Band of Angels

Robert Penn Warren is a poet first, a novelist second. The quality of writing in this dark pre and post civil ware story is worth the time all by itself. The plot is just the icing on the cake. This is a story about a young woman who finds a dark truth about her heritage after her father dies and she returns the plantation where she was reared. There are no facile answers to hard questions of race and property, "well loved" slaves and freedmen. If Gone With the Wind is a 1930 Southerner's view of what the Antebellum south was like, then Band of Angels is a 1950 Southerner's view of what it would have been like to be black during and after the civil war. This book should be required reading, even in the 21st century.

Set from just prior to the Civil War up to about 1888, this novel explores the concepts of freedom and self-identity. Told in the first person by the main character, Amantha Starr is the daughter of a rich Kentucky planter and one of his slaves. She goes to Cincinnati with her father where under the tutelage of Miss Idell (one of Warren's best character creations in the novel) she is readied for Oberlin College. At Oberlin she meets Seth Parton and learns about abolitionism from him, which she immediately uses against her father to get him to free his slaves. It doesn't work, but it makes her feel powerful for the first time, which Warren makes ironic since after her father dies Amantha learns that he never manumitted her: she is sold into slavery and sent to New Orleans. Now the property of Hamish Bond, she learns to "protect" herself with self-pity. After New Orleans falls to the Federals, she marries the Union officer Tobias Sears. Sears is a fiery promoter of freedom for the slaves and black rights, but the wealth to be made in Reconstruction contaminates him; he begins drinking heavily and becomes an utter failure, to his cause and to himself. It's with this realization about Sears that Amantha, who has always relied on the men around her (her father, Parton, Bond, Sears) to define and control her, throws off the cloak of self-pity and stands up for herself for the first time. Warren's message is that if Amantha was looking to others to set her free, she was wasting her time: her freedom can only come from within herself. It's an important idea, worth repeated reminding. Dense with period details, and sometimes melodramatic, the novel is nevertheless compelling. Based on a true story and made into a movie starring Clark Gable as Bond and Yvonne De Carlo as Amantha.

This is perhaps the best novel ever written about the Civil War and Reconstruction. Unlike Gone with the Wind, the denizens of Warren's South aren't caricatures but complex human beings. You feel the hurt and disappointment of many people, sucked into the tensions of the antebellum South, the abolitonist North, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. "Little Miss Manty" is one of the most engaging characters in fiction. Warren never patronizes anyone. Each page is filled with rich imagery and points for deep reflection.

This is a wonderful read. You will "get lost" in Warren's evocative recreation of the post civil war period as he follows the fortunes of a young woman who is technically "colored," but was raised in "white" society by her white father. Unsurprisingly, her circumstances undergo a great change once her father dies and she loses his protection and the position that came with it. Read this book and get a nice surprise!