The Color of Lightning, by Paulette Jiles, $25.95. The intriguing story that shapes “The Color of Lightning” is so tightly woven with fact that to call it a novel is to stretch the definition.
Not only is the story based on evidence revealed in several oral histories from the early 1900s, an 1860 census and an 1864 muster of a scouting company, but also on the diary of Samuel A. Kingman, who was present at the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. In addition, many of the Comanche and Kiowa people named in the novel were actual people. And with one exception, even the names of the captives are genuine.
With that, Jiles opens her story with Britt Johnson — a freed slave — taking his family into Texas, which is still part of the Confederate South. Britt intends to start a new life.
Undaunted by the strange surroundings, the family is filled with plans for the future, including a church of their own, a school for the children. And, at first, their new life lives up to most of their hopes.
A year passes uneventfully until one day as Britt and the other men are in town buying supplies, his wife and children are taken by the Kiowa and Comanche and divided among the captors. And, with that, the story shifts to their struggle to survive in a totally different world.
The oldest girl, Elizabeth, tries to remember the dates of friends’ birthdays, Bible verses, anything to keep from going mad, even as she knows that once they come to the Red River she will be beyond help. The months pass. Mary’s daughter, Cherry, learns to sign. Even as she tells stories to the men, she must watch her mother being raped.
Meanwhile, Samuel Hammond, a white man and a Quaker who had served as an ambulance driver during the Civil War, is on his way west to check reports of abuse in the Office of Indian Affairs. Now both stories take turns unfolding, each taking unexpected twists and turns. But for the Britt Johnson family, it is always a struggle to stay alive.
Samuel Hammond stubbornly clings to his faith and belief in man’s ultimate goodness until the day that both the Texas state troopers and the Black Ninth Cavalry are forbidden to cross the Red River into Indian Territory to rescue the Indians’ captives.
Jiles has done a skillful job of constructing a heart-wrenching story that reveals not only the nation’s complexity, but also its tragedies and moments of greatness.
The Wind Comes Sweeping, by Marcia Preston, $13.95. Marcia Preston, recipient of a Mary Higgins Clark Award for suspense fiction, centers her latest on a failing cattle ranch.
With the death of her father, Marik Youngblood, who had grown up on the ranch but left in hopes of becoming an artist, has returned. Now, she not only hopes to salvage what remains of the ranch but also to find her father’s only heir and grandchild, the daughter she had given away.
To solve her financial problems, Marik decides to lease the ranch land for wind towers, only to learn that her neighbors, Lena and Burt Gurdman, are vehemently opposed. It soon becomes evident, however, that the issue is far more than a shared property line but a secret Lena and Marik thought they had buried along with the bones of an infant years ago.
Unfortunately, though the author creates believable characters and paints the settings with understanding and care, the story itself lacks the needed tension to carry the plot. And the result is a mild and, ultimately, predictable read.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes regularly about new regional fiction.
