The Old American
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In 1746, Nathan Blake, the first frame house builder in Keene, New Hampshire, was abducted by Algonkians and held in Canada as a slave. Inspired by this dramatic slice of history, novelist Ernest Hebert has written a masterful new novel recreating those years of captivity. Set in New England and Canada during the French and Indian Wars, The Old American is driven by its complex, vividly imagined title character, Caucus-Meteor. By turns shrewd and embittered, ambitious and despairing, inspired and tormented, he is the self-styled “king” of the remnants of the first native tribes that encountered the English. Displaced and ravaged by disease, these refugees have been forced to bargain for land in Canada on which to live. Having hired himself out as interpreter to a raiding party of French and Iroquois, Caucus-Meteor returns from New Hampshire the unexpected possessor of a captive, Nathan Blake. He decides to bring the Englishman to his own village rather than sell him to the French. Ambivalent about his former life, Blake gradually fits into the routine of Conissadawaga. Meanwhile, Caucus-Meteor struggles to protect his people from the rapacious French governor. Constantly plotting and maneuvering, burdened by responsibility, the Old American exhibits cunning and courage. A gifted linguist who was forbidden to learn to read or write; a former slave who is now a king; a native leader who has seen more of London and Paris than his English captive, who knows more of European politics than the French colonial administrators, Caucus-Meteor is a brilliant, cantankerous, visionary figure whom readers will long remember.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
His first novel in seven years once again shows Hebert (The Dogs of War) as a meticulously accurate and inspired author of character-driven literary fiction. Again using the sharply observed setting of New England, he goes back in time to create an unforgettable character in Caucus-Meteor, interpreter, visionary, king and "old American." The Algonkian chief is central to this mesmerizing captivity narrative set during the French and Indian Wars and based on the true story of 35-year-old Nathan Blake, an Englishman abducted by Indians from his home in Keene, N.H., in 1746. (Blake lived with the Canadian Indians for 10 years before being ransomed by his wife, Elizabeth, and returning to New England, where he died at the age of 100.) Hebert's powerful tale resonates with the honor and dignity of its protagonists. With his own tribe decimated by disease, the grieving, elderly Caucus-Meteor joins an Iroquois raiding party and, almost by accident, acquires Blake as his slave. As their slave/master relationship evolves, the two men become close, eventually working together to negotiate with the French in hopes of securing the village's future. Blake assimilates, becoming the tribe's leader, marrying Caucus-Meteor's daughter Black Dirt, and losing, as Caucus-Meteor predicts, his desire to return to his former life. Caucus-Meteor's poignant remembrances provide rich details of the culture and customs of the Canadian Indians. A description of the ritual of the gauntlet, a ceremony all slaves must endure, is physically brutal, yet beautiful in its psychological complexity. The integrity of Hebert's work is one of its most salient characteristics.
