle driver and sharpshooter, Edward looks for a context that affords a measure of esteem. Eventually he meets and marries She Goes Before and takes a Santee name, Plenty Cuts, because of his bullwhip scars. But as the U.S. continues the persecution of Native nations, robbing them of their natural resources, Ratcliff can no longer sustain his family. Eventually he takes a job as a scout for Custer at Little Big Horn, and his fate is sealed. McCaig's latest is authoritative and occasionally profound.
