“Black Cloud Rising” by David Faladé, 2022
This story is based on real events during the Civil War. The Union’s ‘African Brigade’ (later named the 36th U.S. Colored Troops) moves through the tidewater areas of lower Virginia and upper North Carolina, below the James River and above Roanoke Island. In a 3 week ‘raid’ it frees 2,500 slaves, commandeers or burns slaver and rebel property and battles Confederate bushwhackers. It’s led by a fierce one-armed Abolitionist, General Edward Wild and its key character is a ‘black’ sergeant and adjutant of mixed ethnicity, Richard ‘Dick’ Etheridge. Both are real personages. The soldiers have been recruited in the ‘sand banks’ and slave quarters of the peninsula and outer banks, so know the slaves and the owners. It is their personal ‘coming home’ – with rifles.
They march south the length of the Great Dismal Swamp in
the Albemarle area and connect with a group of “Maroons” who have been living
in the swamp, an admixture of Native Americans and escapees. The swamps, wetlands and bayous are all
around, called ‘pocosin’ by the locals. They
arrest one head of the local bushwhackers, who is whipped by an old slave woman
at his own ‘whipping pole,’ with Wild’s approval. They occupy the largest settlement, Elizabeth
Town, for a week, which now teams with freedmen and black soldiers. The local white folks, even the Unionists,
are trying to figure out if this situation is permanent or if it will all
revert back to slave-time ‘normal.’ Etheridge himself is trying to understand his
mixed parentage and how it will play out as slavery is disbanded on Roanoke
Island, his home, along with his father’s.
A Freedman’s colony had been established on Roanoke, where
his mother now lives. It is presided
over by a worrisome bunch of ‘white’ Union Zouaves, who are stealing even from
freed folk. They sell to a Copperhead
who secretly sends goods to the Confederate irregulars. Etheridge’s
half-brother has joined the bushwhackers in hiding, while his father is making
money off the Union army. (Of note, the majority of North Carolinians would
have voted against secession and war if given a chance in 1861.) Etheridge’s
girl arrives in Elizabeth Town to escort an injured relative up to Norfolk and
tells him the tale. Wild’s brigade is
surrounded by enemies. Friends and
allies are dubious, the mission is in doubt, the girl vulnerable and the
military fortitude of the African Brigade and ‘black’ soldiers in question.
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| The 'Raid' |
ISSUES
That’s the setup. Faladé
called General Wild a ‘zealot” in an NPR
interview. This might be due to him
being tough on slavers and rebels like Sherman. One character who has no mixed ethnicity is
angry at Etheridge for being a ‘race’ traitor of some sort. What this all hides is that many so-called
‘black’ people were and are really of mixed ethnicity, as are some so-called
‘white’ people. So behind the story is a
skin color politics that complicates simple-minded ethnic binaries. And also behind it is the author’s hostility
to John Brown-style radicalism. There
were personal ties between former slaves and former and present slave-owners,
which made some soldiers like Etheridge more considerate. He is hectored by two black non-coms for not
being harsh enough. One tactic used by General Wild in the book is to detain
the wives and daughters of the Confederate guerillas. Is this true or is it the author’s way of
showing Wild a 'zealot?' It is reported
that Wild took ‘hostages’ but their sex is not indicated.
Etheridge’s relation with the European-American officers in
the Brigade improves as they travel back through hostile territory, especially
after firefights and a theft incident involving 4 soldiers. He has a melodramatic confrontation with his whitish
half-brother and a continuing problem with a rogue fellow soldier that gets deadly. He breaks military rules for personal reasons
and gets away with it. There is a conflict with another Union unit made up of white men. Faladé shows that the light-skinned fishermen
on the Outer Banks had no slaves, but they supported ‘sovereignty’ and so supported the Confederacy.
 |
| General Wild |
In 2021 the struggle was finally recognized in Elizabeth Town
by the State Historical Society and a road marker installed. Locals still seemed upset over the ‘harshness’
shown by General Wild, as he publicly hung a young bushwhacker. The slaver guerillas had night-ambushed and
killed several Union officers and attacked his command on a continual basis.
They had promised to kill any black soldier they captured and they did. They
hung some escaped freedmen along the road, including a baby. This local dislike of Wild 150+ years
later tells you something about the so-called ‘modern’ South.
Wild helped Robert Shaw get light-skinned officers for the
54th Massachusetts, the unit in the film Glory. Wild’s 36th
Colored Brigade participated in several other battles, the Petersburg campaign
and the occupation of Richmond. At the
battle of Wilson’s Wharf, Wild’s command defeated an attack by Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia led by cavalry General Fitzhugh Lee – the first pitched battle between the two forces. He later oversaw the Freedman’s Bureau in
Georgia as part of Reconstruction.
The book reads well and quickly. It is not a battle story, so much as a story
about soldiering and the effects of slavery.
Faladé is a professor of English at the University of Illinois. He has written other books about Etheridge’s
time in the Coast Guard at Pea Island. Roanoke
is just south of the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk and also the location for the
‘Lost Colony’ of European settlers. It,
however, plays a background role in the narrative.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Good Lord Bird,” “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx,
Engels); "Why the South
Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln" (Spielberg); "Struggle &
Progress," "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders,
Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerillas,
Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free
State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger
Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in
Florida," "A
Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," "White
Trash," "Drivin' Dixie Down," “Monument,” ‘A Confederacy of Dunces.”
And
I bought it at May Day Books!
Red
Frog
May 11, 2023
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