Tap Roots

IN Oh, Promised Land, Mr. Street told the story of Sam Dabney, the pioneer, who found his promised land in Southern Mississippi and settled there in 1815. In this new book, Sam Dabney casts a long shadow; he was a portentous man even in his last illness, and after his death his spirit rules the community and the family he founded. Neither his “son,”Horab, nor any of his grandchildren knew that they were not of his begetting. Horab was actually the illegitimate child of Sam s sister, whom he adopted in infancy. When Keith Alexander, himself of unknown parentage but handsome and deadly, made love to Horab’s daughter, Morna, her family detested the thought of her marriage to a nameless man. This irony is maintained throughout, perhaps a tritle too persistently. The story begins in 1858 and ends in 1865. It is not a “Civil War novel,”but it tells the story of a small community of antislavery people in the deep South, who fought and died in defiance of the Confederacy.

As an historical novelist, Mr. Street is a romantic. Occasionally he steps over into sheer fantasy. Again and again he refers to the Confederate force of horse, foot, and guns, twenty-five hundred strong, which destroyed the “Free State of Lebanon, as a “regiment.” And his description of the final battle is a military nightmare. Yet there is power in this uneven book. It holds one’s interest and sympathy. The blurb says of the author: “He plots his stories (usually in bed) before he writes a line. He knows where he’s going, then he starts dictating. This may be an excellent technique, but one cannot help feeling that a more laborious manual exercise might provide a firmer expression of his very real talent as a novelist. R. E. D.